Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ENGLISH MINIATURES OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Miniature painting in England of the Stuart period, on vellum, card, or metal—Broad oval portraits painted in opaque colours with bold shadows, and mostly of men— Sir Anthony Vandyck, Sir Balthasar Gerbier, John Hoskins, Samuel Cooper, Thomas Flatman, Nathaniel Dixon, Laurence Crosse, and Bernard Lens. AJTHONY VANDYCK was one of the greatest portrait painters that ever lived, and his stay and work in England had a marked effect upon our style of miniature portraiture. Vandyck himself is supposed to have painted a few miniatures, but it does not seem to be quite certain that he did so. Mr. Propert had a beautiful miniature of Queen Henrietta Maria which he attributed to Vandyck with much probability of truth ; it is figured both in his own book and in the Burlington Fine Arts Club catalogue of the exhibition of miniatures held there in 1889. Walpole also mentions a miniature in oils by Vandyck. After 1632, when Vandyck came to England 78 SIR BALTHASAR GERBIER 79 to work regularly, his position as Painter to the King, and the wonderful strength and beauty of his work, would easily have made him the most highly considered and admired painter of the time. It is likely enough that the high standard of portraiture set by Vandyck may have strongly appealed to the miniaturists who were then working, and there is no doubt that in the strong work of John Hoskins and Samuel Cooper there is to be found a radical difference from the flat work done in the sixteenth century. Vandyck's influence is undoubted, and although perhaps it does not make itself felt markedly in miniature work until after his death, which occurred in 1641, it lasted permanently when once realised. A sort of link between the old style of wor...