The style of Rubens, brilliant, luxuriant, and full of vigorous life, it may be thought would commend itself peculiarly to the attention of women. This school, however, in which the healthy and florid naturalism of Flemish art reached its highest development, seems to have been without any female disciples of note. The passionate and often intensely dramatic character of the works of Rubens and his scholars, and the physical development of his nude figures, were, indeed, scarcely suited to feminine study, though their fullness of life and warmth of coloring afterward won to imitation an artist like Madame O’Connell. We may also mention Micheline Wontiers, a portrait painter in the first half of the seventeenth century. An engraving was made from one of her productions by Pontius, who busied himself with the works of Rubens. The name of Catherine Pepyn, too, is found inscribed as a portrait painter in the St. Luke’s Society of Artists at Antwerp, about 1655. In Holland, on the other hand, the new school of painting owed its marked features to the political and religious revolution that had been the fruit of the reformed doctrines. This change offered a wide field for the exercise of female energy and genius. With the progress of the new faith kept pace the rapid advance of literature; the great questions at issue and the more earnest domestic life of the Hollanders furnishing ample materials for thought and description. Painting came under the same influence, and this was evident when the depth and power of feeling in his works marked Rembrandt as one of the greatest masters of all time. A novel species of the art was called painting _de genre_. Herein life was represented in all its rich and varied forms, and the world and real humanity became objects of attention where hitherto only idealized representations had been tolerated. A new arena was thus opened, in which there was promise of noble achievement, and the rudest and meanest aspects of common life soon appeared capable of being invested with an ideal fascination. The painter _de genre_, armed with the wand of humor, often succeeded in such attempts, and success led to the adoption of that wonderfully poetical chiar’ oscuro in coloring, which, till this period, had never attained the same degree of favor either in the North or the South.