The queen with her piquant face, her satin robes and her pearls was likewise a subject delightful to the artist and charming to us. Of all the royal pictures, however, none has enjoyed the popularity of the group known as The Children of Charles I., now in the Dresden gallery, or that other group so like it at Turin. In both cases the group is composed of Prince Charles and his sister Mary with their little brother, James, Duke of York. This sweet group of naive children, with a fine spaniel on either side, is justly a favorite. Indeed it is so much so that we do not like the information of the student of English history that the fine frank fellow, Charles, became the dissolute Charles II. of England's most corrupt period or that Baby Stuart, the pet of all our primary pupils and their mothers, became the bigoted and weak James II. who was unable to hold a throne handed down to him by all the generations of English kings since William the Conqueror.

Happily, however, we are studying pictures and not history and we love these Stuart children for what they are here before us in Van Dyck's beautiful picture and not what they became in their maturity. The "Baby Stuart," so widely copied is from a drawing of the youngest of these children.

It is evident, from the great number of pictures done by Van Dyck, that his method of working must have been extraordinary. The following is an account given by one of the artist's friends which is interesting to us as bearing directly upon this matter. "He appointed a certain day and hour for the person he had to paint, and never worked longer than one hour at a time upon each portrait, whether in rubbing in or finishing; when his clock told the hour, he rose and made a bow to the sitter, as much as to say that enough was done for that day, and then arranged the day and hour for the next sitting, after which his servant came to prepare fresh brushes and palette, while he received another person to whom he had given an appointment.

"He thus worked on several portraits in one day with extraordinary expedition. After having lightly sketched the face, he put the sitter in an attitude which he had previously meditated, and with gray paper and white crayons he drew in a quarter of an hour the figure and drapery, which he arranged in a grand manner and with exquisite taste. He then handed over the drawing to skilful persons whom he had about him, to paint it from the sitter's own clothes which were sent on purpose at Van Dyck's request. The assistants having done their best with the draperies from nature, he went lightly over them, and soon produced by his genius the art and truth which we thus admire. As for the hands, he had in his employment persons of both sexes who served as models."

In this matter of hands he sometimes erred in judgment for it is no uncommon thing to find in his pictures a delicate pair of hands attached to the burly figure of a warrior or of a statesman.

It is also related that he frequently entertained his sitters at dinner that he might study their expression when relaxed and not under the strain of sitting for their portraits. Indeed so common was this custom with the artist that it materially increased his expenses.

His price for a half length portrait was sixty pounds sterling and for a full length one hundred pounds.

As the years wore on it became more and more evident that nothing short of a revolution could settle affairs in England. The income of the king fluctuated and at times the royal family were separated, owing to the unsettled condition of affairs. Van Dyck felt keenly the shrinkage in his income. The extravagant habits contracted in more prosperous times still clung to him. In his extremity we find him forgetting the high calling of his art and painting, as Guido Reni had done, hurriedly and carelessly merely for the money.

Worse almost than this we find him stifling in the unsavory odors of the laboratory in the hopeless pursuit of the "philosopher's stone," that imaginary element, which, when once produced, would turn all baser metals to shining, precious gold. In our more practical way of looking at things, we cannot help thinking that when he lowered and abused his art he let go the real philosopher's stone for him and then, in pitiful consciousness of his mighty loss, he sought its substitute in the uncanny recesses of the alchemist's retorts and crucibles.

Our artist, though a yet a young man, was broken in health and in purse. In the vain effort to recuperate the latter some of his noble friends arranged a marriage for him with Maria Ruthven, a woman of noble family. Such a marriage could hardly be happy for either party and yet we have no evidence that the ill-mated couple were unkind to each other.

They had been married hardly two years when, burdened with disease and disappointment, Van Dyck died just eight days after the birth of his daughter, Justiniana. He was but forty-two years of age and, if we may judge from the quality of the work he left, it was not unreasonable to look to the future for his crowning work.

There was a sumptuous funeral in old St. Paul's and the artist was laid to rest close beside John of Gaunt in the crypt of the old church. In the confusion that attended the rebuilding of the church in later years, the graves were lost sight of. Years later, in excavating, the plate from Van Dyck's coffin was found but no further trace of his remains. We can then make no pious pilgrimage to the artist's grave for his dust is scattered, we know not where. Again, dear reader, in the paraphrased words of another, let me say, "Look not on the man but on his pictures."