They were wonderfully interested in life, these old painters, and have left us many vivid scenes of our an-cesters' surroundings. For example "The Sallonstall Family," all nearly life-size—the father leading two elder children; his wife in bed; a nurse sitting by with the new baby in her arms. What strikes one is the fearful way in which everyone is smothered up: the wife's face peeps out from a wimple swathed tightly round head and throat. The bed has a great canopy with curtains drawn round five-sixths of it. There is not a suggestion of a window anywhere. No wonder that infant mortality was such a scourge.
Yet open air life was popular, as witness Tenniers' "Fair at Ghent" with its hundreds of exquisitely painted little figures, an open-air stage, ud other amusements; or Van Breen's Festival on the Ice," amid charming scenery of a castle, church, farm, and boats stuck in the ice. Generally it seemed to me that the landscape painters used landscape mainly to enhance the interest of their men and women, though Ruysdael loved Nature for herself, and one superb picture by Koninch showed how poetical a great stretch of absolutely flat country can be. Also in the etchings room (some of these by Van Dyck and Rembrandt are so exquisitely fine that one can hardly believe they were done by mortal hand) I found a series of little studies of Islington 300 years ago. Would it were like that now.
There is a splendid collection of glass, brass and furniture, some of it curiously modern, though chairs were not made for lounging. Existence in the magnificent clothes they wore was bound to be stately and somewhat artificial. But, if you can shut your eyes to superficialities, like clothes and unfamiliar arrangements of hair, how eternal are the types. The 4th Earl of Dorset might be met by dozens (end avoided) in the City; an unknown lady by Rubens could have been Arnold Bennett's model for Alice, that comfortable woman, in "Buried Alive"; and many more might change their clothes and mingle unnoticed in any assembly of what Lowe, the cartoonist, rudely calls society clothes-horse:
So too when I was waiting for my bus, there was a pretty child of about 16 who might have come straight from one of the frames in Burlington House; and close by an unhappy old creature was selling matches who, with better kick could have been a "boor carousing."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.