Finally we have to consider and acknowledge his triumphs as a colourist. It may be said that Rubens, for all his gifts, required more than twenty years of unremitting labour to obtain his mastery over colour, but when once it was his he retained the gift to the last hour. In the early days Rubens as a colourist was a person of no importance, the grossness of his composition and the tameness of his drawing were not redeemed by the handling of pigment. In the second period the use of paint is far more skilled, but it does not blend, neither does it glow. In the later years it acquires both gifts, and the exquisitely luminous quality of some of his pictures, the marvellous delicacy of flesh tint, that must have astonished and delighted his patrons, is preserved to us to-day. In fact it may be said that Rubens has preserved his colour to a larger extent than many great painters who came after him. He is far more reliable in this aspect of his art than is our own Sir Joshua, whose portraits have long ceased to tell the story they must have told to delighted and flattered sitters. It was no effort of genius that made Rubens a supreme colourist in the later years. He came to his kingdom by dint of sheer hard work, but for his painstaking devotion to labours such results could not have been achieved. The spirit of the Renaissance travelled very slowly from Italy to the Netherlands, and that its influence was felt in the sixteenth century did not lead to any very marked divergence from the traditions that the art of the Netherlands was following. Italian form and Italian sentiment met with little response there, and there is no doubt that the eighty years of conflict with Spain which led to the recognition of the Republic, turned men's thoughts away from art. By the time it was possible to revive a school, the Netherlands were looking to life rather than to faith, and even the classicism of the period that turned Rubens towards pictures illustrating mythological incidents could not help him to create imaginary figures. This is as it should have been, for it made eighteenth-century art what it was through the influence of Rubens and Vandyck. He filled his canvas with the types he saw around him, and while nobody will dispute the virtue of the Netherlands, there will be few found to assert that it produced the Latin type of womanhood. The people of the Netherlands do not belong to the Latin races; that is why they did not respond earlier to the Renaissance, that is why they look at what seems to be their worst rather than their best in some of Rubens' most ambitious works. Yet by reason of his long sojourn and hard study in Italy, Rubens did do something considerable to bring Italian art and tradition into the Netherlands, and if he could not establish it there, the cause of failure was that the genius of the country was opposed to it. Among the painters who worked for Rubens or were greatly influenced by him the best known are Anthony Vandyck, Frans