Peter Paul lived with his beloved brother Philip, to whose influence we are probably justified in tracing the first two commissions that were given to the young painter. One was to take part in the work of re-decorating the Town Hall, the other was to prepare an altar-piece for the Church of St. Walpurga. For the Town Hall Rubens painted the first of his long series of "Adorations," and though it is emphatically one of the works of his first period, and is far from expressing the varied qualities that have given him enduring fame, it created sufficient sensation in Antwerp to bring him the position of Court painter, with a definite salary and a special permission to remain in the city of his choice. Had he been a lesser man he would have been called away to attend the Court in Brussels. Undoubtedly Rubens was a patriot, a man to whom the fallen fortunes of his city appealed very strongly. We must never forget that the endless wars stirred up by Spanish ambition had roused the best instincts of patriotism the world over, and though Rubens was not a warrior, he was a statesman and a patriot, who knew that his hands and brain could serve his city in their own effective fashion, one in no way inferior in its results to that of the fighting men. Perhaps we may trace to all the mental disturbance of this era the artist's first great transition, for the Rubens who painted in Antwerp after his return from Italy and gave the "Descent from the Cross" to his city, is quite a different man from the one who painted the earlier pictures. He has matured and developed, has completed the period of assimilation through which all creative artists must pass, has gathered from the talents, from the genius of the men he has studied, the material for founding a style of his own. He begins to speak with his own voice. [Illustration: PLATE V.--LE CHAPEAU DE PAILLE (In the National Gallery) This is a portrait of Suzanne Fourment, a sister of the painter's second wife, painted when the sitter was about twenty-one years old. The serenity of the girl's mind is admirably expressed in this sparkling work, and is one of Rubens' successful essays in portraiture. Another study of Suzanne Fourment may be seen in Vienna.]