International studio (81.1925)

inceRtiAcionAL

MEMBER OF THE LE CLERQ FAMILY BY FRANS POURBUS, THE ELDER

rich tone. The Madonna, in the Faust collection,
shows evidence of this painstaking treatment.
The master may have worked at it, at odd times,
over a long period of years. Isabella died in 1626,
and four years later the once world-weary artist,
the most famous man of his country, who might
have espoused a lady of the court, married the
sixteen-year-old daughter of Daniel Fourment, a
prosperous middle-class merchant. It was the
girl's childlike beauty that plunged Rubens into
the seeming folly of a late marriage. And it is the
features of Helena Fourment, familiar to us
through the medium of a score of portraits, thai
appear in the face of the Divine Child.

With the exception of a beautiful Andrea del
Sarto, "John the Baptist," the other pictures in

this room are Dutch or Flemish works of the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One
of these, which has attracted the attention of
connoisseurs, is a remarkably fine study of an old
woman, by Albert Cuyp. In other American col-
lections there are Cuyp landscapes, but the Faust
collection is fortunate in the possession of one of
the few portraits painted by the Master of Dort.
As a companion piece to this, we find a superb
"Portrait of a Man," by Govaert Flinck, in every
line of which the guiding hand of Rembrandt is
evident. On an easel in a shadowy corner of the
great room stands the well-known "Memeber of
the Le Clerq Family," by Frans Pourbus, the
Elder, a three-quarter-length portrait that is so
lifelike as to be almost startling.

jour forty-two

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