natural and complete equipoise. During the last twenty-five years of his life Maes seems to have gained a rather scanty subsistence by painting portraits. Some of these are of high merit; the _Portrait of a Man_, for example, in the Fine Arts Museum at Budapest, which represents a gray-haired and bearded man, with black velvet cap and black coat edged with brown fur, sitting in a red-backed chair. Thus it repeats the artist’s favorite color-scheme, and moreover, [Illustration: OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATION GABRIEL METSU RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM] in its grave, tender rendering of old age, preserves the fine sentiment of his best period. But such noble characterization of humanity is rare with him, for, impelled by need and very likely by the taste of his public, he became an imitator of Van Dyck’s elegance. With Maes this elegance became pinchbeck, his fine ladies and gentlemen being very cheap imitations of their models. GABRIEL METSU BORN in Leyden in 1630, the son of a painter, Gabriel Metsu was one of the precocious talents of the Holland School, for in his sixteenth year he helped to form the Guild of St. Luke in his native city. For the purpose of studying his art, his brief career of thirty-seven years (he died in 1667) may be conveniently divided into two parts, preceding or following the year 1655, in which he moved to Amsterdam and came under the direct influence of Rembrandt. But it would appear from his own early pictures, that even during his life in Leyden he had by some means obtained a knowledge of this master’s work. Metsu’s actual teacher, according to Houbraken, had been Dou, though his own work shows no direct trace of the latter’s influence. On the other hand, that of Hals is apparent. Meanwhile he experimented for himself and produced several pictures which, like _The Blacksmith_, in the Rijks Museum, are founded on the motive of a workshop, lighted fitfully by a forge and scattered with tools. In fact, as Bode says, the work of his early period is distinguished by “restless composition, hurried movement, and careless treatment.”