Put completely at his ease, Laurent hailed with delight the proposition that he, Bergmans, Marbol and Vyveloy should meet from time to time.
The artist Marbol, a little, dry man, all nerves, concealed beneath an anemic and delicate appearance, an extraordinary fund of energy and perseverance. Within the past two or three years he had gained something of a reputation for painting what he saw about him. Alone in this great city literally infested by daubers and studio painters, in this ancient hotbed of art now almost totally extinguished—a necropolis rather than a metropolis—he was commencing to exploit the local "plein-air," streets, scenery and types. He had left the ancient academy founded by Teniers and the delicious realists of the seventeenth century, but now fallen in the hands of false artists, as timid painters as they were intolerant teachers, with a certain eclat on the eve of the concours de Rome. In so doing, the young man had made enemies of the official coterie, the dealers, the amateurs, the critics and the collectors, those who procure bread as well as those who award renown.
To paint Antwerp, its life, its harbor, its river, its sailors, its dockers, its luxuriant women, its rosy and chubby children whom Rubens, in other days, had thought sufficiently plastic and appetizing to populate his heavens and Olympuses; to paint this human mob in its own ways, its costume and surroundings, with the most scrupulous and cherishing care for its special customs and morals, without neglecting any of the correlations which accentuate and characterize it; to interpret the very soul of the city of Rubens with a sympathy bordering upon assimilation—what a program and what an objective! It was, from the point
