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Chap. XII.
ROYAL PICTURE GALLERY.
197
and to be met with only in the possession of one or two
noble French families, who guard them with the same
jealousy as the grandfather of the present Duke of
Norfolk did their black and tan brethren. I never had
the good luck to meet but with one of these little
creatures, and a more exquisite little animal I never
beheld, scarcely larger than a rat, brown and white,
with ears like silk training on the ground; the little
creature almost disdained to walk, but when it did it
scampered and ran like a fairy.
In reply to my inquiries whether Denmark possessed
any painters of note in earlier days, I was informed “ No.
Many Dutch artists settled in Denmark in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and our portrait-painters, who
have been always excellent, received their education in
Holland, but we have no national school of our own.”
The first whom I find mentioned is a certain Peter
Isaacs, who flourished in the reign of Frederic II. A
Dane by birth, his father was Dutch Consul at Elsinore,
and had a numerous family; Peter, one of his sons,
turned painter, and his portraits were much esteemed in
his day. His portrait of Christian IV. is by far the most
flattering to the personal appearance of that monarch as
a young man; most of these have been engraved by
Haelwech. But, though Peter excelled in
portrait-painting, he was a man of no inventive genius; he painted
huge supper-parties in the so-called style of Paul
Veronese, and servilely imitated the coarsest groups of
Rubens and Jordaens’ clumsiest allegories.
Next on our list appears Carl van Mander, a Dane by
birth, but of Dutch origin, court painter to Christian IV.,
all allegory and sprawl, but an admirable painter of
portraits, as many in the Frederiksborg Gallery attest,
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