tidings of the Infanta's safe arrival in English waters. The preparations for her reception were quickly followed by the coming of the bride, who safely accomplished her long journey's end on Christmas Day. In the midst of a carnival of popular rejoicing the union was solemnised at Bruges on the 7th of January 1430. John van Eyck's absence had extended to slightly over fourteen months, during which, seemingly, the two portraits of the Infanta were the sole yield of his art, except we couple with them the picture known as "La belle Portugaloise" and another portrait of a Portuguese maiden of which only verbal descriptions have come down to us. In the light of all the compelling evidence of John's consummate love of Nature, amply displayed in the mass of landscape work that enriches many of his finest productions, one cannot help but be struck by the fact that he never appears to have realised the possibilities of seascape as an avenue of Art. Only in one small panel do we remember any deviation from the type of slow-running river water that he usually affected, and there we are shown small craft exposed to the mean spiteful choppiness of a wind-exposed estuary, an unconvincing picture from the utter monotony of treatment of beaten water. Is it possible that the sea in all of its countless moods failed in its appeal to the aesthetic sense of the master, with its infinite variety of elemental energy and its chaste exuberance of exquisite colouring, with all the untold modulations, moreover, in that great symphony of the ocean which stirs so deeply the soul of the true poet? Or was it that the message baffled the apprehension of the artist, and left him helpless to respond to the call? Whatever the answer--or be it that, like his leader De Lannoy, he found the sea so severe a taskmaster in the more matter-of-fact sense as to blunt the edge of his finer feelings--whatever the answer, prolific as Art had already proved through the centuries by the manifold and luscious fruits it had borne, evidently it had not yet attained to the fulness of time in which it was to bring forth its apocalypse of the sea; nor was John van Eyck its consecrate expositor. V PERIOD OF GREAT ENDEAVOUR