Typical of these is JOOS VAN CLEEF, of Antwerp, who died in 1540. According to Vasari he visited Spain and painted portraits for the Court of France. At all events it is certain that he worked for a time in England, where the great success of Sir Antonio Mor is said to have disordered his brain. The few pictures that can be assigned to him with any certainty thoroughly justify the high reputation he enjoyed in his time--the two male portraits for example at Berlin and Munich, the portraits of himself and his wife at Windsor, and his own at Althorp. His style may be classed as between that of Holbein and Antonio Mor. His well-drawn forms are decided without being hard, and his warm and transparent colouring recalls the great masters of the Venetian School. II PETER PAUL RUBENS Dr Waagen thus summarises the history of painting in the Netherlands during the interval of about a century and a half that elapsed between the death of Jan van Eyck in 1440 and the birth of PETER PAUL RUBENS in 1577. "The great school of the brothers van Eyck," he writes, "which united with a profound and genuine enthusiasm for religious subjects a pure and healthy feeling for nature, and a talent for portraying her minutest details with truth and fidelity, had continued till the end of the fifteenth century, and in some instances even later, to produce the most admirable works, combining the utmost technical perfection in touch and finish with most vivid and beautiful colouring. To this original school, however, had succeeded a perverted rage for imitating the Italian masters, which had been introduced into the Netherlands by a few painters of talent, particularly by Jean Mabuse and Bernard van Orley. To display their science by throwing their figures into forced and difficult positions and strongly marking the muscles, by which they thought to emulate the grandeur of Michel Angelo, and to exhibit their learning by the choice of mythological and allegorical subjects, became the aim of succeeding painters, and before these false and artificial views of art, the spirit of religious enthusiasm and the pure, naive perception of the truth and beauty of nature gradually disappeared. "In proportion as the Flemish painters lost the proper conception of form, and the feeling for delicacy and beauty of outline, it followed of course that they became more and more removed from nature in their desire to rival each other in the forced attitudes of their figures, and in the exhibition of nudity, until at last such disgusting caricatures were produced as we find in the works of Martin Heemskirk or Franz Floris, artists who were even deficient in good colouring, the old inheritance of the school.