FRENCH AIR LINER TRAGEDY

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 42, 13 November 1926, Page 24

FRENCH AIR LINER TRAGEDY

aid of a guide book and the ever-ready assistance of the solemn looking, but courteous officials, any person .of average intelligence and good artistic taste can easily discern the leading treasures without any such aid. And so I quietly enjoy, without interruption, Rembrandt’s wonderful "Lesson on Anatomy," which was purchased nearly a hundred years ago for less than £3OOO. but which the combined wealth of the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, Schwabs and others could not, I expect, secure. Paul Potter’s Bull. Then there is a Jan Steen’s "The Sick Child”; and Vermeer’s “View of Delft”, one of the greatest of all landscapes, and a noble portrait by Franz Hals, whose “Laughing Cavalier” is across the North Sea in London town. Perhaps the picture which attracts most attention—to-day there is but the most meagre of attendances in the Gallery, but fully one-third of the visitors are standing before the famous painting—is Paul' Potter’s "Bull,” painted, so an official, informs me, as far back as 1C.25, and taken to Paris for a time l>v Napoleon and placed in the LouvrePotter’s masterpiece was repurchased for £5000; £500,000 would not buy it to-day from Holland, even were the florin to follow the franc in depreciation. Which it is not in the least likely to do. Among the smaller pictures there is a most exquisite

—but which, lam assured, has many curious old buildings, and the highly inclined tower of whose Princcnhof, where William the Silent, Prin.’e of Orange, was assassinated by the Span-ish-paid fanatic Gerard, we are soon in the centre of busy Rotter lair, and crossing the broad Maas alon.i whose waters pass huge steamers bound the wide world over. Dordeclit said to be the special• bourne of artists, who must have painted the picturesque Groote Kerk from every conceivable point of vantage, is soon left behind, and thence through Rosendaal and the Belgian customs border station of Esschem, a comparatively short run brings us to Anvers Dam, a suburban station, and a huge forest of masts testifies to the greatness of Rotterdam’s rival, the ancient port of Antwerp. Paris In Petto.

The Frenchman who styled the Belgian capital, a “Bourgeois Paris,” or as we might put it, a Homelv Paris, was not far from the mark. Everything at Brussels is on a minor scale as compared with the over-glittering City of Light on the banks of the Seine. But it is a mightily comfortable townWhatever be the faults of "cep., braves Beiges,” and neither in England, nor, still less in Holland, do I find the Belgians in any pronounced favour just now—you just mention the “Belgian refugees” to the average Englishman—-

busy manufacturing city, with a strange admixture in its streets of seventeenth and eighteenth century buildings, and its rather,-heavy, just a little dour looking people. I did not fail to visit the fine old cathedral church of St. Bavon, whither has been replaced, in all its pristine glory, that famous masterpiece of the brothers Van Eyck, the many panelled picture, "The Adoration of the Lamb,” the story of whose removal and concealment from the vandalish Germans during the war is a veritable romance of art, into which I dare not here enter in detail. Ghent is not a specially interesting place and a wet evening spent thereat in listening to an exasperatingIv crude hotel quartette—mendaciously described in a handbill as being composed of “celebrated artists from Brussels,” will long remain a rather dismal memory. Next morning, 1 devote a couple of hours to strolling about the ever picturesque but sadly decayed streets of Bruges, whose many bridges are as quaint as ever, but whose canals on a steaming sultrv July day are grievously malodorous. Thence I pass on to Ostend where returning Britons swap Continental experiences on the overcrowded boat, and I am soon back again in dear old England, admiring tlie beautiful Kentish country as the train takes me through the pleasant hop gardens to London town.