He also painted landscapes in which people were only accessory, sunny valleys with leafage, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of dancing country folk or reapers in the wheat.

Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and sunshine as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his backgrounds from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and Brussels.  Foliage, water, and undulating ground were indispensable to him—­were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers of the impression he wished to convey.

Brueghel always kept a childlike attitude, delighting in details, and proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of deception.  Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold subjective way.  He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he found there—­in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape painter.  The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic excitement and tension.  Take, for instance, the evening scene with the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by the hurricane, carries all before it—­trees, rocks, animals, and men.

In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and Racine.  There were idyllic features in Fenelon’s Telemachus, and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.

Honore d’Urfe’s famous Astree was much translated; but both his shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of sadness.

The case was different with French painting.  After the Netherlands, it was France, by her mediaeval illustrated manuscripts, who chiefly aided in opening the world’s eyes to landscape.  Both the Poussins penetrated below the surface of Nature.  Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the foreground, a hill with a classic building in the middle, and a chain of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than colour.  There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law, Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his grass is more succulent, his winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the clouds.