The glorious Master of Moulins has, it is clear, no longer the old inherited habit of feeling himself banished to a page in a book. He no longer shows the same somewhat mechanical respect to all work, principal and accessory. In the “Virgin and Child between the Founders,” and particularly in the “Nativity” with the twilight landscape in the background, and the fat poodle in front sitting on the kneeling cardinal’s mantle, the precedence of values is observed, and the painter reserves his piety and devotion for the noble parts. The author of these pictures—one of the greatest painters that ever lived—is only known as the Master of Moulins, or the Painter of the Bourbons. His name was probably Jean Perréal, but there is no certainty about it. Only a few definite names have come down to us from the beginnings of modern art. We must search for them in the inventories and account books of princely households or cathedral chapters. The artists did not yet sign their works; they indulged in no dreams of immortality. They did not yet feel they were the supermen, that the Renaissance, later on, made of them, and that, in the estimation of the upper class, especially of its feminine and effeminate portion, they have remained till the present day. They were honest and genuine artisans, just like other respectable artisans; and in France they, for the most part, enrolled themselves in the Saddlers’ Guild, perhaps because they, like the latter, had originally, as miniature painters, to do with parchment, _i.e._, a species of leather. They regarded it as a special distinction to be appointed servant,—_valet_ or _varlet_—of a prince, on whose commissions for church and palace they lived. Jean Malouel and his pupils, Jacques Cone and Jean Mignot, Jehan Fouquet, his sons Jean and François, and his great pupil Jean Bourdichon, Enguerrand Charonton and Nicolas Froment, perhaps also Perréal and King René the Good (1409-80), are perhaps the only painters whose personality stands out clearly outlined in the dawn of art history before Clouet, and his contemporary Corneille of Lyons. Perhaps a number of forgotten names may yet be dug up from archives. The obscurity of the few who have either been handed down to us, or been rescued from oblivion by industrious investigators in recent years is a heavy injustice. They deserve to shine with the same glory as the most illustrious that Vasari has preserved for us in a work of amusing studio gossip. Jehan Fouquet stands in a line with the greatest portrait painters of all times. He may be named in the same breath with Holbein—nay, with Velasquez. His portrait of a man in the Liechtenstein Gallery at Vienna, which shone as one of the gems of the exhibition, is perhaps the most powerful work that the great master created, and the “Man with the Wine-glass,” in the Vienna collection of Count Wilczek, is hardly inferior to it in significance.