Besides the paintings in various churches and museums in Flanders there are twenty-three by Rubens in the museum at Brussels, seventy-seven in the Pinacothek at Munich, ninety at Vienna, sixty-six at Madrid, fifty-four in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg and the same number in the Louvre at Paris, sixteen at Dresden, thirty-one at London, while a considerable number can be seen in various public and private art collections in the United States. "He is everywhere," writes Prof. Wauters with justifiable enthusiasm, "and everywhere triumphant. No matter what pictures surround him, the effect is invariable; those which resemble his own are eclipsed, those that would oppose him are silenced; wherever he is he makes you feel his presence, he stands alone, and at all times occupies the first place.... He has painted everything--fable, mythology, history, allegory, portraits, animals, flowers, landscapes--and always in a masterly way.... Is he perfect? No one is. Has he faults? Assuredly. He is sometimes reproached with having neither the outline of Raphael, the depth of Leonardo da Vinci, the largeness of Titian, the naturalness of Velasquez, nor the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt. But he has the outline, the depth, the largeness, the naturalness and the chiaroscuro of Rubens; is not that enough?" To appreciate fully the magnitude of this greatest of all Flemings it is necessary to recall, for a moment, the times in which he lived. Fourteen years after the capture of Antwerp by the Prince of Parma, Philip II determined--when on his deathbed--to give the Spanish Netherlands partial independence by transferring the sovereignty over the loyal provinces possessed by the Crown of Spain to his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert. The arrival of the Archdukes, as they were called, in 1599, was made the occasion of a joyous entry that, on the whole, was justified by their Government--which was a great improvement over anything that had preceded it since the days of the unspeakable Alva. To be sure, the war with the States of Holland still dragged on, and the Scheldt was closed. But the burghers wisely sought to replace the loss of their sea trade by encouraging industries. Silk and satin manufactures during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave employment to upwards of twelve thousand hands, and diamond-cutting became an industry of growing importance. While the commercial stagnation was severely felt, the city did not decline like Bruges, but held much of its population and recovered some of its former wealth.