Spanish art during the last years of the thirteenth century and until two centuries later is so incomplete in its details, presents so many diverse aspects, and the circumstances of its rise and tendency are so vague, that to venture any general opinions regarding it would be unwise. Its study has recently been confined to short monographs by various critics and scholars, both Spanish and foreign, which do not go beyond the discussion of specific works and artists, and the particular investigation of obscure titles and documents exhumed from the archives. The arrival of Starnina and the Florentine Dello at the Court of Juan I of Castile in the second half of the fourteenth century, appears to have given a very great impetus to that style to which the Spanish painters were growing accustomed. But this Italianism notwithstanding, Flemish influences penetrated, if more lately, still more rapidly into Spain. The early Spaniards pursued and sought a realism in art which they were unable to find in that of Italy, hence their predilection for the style and manner of the Flemish and German painters and those of other countries whom they came to call painters of the North. The appearance of Van Eyck in the Peninsula in 1428, and that of other Flemish painters who arrived there about that time, aroused a true enthusiasm and imparted to Spanish art a tendency to copy faithfully from nature which henceforth came to be one of the characteristics which have never left it. Among these painters of the North it is strange to find, a little before the middle of the fifteenth century, an artist called Jorge Inglés (George the Englishman), so named, without doubt, from his origin, who did some important work, especially in the hospital of Buitrago, the study of which we heartily commend to the English public and critics. We should like to have sent this work to the exhibition of the Royal Academy, but its enormous dimensions, as well as other circumstances, rendered this impracticable. During this epoch, the composition of Spanish works begins to show the use of colours prepared with oil, thus permitting the development of a technique more in conformity with the Spanish temperament. Consequently the new medium appears in the works of many masters, among the first of these recorded being _La Virgen de los Consellers_, painted and signed by Luis Dalmau in 1445.