Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/745

Rh places being respectively 12 and 15 miles. The Reformed church, called in the olden times St Mary Magdalen’s, is considered the ﬁnest ecclesiastical building of Zealand, and dates from. In the one half, known as the Preekkerk or preaching church, there is a splendid organ, and in the other half, known as the \Vandelkerk or walking church, stands the tomb of Frans Naerebout the philanthropist. Goes further boasts of a ﬁne old town—house, a high school, and the remains of the old castle of Ostende, which was the nucleus round which it began to form itself in the 14th century. The industries of the town are varied but not extensive, dealing with linen, dyes, chocolate, oil, ﬂour, straw hats, wood, and cigars. Shipbuilding is also carried on, as well as a trade in wood and coals. The harbour, which is defended by a fort, is formed by a short canal communicating with the eastern Scheldt, extended and im- proved in 1818—19. The population of the town, which received its municipal rights in, and was surrounded with a wall about, numbered 4916 in 1860, 5205 in 1870, and 6063 in 1876.  GOES, (?–), a painter of considerable celebrity at Ghent, was known to Vasari, as he is known to us, by a single picture in a Florentine monastery. At a period when the family of the Medici had not yet risen from the rank of a great mercantile ﬁrm to that of a reigning dynasty, it employed as an agent at the port of Bruges Tommaso Portinari, a lineal descendant, it was said, of Folco, the father of Dante’s Beatrix. Tommaso, at that time patron of a chapel in the hospital of Santa Maria N nova at Florence, ordered an altar-piece of Hugo van der Goes, and commanded him to illustrate the sacred theme of “ Qucm genuit adoravit.” In the centre of a vast triptych, comprising numerous ﬁgures of life size, Hugo represented the Virgin kneeling in adoration before the new-born Christ attended by Shepherds and Angels. On the wings he por- trayed Tommaso and his two sons in prayer under the pro- tection of Saint Anthony and St Matthew, and Tommaso’s wife and two daughters supported by St Margaret and St Mary Magdalen. The triptych was sent to Florence, and placed on the altar upon which it still remains. Van der Goes, like Hubert Van Eyck and Jodocus of Ghent, has bequeathed but this one picture to posterity ; but it is a picture which shows that he was an artist of whom Ghent might be proud, as Bruges was proud of John Van Eyck and Brussels of Roger van der 1V eyden. Unhappily the triptych of Santa Maria N uova suffered so much from decay and restoring that the defects peculiar to the Flemings became unduly prominent as time and neglect effaced the brilliancy and harmony of the principal colours. We can only discern at the present day that the art of Van der Goes is a variety of that which characterizes Van Eyck and Van der Weyden. Less ﬁnished and less coloured than the work of the ﬁrst, it is less subtle and expressive than that of the second. It lacks depth of religious feeling, and hardly rises above the common level of the school in respect of feeling or execution. It is a cold and stiff art, marked by hardness of surface, dryness of contour, angularity of drapery, overladen ornament, and ill-balanced light and shade. Imposing because composed of ﬁgures of unusual size, the altar-piece is more remarkable for portrait character than for charms of ideal beauty. There are small pieces in public galleries which claim to have been executed by Van der Goes, but none that are certiﬁed as the work of his hands. One of these pictures in the National Gallery in London is more nearly allied to the school of Mcmling than the triptych of Santa Maria N uova; another, a small and very beautiful John the Baptist, at the Pinakothek of Munich, is really by Memling ; whilst numerous fragments of an altar- piece in the Belvedere at Vienna, though assigned to Hugo, are by his more gifted countryman of Bruges. Any one who visits Continental collections will see that the name of Van der Goes was given to pictures of which he could not have been the author. None of the compositions mentioned by historians have survived except the altar-piece of Florence. But Van der Goes was not habitually a painter of easel pieces. He made his reputation at Bruges by producing coloured hangings in distemper. After he settled at Ghent, and became a master of his guild in, he designed cartoons for glass windows. He also made decorations for the wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in, for the festivals of the Rhetori- cians and papal jubilees on repeated occasions, for the solemn entry of Charles the Bold into Ghent in –, and for the funeral of Philip the Good in. The labour which he expended on these occasions might well add to his fame without being the less ephemeral. About  he retired to the monastery of Rouge Cloitre near Ghent, where he took the cowl. There, though he still clung to his profession, he seems to have taken to drinking, and at one time to have shown decided symptoms of insanity. But his superiors gradually cured him of his intemperance, and he died in the odour of sanctity in.    

   OHANN OLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749–1832) was born in Frankfort 011 August 28, 1749. His parents were citizens of that imperial town, and Wolfgang was their only son and their eldest child. His father was born on July 31, 17l0, and in 174‘). received the title of imperial Councillor. He married on August 20, 171-8, at the age of thirty-eight, Catherine Elizabeth Tcxtor, a girl of seventeen. Her family was better than his own, and held a higher posi- tion in the town. Her father was imperial councillor, and had been schultheiss or chief magistrate. In December 1750 was born a daughter, Cornelia, who remained until her death, at the age of twenty—seven, her brother’s most inti- mate friend. She was married in 1773 to John George Schlosser. The house in which Goethe was born is still to be seen in the Hirschgraben. loethe has described to 11s how it was rebuilt, and it has since been much altered. lIis education was irregular; he went to no school, and his father rather stimulated than instructed him. But the at- mosphere by which he was surrounded gave him, perhaps, the best education he could have received. Frankfort, a free town of the empire, still preserved the appearance of the Middle Ages. It had lost the reality of power, but its citizens naturally grew up with a strong sense of independence, and a power of realizing the unity of Germany which was wanting in a small state. The boy from his earliest youth was accustomed to the companion- ship of his elders. His father was strict and formal, his mother quick and lively, inspired with no small share of the genius of her son. Goethe lived in the freest intercourse with every kind of society in the town, in which he might expect some day to be an important personage. There was no capital like London or Paris to call him away; Berlin was poor and distant, Vienna half Italian and half Spanish. Goethe must have been brought up with the ambition to take his degree at the university as doctor, to return home and become an advocate, to make a rich marriage, to go through the regular course of c1v11 ofﬁces, to inherit his father’s house, and perhaps one day to be burgomaster. His home was a cultivated one. The father was fond of art and of the;; German poetry