It was during his stay in London that he painted the picture now in the National Gallery, called _Peace and War_ (No. 46). This was intended as an allegory representing the blessings of peace and the horrors of war, which he presented to the king as a tangible recommendation of the pacific measures which he had come to propose. After the dispersion of the Royal Collection during the Commonwealth this picture was acquired by the Doria family at Genoa, where it was called, oddly enough, _Rubens's Family_. As a matter of fact the children are those of Balthazar Gerbier. He also painted the _S. George and the Dragon_, which is now at Windsor Castle, and made the sketches for the nine pictures on the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall--now the United Service Institution Museum--in Whitehall. It was on this occasion, too, that he received the honour of knighthood from Charles I., who is said to have presented him with his own sword. In the following year, 1630, Rubens married his second wife, Helena Fourment, who was only sixteen years old--he was now fifty-two or fifty-three. She belonged to one of the richest and most respectable families in Antwerp, and was by no means unworthy of the compliment of being painted in the character of the Virgin receiving instruction from S. Anne, in the picture which is still at Antwerp. In 1633 his painting was again interrupted by a diplomatic mission, this time to Holland; and his remaining years were subject to more distressing interruptions, from the gout, to which he finally succumbed in 1640. When we come to consider the English School of painting we shall see how much of its revival in the middle of the eighteenth century was due to the personality as well as to the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the Netherlands, likewise, it was not merely a great painter that was required to raise the art to life, but a great personality as well; and to the influence of Rubens may be attributed much if not all of the extraordinary fertility of the Flemish and Dutch Schools of the seventeenth century. Making every allowance for the difference in the times in which the Van Eycks and Rubens were working, there is no doubt that the former lived in too rarefied an atmosphere ever to influence their fellows, and with the exception of Hans Memling they left no [Illustration: PLATE XXIV.--RUBENS PORTRAIT OF HELENE FOURMENT, THE ARTIST'S SECOND WIFE, AND TWO CHILDREN _Louvre, Paris_]