For centuries artists all over Europe were vainly endeavouring to remedy this defect, and it was not until the opening of the fourteen hundreds that the problem was at last solved, but long before that period oil paint had been successfully employed for decorative purposes. We know that the sculptor Wuillaume du Gardin made use of it for his statues as early as 1341, and when Hubert van Eyck first came to Bruges at the close of the fourteenth or at the opening of the fifteenth century the practice seems to have been generally adopted. It has long been known that John van Eyck was an _enlumineur des statues_, and a document recently discovered in the archives of Ghent makes it quite certain that his elder brother Hubert followed the same calling; what more likely then, than that the idea should have struck him of painting his pictures with the same pigment with which he had been in the habit of decorating stone? But whatever may have led to his great discovery, certain it is, that the day on which he made it was the birthday of modern art. The invention of oil painting has until recently been generally assigned to the year 1420 or thereabouts, but if Mr. Weale is right in his calculations, and be it borne in mind he has devoted a lifetime to the study of the Flemish primitives, and has done more to elucidate their history than any living man, Hubert van Eyck's great oil-painting, the only picture which can as yet be certainly assigned to him, 'The Adoration of the Lamb,' at Ghent, cannot have been commenced later than 1415, probably even earlier. It follows then that the new process must have been invented prior to that date. HUBERT VAN EYCK Hubert van Eyck, the first and the greatest of the Flemish masters, was born at the little market town of Maeseyck in Limbourg, somewhere about the year 1366. He seems to have been of an old painter family, as not only Hubert himself but his brothers John and Lambert and his sister Marguerite all followed this calling. Of his life's story we know little, of his early years hardly anything. An illuminator of missals and an illuminator of statues, as well as a painter of pictures, perhaps, as Mr. Weale has recently suggested, he made his first studies at Maestricht or at Cologne and afterwards travelled in Spain and in Italy. By the opening of the fifteenth century he must certainly have been an artist of some reputation, for in 1413 John de Visch, Lord of Axel and Capelle, bequeathed to his daughter Mary, who was later on Abbess of Bourbourg near Gravelines, a picture which Hubert had painted. What was its subject or what has become of it is not known.[45]