The former is of greater importance, as this again points to acquaintance with the South, where alone the painter could have seen snow-mountains. Now, as very similar architecture to that in the altar-piece at Bruges, which is signed by Jan van Eyck, is found in the _Chancellor {39} Rolin_ (Louvre), the _Virgin and Child_ (Dresden), and the _Carthusian Monk with Saints_ (Gustave de Rothschild, Paris), the suggestion is clear that in all these pictures the architecture is the work of Jan, and several notable critics hold this view. In three of these four paintings we find the snow-mountains--namely, in the Dresden triptych, the _Chancellor Rolin_, and the _Carthusian Monk_. And having established Jan as the author of these snow-mountains, we must credit him with the landscapes where this feature occurs in other pictures--_i.e._, the Ghent altar-piece, the _Crucifixion_ of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the _Calvary_ of the Berlin Museum, and the _Three Marys_ of Sir Frederick Cook. The theory that Jan is responsible for the snow-mountains is amply supported by the very reasonable deduction that he must at some time have visited Italy. This is gathered from the Italian character of the architecture, together with the snow seen in the Rothschild picture, the _Chancellor Rolin_, the _Carthusian Monk_, and the Dresden picture. The theory is further supported by the presence of the palmetto together with snow-mountains in the _Three Marys_ of Sir Frederick Cook. Here the palmetto proves the authorship of the {40} landscape, and as the view contains snow-mountains it very materially strengthens the supposition that it was Jan, and not Hubert, who painted them, and who consequently must have been to the South of Europe--probably Italy--to have seen them. The flock of geese, which appears in no fewer than six pictures in addition to Jan's signed _St. Barbara_ at Antwerp, is of very much less importance than the snow-mountains and the palmetto, for here the only use that can be made of it as evidence is its frequent repetition. It is found in the landscapes of the Ghent altar-piece, in the _Chancellor Rolin_, the _Carthusian Monk_, another version of the same subject in the Berlin Museum, _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_, and in the _Three Marys_. But the flock of wild-geese is not a feature made use of by the van Eyck brothers only. It seems to have been of common occurrence in several other Flemish painters both before and after the days of the van Eycks. Nevertheless, its presence in the pictures enumerated has been brought forward as supplementary evidence to prove the collaboration of Hubert and Jan. [Illustration: ST. BARBARA. BY JAN VAN EYCK.]