_Unknown_ (Early Flemish: 15th century).
This picture, formerly ascribed to Roger van der Weyden, and called
"The Painter and his Wife," is delightfully typical of the Flemish
ideal both in man and woman--"the man shrewd and determined, the woman
sweet and motherly." "They are not fine of figure nor graceful of
limb, but, with hardly an exception, their faces tell us that they
are men of tried capacity and learnt experience. Through the eyes of
many of them glances a happy, childlike soul enough, but the mind is
almost invariably a slow-moving, solid power ... and such as they, were
the artists who painted them; they possessed the same industry, they
admired the same qualities. The virtue of honest strength, which made
the men of Flanders the merchant princes of Europe, was the virtue
whose traces the artists of Flanders loved to observe.... They care
little for mystery, little for pity, little for enthusiasm.... They
love a man whose visage tells the strength of his character, who has
weathered the buffetings of many a storm, and bears on his visage the
marks of the struggle" (Conway's _Early Flemish Artists_, p. 104).