The _Virgin and Child, with St. Donatian, St. George, and the Donor, George van der Paele_, Canon of the ancient Cathedral of St. Donatian at Bruges, bears the date 1436, and is the most important of Jan van Eyck's religious compositions. The scene is in the circular apse of a Romanesque church, lighted by the soft rays that filter through the leaded windows. The Virgin, draped in a red cloak, is seen in the centre under a green canopy, holding the Christ-Child in her lap. She has the same heavy, matronly features as the Virgin of _The Annunciation_ in St. Petersburg and of the Chancellor Rolin picture in Paris, and is no more idealised than the by no means attractive infant Saviour, who is playing with a parrot. It is all very human and wonderfully true, and for that very reason lacking in spiritual significance. On the left stands St. Donatian in a gorgeous and marvellously painted brocade robe, whilst on the right St. George, in armour, presents the kneeling Canon van der Paele to the Virgin. The patron saint, again, {61} is obviously painted from a model of low rank in life--perhaps a peasant or a stableman; whilst the rugged irregular features of the donor are set down with an honest and painstaking straightforwardness that seems to delight in doing full justice to all the sitter's ugliness. As objective portraiture pure and simple, this head of van der Paele has probably never been surpassed in the whole history of art. The supreme mastery of Jan van Eyck manifests itself in the creation of a work of unforgettable beauty and sumptuous splendour from such unpromising material. The ugliness of the types chosen is forgotten when one's eyes revel in the rich scheme of colour, the extraordinary beauty of the painting of all the stuffs and accessories, the perfect modelling of the features, and, above all, the (for the time) amazing knowledge of the effect of light. With all the richness of pigment there is not a single note in this whole large panel that is not absolutely "in tone"; nothing is forced, nothing arbitrary, as though the fifteenth-century master had already adopted the principle of the nineteenth-century impressionists--"the first subject of a picture is light."