"Some few painters, however, whose feeling for truth and nature repelled them instinctively from a path so far removed from both, took to portraying scenes of real life with considerable humour and vivacity; or they delineated nature in her commonest aspects with great minuteness of detail; and thus _tableaux de genre_ and landscape originated. Although a few isolated efforts to introduce a better state of things were visible towards the end of the sixteenth century, it was reserved for a mind of no common power to bring about a complete revolution." That Rubens was possessed of a "mind of no common power" will be readily admitted. He was an extraordinary person, in whom were combined such a variety of excellent qualities that there seems to have been no room left in him for any of the inferior ones which are usually necessary, as one must almost admit, for an alloy that will harden the finer metal for the practical purposes of success. With all his feeling for religion, he was seldom prudish; his amazing vitality never led him into excess or intemperance. His intense patriotism was all for peace; classical learning never made him dry or bumptious, nor the favour of kings servile. As fine a gentleman as Buckingham, he had no enemies. Something more than temperament and natural ability, however, was necessary to make Rubens exactly what he turned out to be, and that was environment. Had he remained in Flanders all his life we should have been deprived of much that is most characteristic in his art. He was too big, that is to say, for the flower pot. He needed to be bedded out, so that his exuberant natural genius might have the proper opportunities for expanding under suitable conditions. It was in Venice and Mantua, in Florence and Rome that he found himself, and took his measure from the giants. Rubens was born in 1577 at Cologne, where his father, a jurist of considerable attainments, had taken refuge from the disturbances at Antwerp in 1566. He was christened Peter Paul in honour of the saints on whose festival his birthday fell--29th June. At the age of sixteen he was placed as a page in the household of the widowed Countess of Lalaing, but as he showed a remarkable love for drawing he was apprenticed first to Tobias Verhaegt, a landscape painter, and then to Adam Van Oort. The latter was so unsuitable a master, however, that Rubens was soon committed to the care of Otto Vennius, at that time Court painter to the Infanta Isabella and the Archduke Albert, her husband; he prospered so well that in 1600 Vennius advised him to go to Italy to finish his education as a painter.