Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/134



The prices given for the three great collections of paintings sold in England within the last century, may perhaps not be uninteresting. The Houghton gallery, of two hundred and thirty-two pictures, collected by Sir Robert Walpole, was sold to the Empress Catharine of Russia for £43,500. The Orleans gallery of two hundred and ninety-six pictures was sold in London, in 1798, for £43,555; and the Angerstein collection of thirty-eight pictures was bought by the British government, in 1823, for £57,000. This last purchase was the commencement of the English National Gallery.

LOVE MAKES A PAINTER.

Quintin Matsys, called the Blacksmith of Antwerp, was bred up to the trade of a blacksmith or farrier, which business he followed till he was twenty years of age, when, according to Lampsonius, his love for a blue-eyed lass, whose cruel father, an artist, refused her hand to any one but a painter, caused him to abandon his devotion to Vulcan, and inspired him with the ambition to become a worshipper at the shrine of the Muses. He possessed uncommon talents and genius, applied himself with great assiduity, and in a short time produced pictures that gave promise of the highest excellence, and gained him the fair hand for which he sighed. The inscription on the monument erected to his memory in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, at Antwerp, re