VAN DYCK The great painter Rubens lived at Antwerp, a town about as near to Amsterdam as Dover is to London.

Yet despite the proximity of Flanders and Holland, their religion, politics, social life, and art were very different in the seventeenth century, as we have already seen.
Rubens was a painter of the prosperous and ruling classes.

He was employed by his own sovereign, by the King of Spain, by Marie de Medicis, Queen of France, and by Charles I.of England.

His remarkable social and intellectual gifts caused him to be employed also as an ambassador, and he was sent on a diplomatic errand to Spain; but even then his leisure hours were occupied in copying the fine Titians in the King's palace.
One day he was noticed by a Spanish noble, who said to him, 'Does my Lord occupy his spare time in painting ?' 'No,' said Rubens; 'the painter sometimes amuses himself with diplomacy.' In his life as in his art he was exuberant.

An absurd anecdote of the time is good enough to show that.