The little picture, “The Virgin and Child,” which is ascribed to Jean Malouel, and was painted about 1395, and can therefore have owed nothing to the Van Eycks, then in Dijon, and perhaps, too, elsewhere, certainly still quite obscure young people, is of such charming realism that one might rather class it as a _genre_ picture than as a sacred picture. The Virgin is making the Child a frock, and is just drawing the thread tight, with the needle turned in a correct horizontal direction, and the child Jesus is amusing Himself by putting His rosy little foot in His Mother’s red leather slipper, of enormous size to Him, which she has taken off and placed before her. There is no reason why we should not assume that Malouel—if it was he—gave his patron—perhaps the Duke of Burgundy—his (the artist’s) own dear wife and little son as a Holy Family. In “The Death of the Virgin,” of the same school of Burgundy, but about a century later, the apostle, kneeling at the foot of the death-bed and reading his prayer-book devoutly, with a big pair of spectacles on his nose, is, in spite of the pathos of the moment, so natural as to be almost comic. “The Miracle of the Saint,” with his head in his hands, who is walking barefoot, by a pupil of Nicolas Froment—perhaps by the master himself—painted, about 1480, at Aix in Provence, attests the painter’s most naïve indifference to probability. In the middle of the street where the decapitated saint is walking, and the executioner, leaning on his sword, stands dumbfounded, kneel, in measured symmetry, to the right and left of the saint, the founder and his consort; he with four little sons, she with four little daughters in a row, like so many organ-pipes, behind them. The picture of the city is, however, so realistic that even to-day an old corner of Aix is recognisable in it, and the gazers running up or standing in knots and laying their heads together, or hurrying to the windows, are of everlasting human verity. Exactly the same holds good of the altar decoration, ascribed to John of Orleans (circ. 1374), a wonderful sepia painting on white silk. The sections which depict the Scourging of Christ by two brutal fellows with hang-dog faces, the Carrying of the Cross, with the Mocking of Jesus by the rabble of Jerusalem, and the Entombment, with the Blessed Virgin kissing the corpse, show that striving after truth, which has hitherto been pronounced to be a peculiarity of the Dutch. In the “Martyrdom of a Holy Bishop”—most likely by Jean Malouel (circ. 1400)—the martyr, in mitre and pallium, gazes from a strongly barred prison window, near which an angel kneels, and through the bars of which the Saviour in person administers to him the viaticum. But the castle in the Lombard style—stone rafters and corbels with red tiled spaces—on to the ground-floor of which the oval window opens, may be regarded as an architectural design.