from the Hermitage at St. Petersburg to the Prado at Madrid, as a record of a galaxy of unrivalled beauty and the flower of the English nobility before the stormy days of the Civil War. Vandyck lived in sumptuous style at Eltham in the summer, at Blackfriars in the winter, and enjoyed to the full the splendid recognition of the Court and of the nobility. He died at Blackfriars in 1644, a year before Naseby, but not before many of his subjects had bitten the dust.
Vandyck would have turned in his grave had he known that his fine equestrian portrait of Charles I. with an equerry bearing a helmet—now in the National Gallery—was engraved by Pierre Lombart, who inserted in place of the head of Charles I. that of Cromwell.
Of the seventeenth-century engravers in England there is the work of William Faithorne the Elder (1616-1691), whose portraits of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, see illustration facing p. 148 (worth £12 in proof state), Thomas Killigrew (worth £5 for a fine print), and Catherine of Braganza, Queen of Charles II. (worth £40, a fine proof before lettering), are remarkable. These are almost taken at random from a magnificent series of fine portraits worked almost entirely with the graver by this renowned artist of London, who was born within sound of Bow Bells and died in Printing House Yard, Blackfriars. He fought against the Puritans, and after his release when the war was ended he opened a shop near Temple Bar, where he sold his own prints and those of famous Dutch and Italian engravers. It is pecu-
