During the eighteen years of his first marriage Isabella appeared in nearly all his large pictures. She was of a more refined type than Helena; so that, with his second marriage, when he began to introduce his second wife into his pictures, his style becomes broader and more vigorous. For Helena had a strong, fully developed figure of pronounced contour, rosy flesh tints, golden hair, and lips that seemed always partly open to show the flash of pure white teeth. These were her attractions. She was obviously more beautiful, more brilliant, than Isabella, although in her youth her development was somewhat too luxuriant,--a picture of healthy, bursting, buoyant young womanhood. Indeed, so proud does Rubens seem of having, at his age, won a woman of her pronounced and youthful charms, that in some of his pictures he expresses them too freely, as, for example, in the Helena in a fur pelisse in the Imperial Gallery, Vienna. That Rubens drew a vast amount of inspiration from his two wives, Isabella and Helena, is obvious to anyone familiar with his work; for they appear in picture after picture from his brush. His married life, first with Isabella and then with Helena, was a constant stimulus to his best work. REMBRANDT AND SASKIA [Illustration: SASKIA, BY REMBRANDT] Rembrandt, too, was married twice, and although his first wife was refined and aristocratic and his second far from it, having been a servant in his household, he was intensely happy with both and painted them many times. Saskia van Ulenburg, although not strictly speaking a beauty from the casual point of view, lent herself admirably, nevertheless, to pictorial treatment, especially that pictorial treatment of lights and deep shadows of which her husband was the greatest master that ever lived. Indeed, the pictures in which she appears are almost too numerous to mention. There is the delightful portrait of her in the gallery at Cassel, said to have been painted in her own home in 1633, the year before she and Rembrandt were married. Her face in profile, the features delicately delineated, is shown against a background of deep, rich colors. With the lightest touch her wavy chestnut hair lies upon her cheek and forehead. A spray of rosemary in her hand rests across her heart. This, the emblem of a Dutch maiden’s betrothal, tells its own story. [Illustration: REMBRANDT, BY HIMSELF _In the Royal Gallery, Berlin._]