The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of Dutch Painting, by Charles H. Caffin.

BY

CHARLES H. CAFFIN

AUTHOR OF
“HOW TO STUDY PICTURES,” ETC.

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1911
{iv}

Copyright, 1909, by
The Century Co.
——
Published November, 1909

THE DE VINNE PRESS
{v}

TO THE PRESENT AND FUTURE ART
OF THE NEW REPUBLIC OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THIS STORY OF THE ART OF THE OLD DUTCH REPUBLIC
IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR

New York, November, 1909

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE STORY
OF DUTCH PAINTING

CHAPTER I

THE END OF THE OLD

ON the 25th of October, 1555, Charles V abdicated the imperial crown, ceding Spain and the Netherlands to his favorite son, Philip II. The event proved to be the prologue of a drama, which in its immediate aspects involved the decay of Spain and the growth of Holland, but in its wider significance was to be the beginning of a new era.

For the modern world dates from the seventeenth century, and its pioneers were the Hollanders of that period. Practically everything that we recognize to-day as characteristic of the modern spirit in politics, religion, science, society, industry, commerce, and art has its prototype amid that sturdy people; being either the cause or the product of their struggle for independence and their self-development. Nor, in paying honor to the Dutch, need we attempt to suggest that they were the inventors of these characteristics. Most of the latter were, so to say, in the air. In the progress of things they{4} had been evolved. But our debt to the Hollanders is that they attracted them and gave them practical application, and thus set the world upon a definite path of new progress. It is particularly with the newness of their art that we are here concerned, but we will try to study it in its relation to the material and mental environment of the nation itself, of whose newness it was so immediate a product and so manifest an expression.

For it is in this way that the art of every country may be studied with most interest and profit. Although there will appear from time to time certain individual artists, whose genius cannot be satisfactorily correlated to its environment, but will indeed, as in the case of Rembrandt’s, seem to be actually contradictory to it, yet even they can be more fully comprehended through the very contrast that they offer to the mass of their contemporaries, whose relation to their environment is readily discernible. Apropos of this customary connection between the artist and the spirit of his time, may be quoted that phrase of Richard Wagner’s, that all great art is produced in response to a common and collective need on the part of the community. It may serve as an excellent touchstone for testing the quality of this new Dutch art which we are to study, so let us for a moment examine its face value, leaving the fuller application of its meaning to all the subsequent pages of this book.

In Wagner’s mind great art, as he conceived it, stood out in clear contrast against a background of less art, of art which is produced in response to some more restricted impulse than that of a common and collective need of the people; for example, in catering to the whims of fashion.{5} Such was the major part of the art of France produced in the last days before the Revolution. The great mass of the people were too abased by ill rule and exactions to have any consciousness but that of hunger, any common collective need but to fill their bellies. The only articulate demand to reach the artists was from the ephemeral swarm of courtiers, sycophants, and, as we should say to-day, “grafters,” who buzzed in splendor and profligacy at court. For a moment the glamour of this life inspired a great artist, Watteau, who, however, it is to be noted, was a foreigner. What he himself was he owed to Flanders. To him the glamour of the French court was but a pageant, a spectacle passing before his eyes, leaving his heart and conscience untouched. When, however, artists of French birth, reared in the home environment, followed in his steps, they revealed nothing of Watteau’s idealistic detachment from the grossness of the theme, but became purveyors to the shallow profligacy of their patrons. And to this day Van Loo, Boucher, and Fragonard have no place with other old masters in the hearts of the people; they are still the favorites of fashion. Nor was it until the upheaval of the Revolution had precipitated the gathering consciousness of a common and collective need on the part of the people, that French art in the nineteenth century began to develop a vital response. Moreover, what was characteristic of French art during the eighteenth century was generally symptomatic of the art of the whole of Europe. The latter had little or no creative force, was essentially an art of more or less feeble and perfunctory imitation. For the age itself was non-creative; a period of exhaustion after the strenuous{6}ness of the seventeenth century, or of the slow forming of new alinements after the shattering of the old ones; of speculation and doubts rather than of convictions.

So the artists, feeling no spur in the needs of the moment, fell to imitating the Renaissance artists of Italy. Among them, if we may anticipate the end of our present story, were the Dutch. They, too, had exhausted the immediate impulse of their own environment. War had made them a world-power, and peace brought them the foreign entanglements that maintenance of such a position entailed. They were no longer under the compulsion of an immense centripetal energy, a nation concentrated upon its own self-reliance. They began to spread themselves as cosmopolitans, aping the fashions of the rest of the world; and, as the fashion of the period was to be Italianate, so the artists of Holland, lacking at home the momentum of a common and collective need, ceased to be a school of great original painters, and became instead clumsy imitators of the splendors and elevation of the Italian masters of the Renaissance.

After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is ahead of us in our study—the establishment in Holland in the seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation; of a group of original and distinguished painters who formed, as Fromentin says, “the last of the great schools, perhaps the most original, certainly the most local.”

The course of our story, therefore, spreads before us. It is to discover in what respect the Dutch School of the seventeenth century was great, how it was original, and{7} in what way its genius grew out of and responded to the common and collective need of the Dutch people of the period. Meanwhile there are the previous fifty years of the sixteenth century to be accounted for, which brings us back to the prologue of the drama, the abdication of Charles V.

That monarch, born in Ghent and educated in Flanders, had a special feeling of regard for his “dear Netherlanders.” Incidentally, they were the richest jewel in the imperial crown, and he had drawn from them annually two fifths of the enormous revenue that he squandered in wars of ambition elsewhere. He had, moreover, proved his love for them by systematic slaughtering of dissenters, that the remnant might be preserved within the fold of the Catholic Church. It was Brussels, therefore, that he selected as the scene of his abdication. Formerly the capital of the Dukes of Burgundy, it had been under imperial rule the seat of government of the vice-regents of the Netherlands; a city of royal and princely palaces, immediately surrounded by parks and game-forests, and fields and gardens, teeming with opulence; the royal center of a group of cities. Of these Antwerp was the commercial chief, the greatest emporium of trade in Europe, with an exchange in which five thousand merchants daily congregated, and a port where five hundred vessels daily made their entrance or departure. It was the distributing-point for the imports from the East and for the products of the Netherlands: textiles of most sumptuous fabrics as well as of plain cloths and linens, works of gold and silver craftsmanship, agricultural and dairy{8} produce from the rich polders of the northern provinces, and fish from a hundred thriving towns and villages along the coast.

So when the emperor, enfeebled by excesses of action and appetite, felt his grip of power slackening, and determined to transfer this people of three million souls, the most industrious, versatile, and liberty-loving in the world, from his own pocket to that of his son, he saw to it that the proceeding should be conducted with a pageantry of ceremonial worthy of the occasion.

It was enacted in the hall of the renowned Order of the Knights of the Golden Fleece, the walls of which were hung with superb tapestries from the looms of Arras, representing the Biblical story of Gideon. The floor was occupied by official representatives of the provinces, clad in the sumptuous bravery of costume that distinguished this country and the times. Upon the dais at one end, beneath a splendid canopy, three chairs awaited the principals in the drama. Precisely at the stroke of three, the emperor entered from the adjoining chapel. Strange whim of Fate, he supported his gout-ridden body by leaning on the arm of the man who was eventually to be chief in undoing the policy that this day inaugurated—William, Count of Orange. Behind the emperor came Philip, and the regent, Queen Mary of Hungary, the “Christian widow” admired by Erasmus, who on one occasion had written to her brother, the emperor, that “in her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted with such severity as that error might be at once extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopu{9}lated.” Following the principals, appeared the Knights of the Fleece in full regalia, and a retinue of nobles, many of them, Egmont, Brederode, Berlaymont, Aerschot, and others, destined to figure in the subsequent drama of the Netherlands.

After a long oration by a member of the Privy Council, depicting the bodily infirmities of the emperor, his great zeal for his people’s welfare, and the particulars of the cession he was about to make, Charles himself read a long recapitulation of his wars and triumphs, dwelt upon his failing strength, and commended his successor to the good will and allegiance of his “dear Netherlanders.” At the conclusion of the speech the whole audience was melted to tears and the emperor himself wept like a child. Philip knelt in reverence, as his father made the sign of the cross above his head and blessed him in the name of the Holy Trinity. Then, while the assembled host applauded he rose to his feet, ruler by the grace of God, vice the emperor, of the Netherlands, Spain, and her American possessions. But he could not speak the language of the Netherlands; his acceptance of their allegiance and his own promises of regard for their interests had to be made through an interpreter.

Philip, as he assumed possession of the lives of millions, is characterized by Motley [A] as “a small meager man, much below middle height, with thin legs, a narrow chest, and the shrinking, timid air of an habitual invalid. In face, he was the living image of his father, having the{10} same broad forehead and blue eye, with the same aquiline, but better-proportioned, nose. He had the same heavy hanging lip, with a vast mouth and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor in public was still, silent, almost sepulchral. He looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a natural haughtiness which he had occasionally endeavored to overcome, and partly to habitual pains in the stomach, occasioned by his inordinate fondness for pastry. Such,” adds Motley, “was the personal appearance of the man who was to receive into his single hand the destinies of half the world; whose single will was, for the future, to shape the fortunes of every individual then present, of many more in Europe, America, and at the ends of the earth, and of countless millions yet unborn.”

Yet it may be doubted whether in the assembly present on that memorable occasion there was a single person who even dimly perceived the enormity of this idea. That a nation, without being consulted, should be transferred like a herd of cattle from one owner to another, for his own use and emolument and even to be slaughtered at his will, probably seemed a natural and right proceeding. The fact emphasizes the immense and profound change that during the ensuing fifty years was to take possession of men’s imagination. The seventeenth century was to see a new idea of the rights of nations and of the relations that should govern a people and its rulers; the com{11}mencement, in fact, of a new era of thought in its bearing on life. But as yet the minds of all engaged in the ceremony were possessed with the old thought, the brute survival of Roman imperialism and of the medieval conflict of rival autocrats; the claim of a pope to exercise supreme sway over the consciences of innumerable millions, and the contention of temporal potentates for absolute control over the souls and bodies of their subjects. Thought and life had been, and still were, based upon the supremacy of the favored individual.

Let us note the effect which this idea had had upon the art of painting, that we may better appreciate the change which is to come over the latter, as the new idea begins to penetrate life and thought. How did painting, notably the fullest expression of it in Italian art, respond to the common and collective need of men’s lives and thoughts? In what way did it embody the idea of the propriety and desirableness of the subordination of all to the will of one individual?

In the first place, the idea was fostered by the Church. This is no place to attempt to discuss, on the one hand, how far the Church in upholding this doctrine was actuated by the desire of saving souls or, on the other hand, to what degree it benefited the world. It is sufficient to recall what an immense hold the Church had over the lives and thoughts of men, and that to establish and maintain it she employed painting as a handmaiden. Thus, in response to the common and collective need of the people, the favored subjects of painting were the doctrines and story of the Christian faith. The interiors of churches were converted into vast picture-books for the{12} edification of the people, as well as into sumptuous shrines for the celebration of the mystic drama of the Mass. And, corresponding to the stately ceremonial of the latter, its superb accompaniments of lights and vestments, and its imposing spectacle of ordered ritual, the altarpieces grew to be miracles of stately composition; arrangements of form and color, light and shade, built up with an artifice as imposing and moving in its effects as that which had elaborated the Mass itself. So closely is the genius of these paintings a product of the Catholic Church’s particular mode of emphasizing its faith that it is evident, when men shall separate themselves from such exposition of the faith, their common and collective need will not demand pictures of this character. This will be exemplified in the case of the Dutch. They will need religious pictures, but neither of a ceremonial character, nor, in view of their idea of worshiping in spirit and in temples not made with hands, for the purposes of decorating their houses of God. Their religious pictures will be of a kind to affect the thoughts and lives of the people in a simpler and more unpretentious way, perhaps more intimately and personally.

But, while the splendor and dignity of the Italian religious pictures were inspired by the religious fervor that had continued from medieval times, they also reflected the new impulse which had made possible the Renaissance: the New Learning, the study of the classics, particularly of Hellenic culture, preëminently of Plato. From the latter, scholars and artists alike had learned to think in terms of the abstract. To the artists had been revealed the abstract idea of beauty—of beauty{13} as at once the symbol and the expression of the highest good in life and thought. They were no longer satisfied simply to represent the sacred story and doctrines; they would have their pictures beautiful, independently of the subject; they would give the subject itself a higher significance through the abstract beauty of the compositions in which it was embodied. Hence the principles of technical distinction that began to sublimate their pictures, until they reached a degree of abstract as well as material elevation that has never been, and, one imagines, will never be surpassed. For it was the offspring of two motives that may never again be found in wedlock—the religious need and the need of expressing the enthusiasm for the cult of the classics. The former may still be operative, but the latter has been dissipated in the spread of the democratic idea.

And what was the principle upon which was based the classic ideal of abstract beauty, as it expressed itself in Italian painting? It was the supreme motive of the human form, as being, in its harmony of proportions and its rhythm of movement, the symbol and expression of abstract beauty. Again it happened that the teaching of the Church conjoined with the speculations of scholars. This world was thought to be the center of the universe; man was the axis of the world. Even God was interpreted as concerned chiefly in the rewarding or punishment of man, while to man all other created things were subordinate. To the imagination of the Renaissance, as of the Middle Ages, man towered up supreme against the mere background of the universe. Small wonder if some men, seizing the logic of this, aspired to be the{14} owners of the bodies and souls of their fellows, and scarcely less that the others acquiesced! It was a rôle not only for popes, emperors, and kings to play upon the stage of the world, but for every princeling and duke to strut through on some smaller platform of a municipality. It justified the Medici in their own eyes, and made them almost of necessity the patrons of artists who had accepted the supremacy of such as they for the leading motive of their art. The painters, in fact, accepting the exclusive aristocracy of the human figure, adopting as their prime motive its ideal perfection, and building up compositions in which the figures were arranged in conformity with the rhythms and proportions derived from such ideal perfection, necessarily achieved an art that was essentially aristocratic, fitted for the temples of an aristocratic church and the palaces of the lay aristocracy. Yet, to repeat, it was also inspired by a great religious need, so that it was fitted for the masses as well as for their rulers.

Such was the great art of the world at the period when Charles V abdicated. Yet even by 1555 the tide has begun to ebb. Of all the great Florentines Michelangelo alone remains, and he has ceased from painting and sculpture. The giant brood survives only in the persons of Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto. The last named will live out nearly the remainder of the century, after which the art of Italy will be in the hands of “mannerists” and “eclectics,” groups whose very names suggest that they are but fanning a flame already dead. Only the “naturalists” will have something in them of the modern spirit.{15}

Meanwhile among the painters of the Netherlands there is as yet little or nothing of the distinction that will grow between Hollander and Flemish. The principal seat of painting is Antwerp, and its school has already been Italianized. Even Lucas van Leyden, the personal friend of Dürer, and at first an original genius inclined toward Gothic feeling, had before his death in 1533 gone over to Italian influence. Admirably representative of this influence is the large triptych by Barend van Orley, now in the Antwerp Museum. Its central panel shows The Day of Judgment. In the vault of the sky Christ appears, enthroned upon a rainbow, his feet resting on a globe. He is encircled by clouds, below which a ring of angels supports a cross, while to the right and left are seraphs sounding their trumps, and all the distant air is aquiver with angelic forms. Hovering midway between earth and sky is St. Michael, the archangel. Down on the earth are the myriads of the risen: the good on one side, in orderly bands, lifting hands and heads toward heaven, and on the other the lost souls in a tumult of flames and smoke. In the side panels the works of mercy are represented; grave personages ministering to the sick and the halt and the blind and the dying, in a spot dignified by monumental architecture, above which, seated on clouds, are ranged the Madonna and the saints. The superb composition, unquestionably suggested by that of the Disputá, is one which Raphael himself need not have been ashamed to design. But the figures that appear large in the foreground exhibit a realism of nudity and an individuality of separate characterization that bespeak the artist’s Flemish origin.{16} Notwithstanding his Italian training he had still retained his racial instincts for naturalism. But this fine work was finished in 1525, and the artist died in 1542.

At the date we have selected as our starting-point, the leading artists were Jan van Scovel, Antonio Moro, and Pieter Pourbus; the last of Flemish birth, the others born in the northern provinces. Though Pourbus essayed religious subjects, the finest examples of which are in Bruges, he is best known as a portrait-painter, in which branch Moro also excelled. The latter, after studying under Scovel, visited Italy, and upon his return was recommended to Charles V, who despatched him to Madrid and Portugal, and later to England to make a portrait of Queen Mary, the wife of Philip II. Subsequently he was in the latter’s service in Spain, but returned to Brussels, where he found a patron in the Duke of Alva. His portraits are distinguished by evidence of truth to life as well as by their masterly, if somewhat careful, handling. But it was Scovel himself whose life best illustrated the tendencies of the time.

Born in Alkmaar in 1495, he studied in Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht; then in Cologne, Speyer, Strasburg, Carinthia, and Venice, from which last he went to Jerusalem. Returning to Europe, he lived for a while in Rome, where he was appointed superintendent of the Vatican Gallery by his countryman, Pope Adrian IV. On the latter’s death he returned to the Netherlands, living by turns in Utrecht and Haarlem, in one of which cities he died in 1562. Greatly influenced by his sojourn in Rome, he was the first of the strictly Dutch painters to absorb the Italian influence. Among several exam{17}ples of his style in the Municipal Museum of Haarlem the most remarkable is a portrait group of twelve Knights Templars, with palm branches in their hands, indicating that they have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It is noteworthy both for its characterization and as an early instance of what was to be a special feature of Dutch art—the portrait group. His subject pictures, mostly on religious themes, have the elegant, non-committal character of work that was inspired by outside impulse, though possibly in the landscape backgrounds one may find a foretaste of the Dutch regard for truth of natural surroundings. His work, indeed, like his life, exemplifies the lack of originality and conviction in the temper of the times. It was a period of suspense, succeeding to the vigorous realities of old ideals, scarcely ready for the development of the new. It was a prologue to a new era.

The new art, when it arrives, will be in response to a new common and collective need of a people, the product, in fact, of a new attitude of thought toward life. In place of the aristocratic it will be democratic, concerned with the rights of all instead of the privileges of the few. It will no longer set man in a pose of artificial supremacy against the background of the universe, but will begin to take account of his environment and to discover his true relation to it. It will be an era, not of magnificent mendacity and superb hypotheses, but of patient inquiry into the facts of life and of resolute adjustment of life to the facts. It will, indeed, be the dawning of the scientific era. And so firmly will it have taken hold of the thought and life of the then sepa{18}rated provinces of the north, that, even as they have parted absolutely from the old religion and politics, still adhered to by the southern states, so they will be impervious to the influence of the art by which the latter continue to be represented. When, fifty years from our opening date, Rubens shall return from Italy to give a brief lease of lustier life to the Italian motive by the vigor of his Flemish genius, the Hollanders of the seventeenth century will be absolutely unaffected by his influence. Their art will be as closed to the invasion of his masterful genius as their country is to the inroads of the German Ocean. Theirs will be an art not only new and original, but certainly most local.{19}

CHAPTER II

THE OLD ORDER CHANGES

THE forty-five years, following the abdication of Charles V, yielded no indication of the harvest of painting that was to signalize the succeeding century. The earlier half of the period embraces the work of Pieter Aertz, first of the distinctively Dutch genre painters, and the latter half sees the growth to manhood of the portrait-painters Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt and Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, while the whole period covers the active life of Jan de Bray. He, like the other two, was an honest but entirely uninspired portrait-painter; and it was not until nearly the end of the century that three men were born who were subsequently to become notable. These are Frans Hals, Jan van Goyen, and another landscape-painter, less well known, Hercules Seghers.

It was a period, indeed, solely of upheaval and preparation, during which the ground was plowed, harrowed, and fertilized, while its old landmarks were being removed, new boundaries established, and a new proprietorship asserted and exercised. It covered, moreover, the whole of Philip the Second’s miserable reign.

This monarch, tiring of the atmosphere of the Netherlands, soon withdrew to Spain, whence for the remainder of his life he attempted to govern the distant provinces{20} as a satrapy, through vice-regents, military commanders, and bishops. His aim, as became his father’s son, was autocracy over the lives, fortunes, and consciences of his subjects. But, to do him justice, it was their own good, as he saw it, that he labored and intrigued for: to purge them of heresy and retain them within the fold of the Roman communion. For nothing is to be gained in the way of understanding the temper and conditions of that day by regarding Philip as an inhuman monster. Judged by the manner of our own time, he may seem to have been; but, judged by the tenacity and unscrupulousness with which men still cling to what they believe to be their rightful privileges and pursue what they are convinced is the dictate of their conscience, he is seen to be but a natural product of the mental and social conditions of his day. He was a recognizable and for a time even tolerated part of a system that men as yet had not thought of disturbing.

It was so, at first, that the citizens of the Netherlands, even William, Prince of Orange, regarded him. They held his overlordship sacred, even while they opposed the acts of his official representatives. They expected to be roundly taxed, but at the same time to have the machinery of their local government of free cities and Estates-General unimpeded; and it was against the interference with this on the part of Philip’s mercenaries that they first remonstrated. For, in the pursuance of his policy of riveting Roman Catholicism upon the Netherlands, Philip had induced the Pope to create more bishops and archbishops, to uphold whose hands in the extirpating of heresy four thousand Spanish troops were to

be retained in the country at the expense of the Estates. The latter and the cities remonstrated, and the troops were withdrawn, though the Inquisition continued its fell work. So matters drifted until 1566, a memorable year in the story of the rise and growth of Holland.

The Flemish nobles, though Roman Catholic to a man, drew up a “Compromise” and pledged themselves to resist the Inquisition. William of Orange, also a Catholic, though he had married a Protestant princess, Anna of Saxony, and would later change his profession of faith, instituted a secret system of espionage in Madrid over the acts and counsels of Philip. Then the League of Nobles, Orange assisting in the wording of the document, presented a “Request” to the vice-regent, praying that the edicts against heresy and the Inquisition might be withdrawn and the management of affairs restored to the Estates-General. Its presentation drew from one of the vice-regent’s counselors, Berlaymont, the expression: “Is it possible that your Highness can be afraid of these beggars?”

Three days later the dissentient nobles were entertained at a feast by Brederode. When the enthusiasm was at its height, and the guests were debating on a name and a watchword, the host let drop among them Berlaymont’s contemptuous phrase. At the same moment he produced a beggar’s wallet and bowl; and, slinging the one over his shoulder and filling the other with wine, called upon all present to drink to the Beggars. The word was caught up, and from man to man the wallet and bowl were passed round, until all had enrolled themselves in the Beggars’ ranks. Then, at the{22} height of the excitement, the counts Orange, Horn, and Egmont entered the room. They were compelled to drink to the pledge and, although they immediately retired, were henceforth marked for Philip’s special revenge.

Later in the same year the “Image-breaking” occurred in Antwerp. It was unpremeditated and in its occurrence unguided: the spontaneous explosion of latent passions smoldering in the mob; the spark that kindled it, the annual procession and parade of the image of the Virgin. Scoffs and ribaldry were succeeded by horse-play, which involved a rough-and-tumble fight among some of the mob that filled the cathedral. The excitement grew. The mob, surging in and out of the building, began to mock an old woman who sold images of the Virgin at the cathedral door. She retaliated in kind, and from the bandying of words the mob and their victim proceeded to the hurling of missiles. A riot was averted for the moment by the arrival of the margrave and senators; but, when evening came, the cathedral was still occupied by a mob, now bent on mischief. The image of the Virgin was the first object of its fury, which, however, soon spread to a wholesale wrecking and desecration. The sacred vessels, the glory of stained glass, and the intricate beauty of carved work—every object of beauty that had made this one of the richest shrines of religious art in Christendom—were irretrievably destroyed. The blind, unreasoning fury, thus aroused, spread to other cities. Philip retaliated with another fury, coldly and calculatingly horrible. Alva was despatched with ten thousand troops, and the so-called Spanish Fury was inaugurated.{23}

Its first victims were the counts Horn and Egmont, William of Orange escaping into exile. A Council of Troubles, or, as the Netherlanders called it, of Blood, was established, and in the six years of Alva’s stay eighteen thousand six hundred persons were put to death. These were irrespective of those who fell in armed resistance. For in 1572 the Beggars of the sea took Brill, and a little later drove the Spanish garrison out of Flushing. It was the signal for revolt. Nearly all the cities of Holland and Zeeland declared for William of Orange, and, in an assembly of the Estates at Dort, voted funds for a war, directed, however, even then, not against the sovereignty of Philip, but to the expulsion of his soldiery. The fortunes of the patriots were checkered with more defeats than victories, but meanwhile the Spanish operations were impeded by lack of money; the troops depending upon the pillage of an impoverished country and the occasional sack of a city, while the treasure-ships of Spain were being intercepted and her commerce continually harassed by the Beggars of the sea. So Philip sparred for breath, and through his vice-regent agreed to the withdrawal of his troops, a treaty to this effect being signed at Brussels in 1577.

William, however, was too convinced of the duplicity of Philip to be a party to the treaty, and persuaded the northern provinces to refuse their assent. The struggle was continued, punctuated by the Union of Utrecht, in which the Estates agreed upon a Dutch republic; by Philip’s rejoinder in the shape of a ban declared against the life of Orange, with a price of twenty-five thousand golden crowns upon his head; and by the counter-move{24}ment of the patriots. This was the declaration of Dutch independence, formally issued at The Hague on the 26th of July, 1581.

To ideas that had been slowly but steadily accumulating under the pressure of dire facts a formulation had at last been discovered and a name given. A new word had been uttered in the world, that was, as the centuries advanced, to be echoed and reëchoed and to be fruitful in newly advancing ideas. Comparable only to it, in modern history, was the word spoken sixty years before by Luther at the Diet of Worms. And now the doctrine of the responsibility to itself of the conscience, with its allied doctrine of religious freedom, had been completed by the political doctrine of the responsibility of government to the governed, and its allied doctrine of a nation’s right to the choice of its own form of government. But, just as the idea must be in labor until the word for it is delivered, so the word itself is but a battle-cry, the fruits of which are painfully and slowly won. The labor of Holland’s actual independence, begun fifteen years before, had yet to be protracted sixty-seven years.

Hitherto all the hope of the patriots had centered in William of Orange. In declaring their independence, they offered him the crown. Partly to prove the disinterestedness of his motives, still more perhaps because he believed that the final release from Spain could be effected only by putting the new state under the protection of France or England, he refused the dignity. Fortunately, however, France continued to be a reed on which no dependence could be placed, and the English help, when it did come, was indirect. Meanwhile, Phil{25}ip’s ban was still out against the Stadtholder, and an attempt was made upon his life. He was shot in the face, but recovered from the wound, to fall a victim, however, two years later, to the pistol of one Balthasar Gerard. The tragedy occurred on July 10, 1584.

It had removed the chief obstacle to Philip’s success. Maurice would worthily succeed his father in the generalship of the war; but the brain and conscience, the unswerving patience and unselfishness, that had given some reality of union to the rival elements of the United Provinces, were buried with William the Silent. The exaggerated individualism of the several provinces and cities would have put them at the mercy of Philip, had he not himself been distracted from any singleness of purpose by the same cause. His own exaggerated egoism, inflated with the ambition to be a world-power, prevented him from concentrating his efforts upon the subjugation of the republic. He still strove to force his influence upon the affairs of France, and meanwhile made preparations to subdue England.

Thus Elizabeth, much as her Tudor instinct may have shrunk from the idea of encouraging rebellion against kingship, was induced by her advisers to make common cause with the Dutch against Spain. She refused their offer of the crown, but lent them money and some troops under the command of Leicester. He proved inefficient as a general, and, while a few names, such as that of Sir Philip Sidney, stand out heroically, England’s real contribution to Dutch independence was indirect. It was Drake’s incessant harrying of Spanish ships and ports and the destruction of the two Armadas that distracted{26} Spain, broke her power of offense, and hastened the exhaustion of her waning resources. Thus the struggle with the provinces continued on land, but became more desultory, while of the sea the Dutch had practically undisputed mastery. The result was an accession of adventurous spirit that, while it failed in the attempt to discover a Northwest Passage, established settlements in the East Indies, wore down the competition of the Spaniards in the trade of those regions, and inaugurated a condition of extraordinary commercial prosperity.

Meanwhile Philip’s long reign of forty-three years was drawing to a close. In May, 1598, he handed over the Netherlands to his daughter and son-in-law, the Archduke Albert, and a few weeks later died. It is sufficient for our present purpose to recall that the prolongation of the war on behalf of the archduke by various generals, including Spinola, was stopped by the bankruptcy of the attacking parties. A truce of twelve years was agreed to in 1609.

Such was the background of events that preceded the birth of a new art in Holland. A new nation had been formed, and the circumstances which attended its formation had a direct influence in shaping the character of the new art. That it involved a departure from the decorative grandeur and the religious motive of Italian art was an incident of the Dutch having repudiated alike the Roman Catholic form of worship and the ceremonies of a regal court. Almost equally incidental was the fact that the artists were limited to subjects drawn from the personages and conditions of life within their own bor{27}ders; were influenced, in fact, to become realists. This, I repeat, was incidental and not unexampled, for realism was at the same time revived in Italy and continued in Spain. The fundamental thing was to be the character of Holland’s realism; and this was a direct product of the national events we have been describing. For it was a symptom of the general character that the people had been forming in itself during more than half a century of nation-building. It was essentially a moral character.

I need hardly say that I do not use the word “moral” in its narrower sense, but to the full extent of its suggestion of a stout fiber of conviction and purpose that habitually promotes integrity of conscience and determines the conduct of a nation or an individual. It is nearer to our borrowed word, “morale.” It is the product, I take it, primarily of a great and worthy pride in self, and then of loyalty to the best in one’s self that such pride engenders and makes necessary. It is what an artist, least of all men, can afford to be without; for his work is necessarily an expression of himself, and, if he has not morality in the sense we have been describing, his work will inevitably betray the fact and prove the weaker for it. No artist in any medium can maintain a bluff. Even if it hoodwinks his contemporaries, posterity will “call it.”

Now, in the case of Holland, the struggle for a great principle, persevered in against all discouragements, had gradually established in the nation just such a morality, which during the years of the truce and for some thirty years later was to demonstrate its value in practically every department of human activity. To higher learn{28}ing and research, to the practical affairs of life, such as manufactures, commerce, banking, engineering, agriculture, and dairy-farming, to questions of disease and hygiene, and to the systematizing of the legal relations as well of nations as of individuals, the Dutch brought the application of a new principle, substituting for empiricism and laissez-faire the method of approach and treatment that we now call scientific.

It is a term, by the way, that from time to time has been assumed to be antagonistic to morality; whereas, if properly considered, it should and does surely represent a morality of the most exacting and, frequently, the most disinterested kind. One after another, then, the Dutch in those days of newly realized nationality confronted the problems of intellectual, material, and social progress, bringing to their study a keen analysis, and handling their solution with integrity and thoroughness. With morality such as this conspicuously abroad in the community, it would have been strange if her artists had not reproduced it in their own special field; if to directness and sanity of vision they had not brought a scrupulous artistic conscience, that resulted in integrity and thoroughness of craftsmanship. That certain of them at some period of their careers deviated, as we shall see, from this high standard does but emphasize the existence of the latter, which, too, was reached, not by a few individuals, but by the artists as a body; so that in no other school of painting can you find such wide-spread excellence of technique. This, indeed, if we may anticipate the sequel, proved to be one of the causes of the school’s subsequent decline. Technique came to be pursued as a

motive. But this was itself a symptom of a deeper cause—the freshness of the original motive had been outworn, its vigor slackened. The nation itself had by that time lost the simple directness of its early ideal and become enamoured of the sophistries of a world-wide ambition.

But to resume the thread of the story. At the commencement of the new century Hals was sixteen years old; Daniel Seghers, eleven; Van Goyen and the portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser, four. The train, in fact, was already laid for a new kind of portraiture and for a new motive in painting—that of naturalistic landscape. Otherwise the men destined to be the most representative of the new school were as yet unborn. With the opening of the century, however, their names appear thick and fast, and continue to arrive for forty years; after which the list of those conspicuous in the annals of the Dutch seventeenth-century school ceases. Dating, therefore, from Hals’s birth in 1584, the period covered is fifty-six years.

It is perhaps convenient for the purpose of assisting the memory to divide the first forty years of the new century into two parts: the first ending in 1621, with the conclusion of the twelve years’ truce; and the second with the marriage, in 1641, of the Prince of Orange’s son, William, to the eldest daughter of Charles I of England. The historical aspect of these two periods in relation to the story of art may be considered after we have reviewed the names of the principal artists whose births they contain.

The earlier division, then, includes the greatest name in the art of Holland, one of the greatest in all art, that{30} of Rembrandt, who was born in 1606. The latter is the birth-year also of the flower-painter Jan van Heem, while the preceding years of the century disclose the names of the marine-painter Simon de Vlieger and the landscape-painters Salomon Ruisdael and Aert van der Neer, and Palamedesz, painter of genre. The year 1610 gives us Van Ostade and the landscape-painter Johannes Both; 1611, Ferdinand Bol and Willem van de Velde the Elder; 1613, Wouwerman and Gerard Dou; and 1615, Govert Flinck and Jan Wynants.

Here we may check the routine of enumeration to note another great name, one of the most distinguished of the Holland School. It is that of Gerard Terborch, born in 1617. He is followed, in 1619, by the landscape-painter Philips Koninck and the portrait-painter Bartholomeus van der Helst. To them succeed in 1620 Aelbert Cuyp and Nicolaes Berchem, followed in 1621 by Eeckhout and Allart van Everdingen.

This enumeration does not pretend to be exhaustive. The aim has been rather to include as few names as possible, so as to simplify the study by concentrating attention from the start on those which are most representative and most often met with. After familiarizing one’s self with these, it is comparatively easy to add to their number and to place the newly acquired ones in their chronological relation to this preliminary list. The same motive determines the selection for the second period.

It begins in 1624 with Carel Fabritius; but the following year discloses a name that in the Holland School stands very close to Rembrandt, Jacob Ruisdael, and{31} another name of great reputation, Paul Potter. To 1626 belongs Jan Steen. After the birth of this artist there is a pause of four years, when Gabriel Metsu and the still-life painter Kalf appear, to be followed two years later, in 1632, by a notable trio, Nicolaes Maes, Pieter de Hooch, and the most distinguished, Jan Vermeer of Delft. With 1633 comes the marine-painter Willem van de Velde the Younger, and with 1635 Frans van Mieris; while 1636 yields Adriaen van de Velde, landscape-and figure-painter, and the painter of birds and poultry, Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Finally, the painter of architecture, Jan van der Heyden, is born in 1637; Hobbema in 1638, and in 1640 the painter of animals and dead game, Jan Weenix.

If one glances back over the names of these two periods, it is to note some interesting suggestions. In the first place, one of the earliest names, Van Heem, and the last of the list, Weenix, represent painters of still-life. The fact emphasizes the hold which this branch of painting had upon the interest alike of the painters and their public, and the part it plays in the general work of the school. In our own day there is perhaps a tendency to underestimate the interest of still-life. “Only a picture of flowers or fruit or game,” represents the feeling of many people on the subject. It is an attitude of mind, resulting from the habit of relying on the mind to appreciate a picture. Thus, as a subject for mental study, a bunch of flowers, a mass of vegetables, pots and pans and the like, may not be interesting. On the other hand, I think it would be a mistake to assume that the Holland public of the seventeenth century were free{32} from this tendency; or to suppose that they regarded a picture as a thing to be viewed and to be appreciated solely through the abstract pleasure that is communicated by the joy of sight. As a matter of fact, they were actually interested in the objects represented in the still-life pictures. They were enthusiastic cultivators of flowers and vegetables, keen sportsmen, and shared with the women of their families a pride in all the objects of decoration and utility in their homes, so that even utensils of ordinary use were made and kept in a state of being ornamental. Accordingly, with that simple directness, characteristic of the race, they took a positive interest in the representation of such things. The latter were subjects of importance in life; accordingly, since their art was so intimate an expression of their life, they were welcomed as subjects for pictures.

The public also applauded the skill with which such subjects were rendered by the artists, and the latter, since still-life presented excellent opportunities for the display of craftsmanship, were glad enough to reciprocate the popular taste. Thus resulted what one notes as a second point in the consideration of Holland still-life painting: namely, that the artists freely introduced objects of still-life into their portraits. I cannot cite a more typical instance than the earliest military group-picture by Frans Hals in the Haarlem Museum. Here the viands and furnishings of the banquet are rendered with at least as much gusto as the heads, and for the present with more assurance. Thirdly, it is easy to trace the influence that this joy in the representation of still-life had upon the evolution of genre painting in the Hol{33}land School and upon the particular character that it assumes. In fact, the interest in still-life subjects, with the influence it had upon the methods of the artists, was a most important factor in the development of the Holland School. Closely allied to it is the interest in portraiture.

How radically this interest affected the art of Holland may be gathered from another glance at the foregoing list of names. It is in the beginning of the new era, in the earlier division of names, that all the famous portrait-painters appear. Not to mention Rembrandt, whose genius was of the universal kind, embracing in its single scope the separated motives of other artists, we find the names of Hals, Mierevelt, Ravesteyn, Van der Helst, Terborch, De Keyser, Cuyp, Bol, and Flinck. On the other hand, among the names in the second list, selected without any parti pris, there is not one of first or even second rank as a portrait-painter; only men like Maes and Netscher, who were primarily and far more worthily genre painters.

For it is the genre painters who form one of the chief distinctions of the later generation. It is true that Dou belongs with the earlier, and he was and still remains popular. But he is not in the same class as Vermeer and Steen, nor as Maes, Metsu, and De Hooch, scarcely as a painter even to be reckoned with Ostade. Indeed, he is nearer to Van Mieris and Netscher, the men in whose hands genre sank to a distinctly lower level. The only example in the earlier generation of a great genre painter is Terborch, who presents the exception, and a brilliant one, to the generalization I have suggested.{34}

Another point of interest to be derived from this summary is the place that landscape takes among the motives of the Holland School. We see, in fact, that it figures at the beginning of the new era and continues to the end. Seghers and Van Goyen precede the century, which immediately opens with Salomon Ruisdael and Aert van der Neer, followed in the earlier division by Both, Wouwerman, Koninck, Cuyp, Berchem, and Van Everdingen. Then the second period opens with the birth of Jacob Ruisdael, and, including Potter, Adriaen van de Velde, and Vermeer (the last named with one known example), ends with Hobbema. Similarly, in the allied department of marine-painting, the century opens with Simon de Vlieger; Willem van de Velde the Elder follows, and in the later period the art is represented by Bakhuysen and Willem van de Velde the Younger.

As a matter of fact, in each field of motive the seed was laid in the beginning of the period under examination. What followed was a rotation of crops and an enriched development of each variety.{35}

CHAPTER III

BEGINNING OF THE NEW

THE breathing-time given by the truce allowed play for dissensions among parties and for the ambitions that had crept into the house of Orange. Meanwhile it favored the development that during the next hundred years made Holland the richest and most advanced country in Europe.

To commemorate the raising of the siege of Leyden, the patriots in 1574 had founded a university in that city; to inaugurate the truce, they pumped dry the Beemster Lake and added eighteen thousand acres to their territory. The two acts, and even the order in which they came, were characteristic of this extraordinary people. They were the most enlightened of their day and brought their intelligence to bear upon all the practical concerns of life. The renown of their university excelled that of Paris, Oxford, or Cambridge; their scholars laid the foundations of international law and modern medicine, and their printing-presses produced more books than those of the rest of Europe combined. Their development in painting is our present subject, but they also carried their love of the beautiful into the design and craftsmanship of the ornaments and utensils of the home, and into the laying out of gardens and the culti{36}vation of flowers. Meanwhile their looms, manned by weavers who had fled from Flanders to avoid religious persecution, produced the finest fabrics in Europe; their workshops exported the best mathematical, astronomical, and nautical instruments; and their discovery of the art of cutting and polishing diamonds gave them a monopoly of this business. The Bank of Amsterdam was founded in the first year of the truce and soon became famous for the amount of its deposits and the volume of its transactions, while the city itself became the chief distributing center for the commerce of the Old and the New World.

Meanwhile in agriculture the Hollanders displayed a similar combination of scientific resourcefulness and indomitable energy. They discovered the value as fodder of certain “artificial” grasses and clovers, and experimented with these to the immense improvement of their cattle and dairy produce; and by the application of intensive methods to the cultivation of the land so increased its productivity, that it became capable of supporting three times the population which had before subsisted on it. Further, by promoting the cultivation of the potato and other root-vegetables they wrought a signal improvement in the public health, since the variety of diet, thus made possible in winter, stamped out the scurvy and leprosy which had been the scourge of Holland as of other countries. At the same time they developed their fisheries and introduced improved methods of drying and treating fish; enlarged their merchant marine, so that they became the chief carriers of the world; and pushed their commerce with the Indies, until they

possessed a practical monopoly of the most lucrative trade of those times, namely, that of spices.

Meanwhile, as a reverse to this story of national progress, were the religious and political dissensions that crept into the commonwealth. Protestantism, after presenting a solid front to Romanism, now found itself cleft by the sect-rivalries of Arminians and Gomarists; and these in time gave color and opportunity to the ambition of Maurice. No disinterested patriot like his father, William the Silent, the second Stadtholder intrigued for his personal aggrandizement, and stained his memory by the judicial murder of the old patriot-statesman Barneveldt. On the other hand, of better memory was his service to art. In 1611 he commissioned Ravesteyn to paint a series of portraits of officers. These and other pictures that he gathered adorned his palace, and, added to by his successor, the Stadtholder Frederick Henry, became the nucleus of the collection that, accumulating through various vicissitudes, now occupies the Mauritshuis, as the Royal Museum of The Hague.

The lack of cohesion, of which these dissensions were a symptom, and that had always been close to the surface of unity owing to the excessive individualism of the cities, was reflected in the new art. Small as was the total area of the country, it supplied a number of artistic centers, each with its group of artists, who had sufficient in common to constitute a school. Under the influence of tradition, or more often of some conspicuous member of the group, they presented similarities of motive that distinguished their choice of subjects and even their method of painting. Thus we may note a school of{38} Haarlem, of Leyden, of Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Dordrecht, and Utrecht. There was a certain rivalry between the schools of these various cities, but, on the other hand, a centripetal force that tended also to draw them together. Communication was easy in so small a country, and, moreover, the growing importance of Amsterdam as the commercial capital made it gradually a center also of art. The result was a happy combination of homogeneousness and individualism. The paintings of the period possess a common excellence, of a kind so distinctive that you may recognize at once a picture as belonging to the School of Holland, and yet they reveal so many individual traits that the homogeneousness is not characterized by monotony.

Accordingly, if we do not make the mistake of trying to surround the school of each city with an arbitrary wall, separating it conclusively from other cities, we may get many suggestions that help to classify our comprehension of the Holland School as a whole. I propose, therefore, to distribute the artists, whose names we have already reviewed, according to their individual schools; to the cities in which they worked, and, in most cases, were born and educated.

Under the head of Utrecht, then, we find the names of Heem, Hondecoeter, and Weenix, all three of them still-life painters. But, while this points to the fact that the distinguishing characteristic of the Utrecht School was the painting of flowers, dead game, and birds, it is not to be assumed that still-life is unrepresented in the other schools. The catalogues contain the names of no less than a hundred painters in this department, distrib{39}uted throughout the various cities, and, as time goes on, congregating especially in Amsterdam. To the latter Weenix and Hondecoeter migrated; and it is interesting to note how the change of locale affected their art. Corresponding to the wealth of the capital, their pictures became much larger, designed as superb decorations for the walls of sumptuous houses.

The School of Haarlem includes the following: the portrait-painters Bray, Hals, and Terborch, the last also a genre painter, like Ostade of this city; and the landscapists Salomon and Jacob Ruisdael, Wynants, Everdingen, Wouwerman, Esaias van de Velde, and Berchem. The array of names, in the first place, suggests the importance of Haarlem at this period, as a center of commerce, society, and art. We may remember that it was particularly given to “corporation” pictures, as its museum to this day proclaims in the works of Bray and Hals, while Terborch, commencing under the influence of this place, later on painted the equivalent of a corporation picture in his Peace of Münster, now in the National Gallery. Another clue to be derived from this grouping of names is that Hals, the acknowledged leader, exerted a direct influence on Terborch and Ostade; and through the latter upon Steen, who came over from Leyden to be Ostade’s student.

Further, we recognize that this school was as fertile in landscape as in portraiture. With the exception of Van Goyen of Leyden, the founders and chief exponents of the art were associated with Haarlem; even Hobbema of Amsterdam, through his having been a pupil of Jacob Ruisdael. The latter’s career, also, is{40} made clearer by this classification. Haarlem was his birthplace and the scene of his personally inspired work. When, discouraged by lack of recognition, he moved to Amsterdam, it was the example of his fellow-townsmen that made him change his own style. For Everdingen, who had visited Sweden, was painting romantic scenes of waterfalls and rocks, and Ruisdael, observing how they found favor with the Amsterdammers, abandoned his study of the Holland landscape to invent similar subjects. Finally, we may connect Wouwerman with two of his townsmen. From Wynants he learned the landscape, and by Hals was influenced in his incomparable treatment of the accompanying groups of figures.

The School of Leyden boasts the great name of Rembrandt, who, however, moved finally to Amsterdam in 1631, when nearing his twenty-fifth year. After him the names that appear in the School of Leyden are: Dou, Steen, Metsu, Mieris, and Van Goyen; all of them, the last named only excepted, genre painters. Dou studied with Rembrandt, who was seven years his senior, during the last three years of the latter’s stay in Leyden. He himself became the teacher of Gabriel Metsu, who, however, was also influenced by Frans Hals, and also, after his move to Amsterdam, where he died, by Rembrandt. Dou was also the instructor of Frans van Mieris. Steen, on the other hand, the greatest of the Leyden group, escaped the influence of Dou, becoming, as we have seen, a pupil of Van Ostade at Haarlem, and later of Van Goyen, after the latter had moved to The Hague. Van Goyen, though born in Leyden, is associated also with the Haarlem School, for after he had had several{41} masters, including Van Swanenburch, in Leyden, he served apprenticeship to the Haarlem painter Esaias van de Velde. Moreover, by the time that he had mastered his art, he settled in The Hague. Thus the characteristic of the School of Leyden remains its genre.

The names from our list that the School of Delft includes are those of Mierevelt, Fabritius, Van Aelst, Palamedesz, De Hooch, and, most distinguished of all, Vermeer. Mierevelt, as a portrait-painter, found better opportunities for his art at the seat of government, and became a member of the Guild of Painters of The Hague. Carel Fabritius was early attracted to Amsterdam by the fame of Rembrandt, and only returned to work in Delft during the last four years of his short life of thirty-four years. Van Aelst, also, the still-life painter, after oscillating between Delft and Florence, finally settled in Amsterdam. So did the portraitist and painter of fashionable genre, Palamedesz. He derived help at first from Mierevelt and was influenced by Hals, and in 1621 his name appears as a member of the guild in Delft, but he spent the latter part of his life in Amsterdam. This city also absorbed De Hooch, who, before he finally settled there, had been influenced by Rembrandt. In fact, his participation in the School of Delft was limited to the two years in which he was a fellow-member of the guild with Jan Vermeer. They were of the same age, but Vermeer was his senior in the guild by two years, and it is scarcely to be questioned that the influence of his refined feeling and exquisite craftsmanship must have affected De Hooch considerably. In contrast to the flux of change that characterized{42} the lives of the other members of the Delft School is the consistency of Vermeer’s attachment to the city of his birth. We shall discuss his art later. Here it is enough to recall that his only teacher was Carel Fabritius; but that his art, as it developed, was individually his own, conspicuously unique, and so admirable that when one speaks of the Delft School it is to think almost exclusively of its greatest artist, Jan Vermeer of Delft.

In connection with The Hague it is more correct to speak of a group than of a school. Among the artists in our list the only one born actually in this city was Ravesteyn, although it is true that Schalcken’s native place was a village in the vicinity. But the same reason that made the former constant to the seat of government attracted thither other artists. The Hague was also a center of society and fashion. Mierevelt found there a market for his portraits, Van Goyen for his landscapes, and Netscher, Schalcken, and De Hooch for genre pictures. The last named spent some years there, but retired to Amsterdam. The rest continued working at The Hague until their deaths. Among them Van Goyen is easily the most distinguished. The rest are rather symptomatic of the atmosphere of their surroundings. The portraits by Mierevelt and Ravesteyn have the perfunctoriness of official and society products, eminently dignified and comme il faut, irresistibly uninteresting, while the genre of Netscher and Schalcken is petty and frivolous by comparison with that of the older and greater painters, and Netscher’s portraits are frequently insipid as to character and over-occupied with the niceties of millinery.{43}

Of Dordrecht or Dort our list contains only one name, that of Aelbert Cuyp, whose versatile genius embraced portraiture, landscape and animal painting, genre, still-life, church interiors, and marines. We may add one other name, that of Hoogstraten, not, however, so much on account of his art as because he was the George Vasari of his day, the historian and story-monger of the painters of Holland in the seventeenth century.

It remains to summarize the School of Amsterdam. As may have been gathered from the foregoing, it was rather an aggregate of artists, drawn thither by two causes: the wealth of the commercial capital and the fame and influence of Rembrandt. The latter, as we have seen, moved finally from his native city, Leyden, to Amsterdam in 1631, when he was in his twenty-fifth year. Two years later he painted The Lesson in Anatomy, and pupils began to flock to him; among the most notable being Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Eeckhout, Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Fabritius, and De Hooch. On the other hand, among those whom the importance of the city attracted were several from the neighboring School of Haarlem; the portrait-painter Van der Helst, for example, and the landscape-painters Berchem, Jan Wynants, Everdingen, and Jacob Ruisdael; while from Utrecht came the still-life painters Hondecoeter and Weenix, and from Delft Van Aelst.

On the other hand, the native-born artists of Amsterdam included that early genre painter Pieter Aertz; the portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser; and the landscapists, Hercules Seghers, Philips Koninck, Adriaen van de Velde, Aert van der Neer, and Hobbema. But the dis{44}tinctively local characteristic of the school, situated as it was in this great emporium of foreign commerce, is its group of marine-painters; among whom we may mention Simon de Vlieger, Bakhuysen, and the elder and the younger Willem van de Velde. Their pictures are particularly interesting for the faithful and spirited representation of shipping: fishing craft, coasting vessels, East-Indiamen in harbor, and men-of-war in action. The pictures of these last are the most important of the occasional indications to be found in Dutch painting that throughout this period of productivity in the arts of peace the country was involved in war. Not that the soldier is absent from pictures. On the contrary, he figures frequently, but usually in the intervals of fighting, while enjoying the pleasures of a furlough; though occasionally we come upon some positive hint of the prevailing disturbance, as in a scene of bivouac, or of peasants and soldiery fighting, or of soldiery attacking a traveling-coach or party of hunters. Generally, however, the subjects of the Holland pictures are rather suggestive of a profound tranquillity.

As a matter of fact, by the time that painting reached its maturity, Holland had ceased to be the battle-ground. She had become rather a focus point of intrigue, involved in distant complications with France, Germany, and England. There are in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam two pictures which hint at this: The Fishers for Souls, by Adriaen van de Venne, and The Enraged Swan, by Jan Asselyn.

The former, painted in 1611 during the truce, represents a river dotted with boats, the occupants of which

are fishing for the men and women that swim around them, while the banks are crowded with spectators. On the left are serried ranks of Hollanders, closing round those in whom they have confidence, namely, the Princes of Orange, Maurice and Frederick Henry, James I of England, and the young King of France, Louis XIII. On the opposite bank a less orderly mass of people confronts them, headed by the Archduke Albert and the Duchess Isabella, to whom Philip had made over the sovereignty of the Netherlands. So far the allegory epitomizes the political situation in which the Hollanders found themselves. Meanwhile, the religious aspect of the situation is suggested in the circumstances of the fishing, which seems to refer both to the old struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism and also to the new one arising out of the dissension in the latter between the rival sects of the Gomarists and Arminians. The happy outcome of it all is prefigured in the rainbow that spans the scene.

To appreciate the allegory involved in The Enraged Swan it is necessary to summarize the events that followed the conclusion of the truce in 1621. Spain would have been glad to substitute for the truce a permanent peace, but held out for terms that were unacceptable to the Hollanders; and war in a desultory fashion was renewed. By this time the Thirty Years’ War had commenced, and the religious and political struggle, that hitherto had centered in Holland, was being continued in a distant and larger field. Maurice died in 1625 and was succeeded in the office of Stadtholder by Frederick Henry, an able soldier and wise and patriotic statesman,{46} who set himself to consolidate the internal resources of the republic. The latter showed its recognition of his services by the fatal expedients of making the office of Stadtholder hereditary in the house of Orange and of agreeing to the marriage of Frederick’s son William with the eldest daughter of Charles I. The effects of this were, on the one hand, to create within the republic an Orange party that in time intrigued for absolutism of government, and, on the other, to embroil Holland in the struggle between the Stuarts and the Parliament of England, and later, upon the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II, to involve the republic both in diplomacy and in war with that utterly unprincipled person.

Meanwhile peace was finally concluded with Spain in 1648, by the Treaty of Westphalia, or, as the compact is also styled, the Peace of Münster, which was proclaimed on June 5, 1648, the day on which Egmont and Horn had been executed by Alva eighty years before. By this time Frederick had been succeeded in the Stadtholdership by his son William, who, with the assistance of the Orange party, was intriguing for absolute rule. Fortunately for the republic, his death occurred two years later, a few days before the birth of his son, who eventually became Stadtholder and subsequently William III of England. Meanwhile, during the prince’s minority, the government was in the hands of Johan de Witt, whose book “The Interest of Holland” is an able summary of the political and commercial conditions of the republic at the time. His patriotism had been whetted to a personal edge by the fact that he had been im{47}prisoned illegally and arbitrarily by the late Stadtholder, and his opposition to the pretensions of the Orange party was in consequence unceasing throughout his official term, which lasted from 1650 to 1672. It is this that is commemorated in The Enraged Swan.

The picture represents a swan standing above its nest of eggs, in a fierce and threatening attitude, prepared to repel the attack of a dog. Above the latter is an inscription in Dutch, signifying “The Enemy of the State,” while one of the eggs is lettered “Holland,” and beneath the swan are the words “Grand Pensionary,” the title of the office of Johan de Witt. Since the artist, Jan Asselyn, died in 1652, it is possible that his picture originally had no allegorical intent, but that its owner, seeing its application to the political situation, caused the inscriptions to be added. However this may be, it remains a curious document of the internal dissensions that at this period rent the little republic, and ended with the murder of De Witt and his brother by an Orange mob in 1672.

Of the entanglements into which the union of the house of Orange with the Stuarts eventually led the country, it is enough here to recall that the enmity of Spain had been replaced by that of France. The ambition of Louis XIV threatened not only Holland but Europe; and it was against this that William III during his Stadtholdership, and later, when he also occupied the throne of England, directed the military resources of both countries and his own unrivaled genius as a diplomatist. The result was a war, interrupted temporarily by nominal treaties of peace, but actually protracted be{48}yond the lifetime of William, until the power of France had been beaten down by Marlborough, and peace was secured by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Hobbema, the last of the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, had died six years before.

Peace removed the barriers that Holland had erected for her self-preservation. Her artists, like her traders, wandered afield. The old centripetal tendency, which compelled the artist to find initiative in his own surroundings at home and so bred a distinctly Holland school, was superseded by the tendency to look for motive outside. The painter found it in Italy; he and his art became Italianate. This is not to say that the Holland painters of the eighteenth century are without merit. The best undoubtedly have a charm of their own; but it is not of the kind that one has learned to recognize and respect in the earlier pictures, as being a characteristic product of a nation fighting to maintain the integrity and independence of its nationality. The charm is by comparison slender and superficial, the product, not of originality, but of imitation. For the art of Holland had ceased to be the expression of conviction, and no longer exemplified the morality that had given character to its motive and unimpeachable integrity to its technique.{49}

CHAPTER IV

FRANS HALS

THE readiest way to study the art of Holland in the seventeenth century is under the separate heads of portraiture, landscape, marine, genre, and still-life. In this way one obtains a comprehensive survey of the development of each of these branches, and is not confused by the fact that many of the artists practised in more than one of them. But at the start it must be observed that these separate departments are inclosed in a common motive. As Fromentin says, the art of Holland was essentially an art of portraiture. It followed from the character of the people and the conditions under which they found themselves. They were a nation of burghers, practical in mind, direct in action, self-centered, and full of personal and local pride. What more likely, in fact more inevitable, than that they should need and their painters should supply an art which gave a complete, exact, and for the most part unembellished portrait of the country, its people, and their habits of life.

But while this common motive of portraiture, which distinguishes every branch of Holland painting, was in response to a common and collective need of the people, it was modified and shaped by the example of two leading personalities: Hals and Rembrandt. So determining{50} was their influence that an analysis of their respective motives and methods is not only a necessary preliminary but the quickest way to a comprehension of the development of the whole school.

They had characteristics in common. One might almost represent the two men by concentric circles; Hals being the inner, Rembrandt the indefinitely larger one. Hals was an epitome of the genius of the Dutch race; Rembrandt was also this, but more—the expression of a genius peculiarly his own. Both manifested, Hals invariably, Rembrandt at times, the quality of direct seeing and doing that was a national characteristic; but at other times Rembrandt was possessed of a spirituality, if one may so call it, that was directly opposed to the prevailing practicalness. Let us study each for the purpose of discovering what was his own personal art and how it affected the art of others.

Hals, then, the leader of the Haarlem School, we will examine first, not only because he was the oldest of the famous men of the seventeenth century, but also because his own genius was so closely representative of that of his countrymen. Of his life there is little to record. He was born in Antwerp, in 1584, but of parents of good Haarlem stock, temporarily driven from home by the vicissitudes of the war. He may have begun his studies in Antwerp, but by 1608 was probably settled in Haarlem. It must have been about two years later that he married a lady named Anneke Hermanszoon, for their child, Harmen Hals, was baptized on the 2d of September, 1611. The marriage appears to have been unfortunate, a record, dated 1616, showing that the husband was{51} summoned and reprimanded by the magistrates for drunkenness and violent conduct toward his wife. She died a few days later, apparently from natural causes, and the following year Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers, with whom he lived for fifty years, bringing up a large family. That his conduct toward the first wife was not very seriously viewed by the community seems to be proved by the fact that in 1617 and 1618 he and his brother Dirck were elected members of the School of Rhetoric. Later they were elected to the Civic Guard and to the Painters’ Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem.

Like almost all the artists of his time, he was involved in pecuniary difficulties. In 1652 a baker sued him for the amount of two hundred guilders, a debt incurred for bread supplied and for small loans occasionally advanced. He obtained possession of the artist’s movables, but allowed him to continue in the use of them. Ten years later we find Hals, now seventy-eight years old, applying for relief from the city government, which granted him one hundred and fifty dollars in quarterly instalments. This exhausted, he renewed his application for public assistance, and was granted a yearly pension of two hundred guilders. Two years later, on or about the 26th of August, 1666, he died in his eighty-second year and was buried beneath the choir of the Church of St. Bavon in Haarlem.

These few circumstances represent practically all that is known of Frans Hals’s life as a man. The main suggestion to be derived from them is that he was held in considerable esteem by his fellow-townsmen. The painters enrolled him in their guild; his creditor did not un{52}duly press him, and the municipality attended to the needs of his declining years. It is fit to dwell on these points, because a tradition, apparently started by Houbraken, the painter-historian of the artists of the period, has clung about the memory of Hals, representing him to have been a frequenter of pot-houses and generally dissolute. But, except for the reprimand administered to him in the affair of his first wife, there is nothing on record to prove the accuracy of this tradition. One is therefore permitted to believe that the incident was a single offense; sufficiently reprehensible, but not to be counted against his whole life. On the other hand, the leniency of the baker and the relief voted by the municipality may be fairly taken as arguments against the story of his worthlessness. But the most reliable evidence of its falsity is to be found in his work as an artist. It is inconceivable that the portraits and character studies which he executed in such numbers could have been produced by a man whose brain was fuddled with dissipation. The very character of his technique gives the lie to such a suspicion; for, as we shall see presently, it was the product of a particularly vigorous comprehension of facts, and was rendered in a method extraordinarily direct and sure, and often under circumstances of great rapidity. While his work is uneven in quality, it is only toward the end that there is a falling off in the certainty and the completeness of his technique. But the pathos that attaches to the two memorable examples of this decline, which now hang in the Haarlem Museum, the groups of male and female Regents of the Hospital for the Poor, is due to{53} their revelation, not of any premature loss of power, but of the sapping of vitality which comes after fourscore years.

On the other hand, it would be fatal to a just appreciation of Hals to try to shape him to our modern notions of propriety. His character was certainly not staid; it may well have been, by present-day comparisons, unregulated. He was a man of his own time, and the character of his fellow-citizens may be seen in the groups he has left behind of the officers of the Civic Guard. They were men of vigorous personality, of strong passions; they lived high and, maybe, at times a bit recklessly. They had faced death in battle, and enjoyed the leisure which their own exertions had helped to bring about. That they enrolled Hals in their organization suggests that he was a man after their own heart. He must have been; otherwise he never could have painted them as he did, realizing at once their individualities of character and the general character of enthusiastic good-fellowship that united them. In none of these portraits is there any hint of excess, but in all the declaration of conviviality. It is quite reasonable to assume that this represents a truer portrait of the artist’s own personal character than the one suggested by Houbraken.

Moreover, there is another phase of his character that is positively revealed in his work. It is that of humor. Whether he is painting one of the curious and sometimes discreditable characters that haunted the streets and resorts of Haarlem, or the portrait of some burgomaster, fully alive to his own importance, or recording the puis{54}sance and the pageantry of the military guilds, it is always in a genial mood, not seldom with manifest humor. In fact, if ever there was an artist to whom, as revealed in his work, the epithet “jolly” were appropriate, it is Frans Hals.

And here we may note a shrewd observation by the German critic W. Bode. “The artist’s particular gift,” he says, “which we find in nearly every one of his portraits, consists in his establishing a lively connection between the person or persons represented and a supposed third person.” He does not represent the individual or group as if posing for himself, but as if he had surprised them in the presence of a third person, or as if he had in mind the impression that would be produced in a third person’s mind by the scene in front of him. His own point of view, in fact, is more than objective, more than a recognition of direct, visible facts; it is rather expansive, drawing into the circumference of its own observation the points of view and feeling of others than himself. One may almost say that he has the gift of revealing his personages not only as they appeared to him, but also as they were regarded by their contemporaries. Whether singly or in groups, they seem to be perfectly at home in an atmosphere at once sympathetic and conducive to the most spontaneous expression of their own natures. Thus, as Bode adds, “he has a great gift of rendering any passing moment of psychical agitation.”

Before proceeding to an analysis of his technique, we may note two other general characteristics: the vigor and the imagination that it involves. An artist’s technique is a measure of his personality, even though his

motive be as impersonal as Hals’s. The latter’s point of view was objective, intent on seeing and rendering the facts of things as they confronted him; but, unlike many objective painters whose technique presents merely a correct and efficient record, because their own mind is little more than a mirror, reflecting mechanically what is in front of it, Hals’s mind was an active vitalizer of the impressions that it received. The distinction corresponds pretty completely to the difference which may exist between two lecturers. One will give a careful presentation of his subject which we listen to with interest, and, if we have confidence in his ability, with a willingness to accept his conclusions; but another will do more. Because of the gusto with which he attacks his subject, the genial, expansive outlook with which he views it, the broadly human spirit in which he treats it, even because of the tone of voice and gesture of body with which he lends color and warmth to his remarks, he will so stimulate his audience that they cease to be mere listeners. Their own brains are at work; they become active participators in the train of thought. It is in this kind of way that Hals’s technique affects one. It is the product of so ample and genial an outlook, so teems with gusto, and manifests itself with such an assurance of conviction and so vigorously facile a style, that it stimulates the imagination. In the presence of his portraits one is no passive spectator, but aroused to an activity of appreciation.

I have spoken of imagination; and I mean to imply a twofold exercise thereof: that Hals himself exhibited imagination and kindles it also in the spectator. To{56} some people it may seem to be an abuse of the word to speak of imagination, in the case of an artist so content to be occupied with the objective traits of his subject as Hals was. But they overlook the fact that, while an artist may exercise no imagination in the choice of a subject, he may display a great deal in the rendering of it. He may not give reins to his imagination as Rembrandt did, peering below the surface of things, exploring the hidden recesses of the human soul; he may, on the contrary, be satisfied to be an able craftsman, handling the material presented to him, intent only on giving to it form and character; yet, even so, he will exhibit what one may call a technical imagination. And it is precisely this which characterizes the technique of Hals. It appears in the arrangement of his compositions, especially in the group-portraits, where it takes the form of a superior kind of inventiveness, which is but a phase of imagination. This gift abounds in the corporation pictures at Haarlem. The problem of disposing so many figures in such a way that each shall have its due share of individual emphasis, and yet that the whole group may have, on the one hand, a naturalness and spontaneity of suggestion, and, on the other, a reasonable amount of artistic unity, was one to try to its utmost capacity an artist’s inventiveness. Hals was the first to solve it; and, while other artists profited by his example, none could attain to the completeness of his success. You may be thinking of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Cloth Guild; but the latter’s composition contains only six figures, whereas in Hals’s masterpiece, The Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew, there are{57} fourteen. For a just comparison you should rather choose Van der Helst’s great composition in the Rijks Museum, The Banquet of the Civic Guard, an amazing example of inventiveness, but lacking in the suppleness, spontaneity, and gusto that Hals exhibits.

But the latter’s imagination is not alone displayed in the management of intricate compositions. It is displayed also in the treatment of each figure and in his pictures of single individuals; manifesting itself in two ways, both in the way he has seen his subject and in the way he has rendered it. And first for the imaginative quality of his vision. It is concerned with externals, or at least with traits of character that lie close to the surface; but with what an alertness it has observed the idiosyncrasy of each person, and how completely it has comprehended it! This is more than objective clear-sightedness; it implies a capacity to reconstruct the retinal impression, and to clothe it with actual living consciousness, that involves a marked exercise of the creative faculty of imagination. If you still doubt it, again compare Hals with Van der Helst, next to himself the most accomplished of the painters of corporation pictures, and the verdict concerning the latter’s work will surely be that by comparison it is prosy. At least that is the word that seems to me to express the difference, and it conveys the suggestion that the work is merely objective, unvitalized by the imaginative faculty.

Further, observe how Hals treats the costumes and the accompaniments of still-life in his pictures. He has not merely seen them; he has felt them, realized in his imagination their distinctive character and their relation{58} to the whole impression. For those were brave days in Holland, succeeding the expiration of the truce; an underlying bravery of spirit and an external bravery of demeanor and manners characterized the life of the burghers. It was not for nothing that their trade had absorbed the finest weavers and artificers in the world; they decked themselves and their families in the costliest fabrics of their looms and loaded their tables with objects of fine plate. These things were more to them than vanities; they were the expression of the proud preëminence they had won. Now it is the spirit and the meaning of all this that Hals was so skilful in rendering. Van der Helst’s displays of costume rather suggest that “fine feathers make fine birds,” while the suggestion of Hals is of fine fellows appropriately bedecked with finery. His imagination, in fact, had caught the enthusiasm of the time and discovered its interpretation. And, further still, apart from the relation which this beauty of display bore to the temper of the times, it needs imagination in an artist to interpret the beauty of a fabric or an object of still-life. Mere imitation of its appearance is not sufficient. Such merely represents the appearance; it does not interpret it. The distinction will be clear to any one who is a student of photography and has seen the still-life studies of flowers and fruit and glassware by Baron A. de Meyer. In them the crude notion of merely representing appearances has been superseded by the desire to make the picture express the enthusiasm which their beauty has inspired. The result is an interpretation of the sentiment of beauty. Such, too, is Hals’s rendering of the silks and velvets and lawn ruffs, the dishes and

goblets, the fruit and wine, banners and weapons. He has not only seen these things, he has felt their beauty; discovered, in fact, by an act of imagination, the sentiment of beauty they involve.

And here I may add, in the way of anticipation, that, if a person is dull to the sentiment of beauty that things inanimate may suggest, he is not going to proceed very far toward an appreciation of the art of Holland in the seventeenth century, for it was largely concerned with the beauty that is inherent in material things. If he is conscious of nothing more in the rendering of costumes and accessories with which these pictures abound than the cleverness of material representation, he will soon tire of the study, for the skilfulness is so frequently repeated, and its very repetition will fatigue. He may begin by exclaiming: “How wonderfully that sash, this velvet gown, or what not is painted!” but, unless he can go on and share the enthusiasm for beauty that inspired and assured the artist’s skill; if, in a word, his own imagination cannot conspire with the imagination of the artist, he will very shortly be an exceedingly tired student of Holland art.

So far we have discussed the imagination with which Hals observed his subjects; it remains to note how imagination was involved in the rendering of them. Really the two processes, the mental and the manual, are inextricably united, for it was the way he felt his subject that determined the impression he received of it, and the impression itself that suggested the mode of rendering it. Yes, he was an Impressionist. The term, as we know, is modern, dating from about 1871, but the idea involved{60} in it has been derived from the example of Frans Hals and of his great contemporary Velasquez, with whom, however, so far as is known, he had no possible chance of conferring. These two original minds, separated by distance and the difference of race and by the barrier of hostilities that precluded any acquaintance with each other or each other’s work, were nevertheless kindred geniuses who simultaneously discovered a new way of seeing and rendering their subject. It did not survive their generation, for the artists of the next century turned again to Italy, and Hals and Velasquez were practically forgotten, until in the early sixties of the nineteenth century Edouard Manet rediscovered Velasquez, and the study of him led to the recognition of Hals, so that both became an example and inspiration to modern art. It produced, in fact, a revolution in the artist’s point of view and method of painting, and the principle involved was dubbed Impressionism.

Some confusion still exists as to what is implied by this term. Many, for example, having heard that Claude Monet is an Impressionist and observing that he covers his pictures with little dabs of paint, suppose that in this consists Impressionism. Others of wider observation, having found themselves puzzled and even outraged by the vagaries in paint that are committed under cover of Impressionism, have concluded that Impressionism is something which, in the words of the late Lord Dundreary, “No fellah can understand”; no layman, at least; and, according to their temperament, they either foam at the mouth with disgust of Impressionism or regard it as a comparatively harmless form of lunacy.{61} In either case they miss the fact that Impressionism has become a vital principle of modern thought, expressing itself not only in the arts: in painting, sculpture, literature, play-writing, acting, music, and dancing, but also in modern methods of education, and, by a natural extension of the idea involved, even in the modern attitude toward matters of criminology and sanitation. These, however, are modern evolutions from the single, simple principle involved in the Impressionism of Hals and Velasquez. Before discussing this, let us note what is surely interesting and extremely suggestive, namely, that both the rudimentary principle, as it appears in Hals, and the efflorescence to which it attained in the nineteenth century were contemporary with a signal advance in the growth of the scientific spirit. It is, in fact, of the latter that Impressionism is a phase.

With Hals, as with modern Impressionists, it represents a more natural way of seeing. When the eye is directed toward an object, it sees the latter as a whole; it perceives some details and fails to perceive others; it automatically selects and eliminates. There is another way of seeing, as when the object is kept for a long time under observation, and the eye travels over it at leisure and exhaustively examines every part. Of a picture that records the results of this way of seeing, we exclaim, “How realistic!” And so in a sense it is; but, on the other hand, we know that it does not really represent the way in which we see things in every-day life. What our eye usually records is not an inventory of details, but a summarized impression of a personality; and the more vivid the impression, the less likely is it to be dis{62}tracted by a number of details. We are impressed by the general significance of the personality, and note only those details that most contribute to it; the details that are themselves most significant and characteristic. Such was Hals’s way of seeing his subject; and, if it resulted in a very vivid impression in the case of an individual portrait, how much more when it embraced the complicated impression of a group! The latter, as a matter of fact, does include more than any eye could possibly embrace in a single act of vision; but this was a necessary concession to the difficulties of the problem, which was to effect a compromise between the conflicting claims, on the one hand, of the group as a whole, and, on the other, of each of the individual units composing it. Admitting the need of this reconciliation of opposites, we can scarcely hesitate to acknowledge the vividness of the total impression and the no less vivid impression of each one of its component units.

When we analyze the principle of this method of seeing, it is found to be that of relativity. In selecting this or rejecting that the artist has been guided by its more or less of value in relation to the whole. The composition, in fact, is an adjusted balance of varieties of values; an interlocked scheme of mutual relations; shrewdly calculated to assert the significance of the whole without undue impairment of the varying character of the parts. And this principle, thus applied to the whole composition, operates also in the treatment of every part. Whether it be the folds of a sash, the modeling of an arm in a sleeve, the substance and set of a ruff, or the construction of a face, each is attained by observing the relation of the{63} values. In this case, however, one uses values, not to measure the amount of relative importance that they play in the general scheme, but in the technical sense of the amount and quality of light reflected from the several facets of the surface. Hals chose to view his subject in a diffused light that permitted practically no shadows, but reduced the whole to a tissue of more light and less light, of higher and lower values. While this sounds like the method of the modern plein-air painters, which has been evolved from the example of Hals and Velasquez, it is not quite the same; for Hals does not represent the light as being independent of the figures and enveloping them, but still adheres to the old convention of making the figure itself a center of light, as, for instance, a lamp is. Thus in one of his groups, where a window appears at the back, the light beyond it is of lower value than that which illumines the figures; and, in another case, a landscape presents a darker background. But, having adopted this convention, he adheres to the logic of it, and, like the modern painter who has followed his example, but with the difference that he tries to represent the effect of plein-air, models his forms in colored light by the juxtaposition of the various values.

And it is characteristic of Hals that in doing this he overlooks minute distinctions of value, seizing only the most salient ones and laying them on the canvas with a broad brush and a remarkable decision. Thus his technique presents a bold and vigorous generalization of the values; often conspicuous for what it omits, as when he indicates the back of a hat or a ruff by a flat tone that is almost uninterrupted by contrasting tones. It is a tech{64}nique, in fact, that relies very largely on suggestion; hence its stimulating character, for one’s own imagination is invited to assist in the illusion.

Nor does this suggestive generalization involve the slovenliness or crudeness of brushwork that often disfigures the modern impressionistic picture. While a canvas by Hals should be viewed from some distance off, it does not offend at close range. On the contrary, one can enjoy the orderliness and finesse, the result of fluency and assurance, that the brushwork reveals, the ensemble having that quality of perfected craftsmanship which characterizes the whole Holland School. And, though Hals is scarcely to be classed as a colorist, the compositions being decked with color rather than interwoven of color, yet his color has a distinctly positive charm. For he takes so frank a delight in local colors, whether gravely or gaily sumptuous, preserves their purity of hue and invests them with luminousness. His color-schemes, too, have this distinction, that, for all their bravery of show, they are never commonplace and seldom without a clear suggestion of virility.

A unique opportunity of tracing the development of his style is presented by the series of corporation pictures at Haarlem. I will not attempt a detailed description of each, but rather recall the impressions that were jotted down in the presence of them. The earliest, then, is The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, dated 1616, when Hals was thirty-two. How magnificent the display of still-life, the table-cloth, fruit, dishes, and goblets painted with such skill and evident delight; what a vigorous enthusiasm is manifested in the treat{65}ment of the uniforms, mostly black, and the scarfs of white and crimson silk! Each head is strongly characterized, and so are the hands. The heads are so disposed that they form a band across the picture, below which another band contains the more sprinkled arrangement of the hands. Two of the latter, close together near the center of the table, form the nucleus from which the lines of the composition radiate. The composition, in fact, is quite formal, and the heads, one notices, are lighted from the side and constructed of shadow as well as light; meanwhile no light comes in from the window at the back, through which appears a landscape, less vividly lighted than the scene indoors. Indeed, the whole arrangement is still influenced by the arbitrary devices of the studio; nor does one fail to note that the space occupied by the heads is flattened almost into one plane, as a modern photographic group is apt to be.

These points are emphasized by a comparison with Nos. 117 and 118, painted eleven years later. The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, this time, is presented in an interior without a window visible. The whole apartment seems to be filled with lighted air; the heads are no longer so obviously arranged to secure a contrast of dark against light and light against dark; they are evenly illuminated, and take their places justly in their several planes. For the planes here extend farther back, and the composition is more varied, with less suggestion of studied artfulness. Moreover, the treatment of the costumes has become finer, the blacks especially yielding a variety of delightful grays that give increased sparkle and animation to the color{66}-scheme. The flesh parts also are more luminous, and reveal a greater fluency of brushwork, as if the artist had “got there” with more ease and rapidity. The effect of all this is very arresting and satisfying until one examines The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew.

The latter belongs to the same year, 1627; but the artist has surpassed himself. Here the faces literally scintillate with animation of color. Those of the other picture are discovered by comparison to be less illuminated; after all, they have been modeled to some extent with shadow, and the flesh in parts is inclined to be greenish gray or drab. The hands also in the latter picture have more expression and a more individual characterization, while the gestures are more natural and spontaneous. The composition, too, is at once more varied and more coördinated. Again, as in both the previous pictures, the nucleus of it is a hand; in this case the center of two diagonal axes. But, while the design is geometrical, the naturalness of the grouping is quite extraordinary in its mingling of ease and propriety. Further, the color masses are more inventively arranged; their spotting is more effectively distributed, and the gaiety of the color is prolonged into the lower part of the composition. This picture commemorates the banquet given by the corps on the eve of its departure to the siege of Hasselt and Mons. Six years later Hals painted a Reunion of the same corps, though only one member appears in both scenes. It is Captain Johan Schatter, who in the earlier picture is seated in front of the table, facing left. He occupies the same position in the later group,

but is now standing and looking over his shoulder toward the spectator. He has exchanged his costume of black and golden brown, with its scarf of rose and white, for a snuff-colored jerkin, pearl-gray under-coat, and a sky-blue sash and feather; and the difference is reflected in the superior delicacy of color that distinguishes the later picture.

In this Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew the corporation pictures reach their highest water-mark. The background, however, of brownish-olive foliage, showing through an opening some red roofs against the sky, is dry in color and lacking in luminosity. The heads, in consequence, do not present the same suggestion of being enveloped in light as those in the previous picture. In what, then, does the superiority of this acknowledged masterpiece consist? Comparing it with the earlier examples, we discover that its color-scheme of blue and amber, while less resplendent, is more choice, delicate, and subtle, and that the loveliness of color has been made contributory to the characterization of the figures. This is scarcely to be appreciated from the photographic reproduction, but in presence of the original one has a lively sense of it. There is no suggestion of the display of color having been considered by itself or as itself an end; the tonal harmony so accords with the harmony of expression that characterizes the separate individualities of the group that tone and expression are in complete unity. Again, as a result or, more probably, a cause of this harmony of expression, there is a complete simplicity of attitude and gesture. “What shall I do with my hands?” Any one who has{68} stage-managed amateur theatricals knows how frequently this question is asked by the performers. In nine cases out of ten the best advice, though the hardest to follow, is to do nothing. It is just the fact that the members of this group are so admirably doing nothing which gives at once such a naturalness and so high a distinction to this picture.

Here, in fact, we touch perhaps the clue to the whole superiority of this canvas. In one word, it is control; that almost unconscious self-control on the artist’s part which results from his consciousness of assured capacity. He has won beyond the point of experiment, beyond the later temptation to indulge in display of knowledge and skill; he has so absolutely acquired both and attuned the one to the other, that the tricks and devices of his craft no longer sway his imagination; he shows, in fact, his mastery not so much by what he does as by what he withholds; he has reached in this great work a plane of extraordinary artistic conscientiousness. The picture, in fact, has that appearance of inevitableness, that suggestion of having grown rather than of having been made, which is the highest expression of genius. It represents Hals at his zenith. The date is 1633 and the artist’s age forty-nine.

The next picture, Officers of the Archers of St. George, is dated 1639, six years later. It is conspicuously inferior not only to the masterpiece (that were excusable), but to all the preceding works. It represents a falling off not so much in actual craftsmanship as in artistic morality. The artist appears to have been satisfied to do less well than he could; to do, in fact, as{69} little as he might. He has saved himself expenditure of invention in the composition by stringing the figures out in a line across the front, and raising another line of figures behind them; this having been the niggard, unimaginative arrangement of the older corporation pictures, from which his other work had presented so happy a departure. Correspondingly the heads, while forcible in characterization, are lacking in luminosity, and the fabrics are without vivacity. The general effect is stockish; the breath of life and of art, as Hals could suggest both, is absent.

Nor in the next picture, dated two years later, the Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth, do we detect the true Frans Hals. The faces are trickily modeled, brilliant high lights being contrasted with heavy greenish-drab shadows; and the figures are lumpish, except the second from the right, which alone reveals sympathy and enthusiasm.

Of the last two groups nothing need be said but that they are the work of a veteran of eighty years, whose hand has lost its cunning, while his brain, no longer active, retains only some wavering recollections of its original activity.

The important point to be suggested in conclusion is that Hals’s best period included the years from 1625 to 1635; that after the latter period this enthusiasm waned, and his work became too often perfunctory. In such cases the flesh parts exhibit an uninspired use of green lower tones that have a tendency to become drab; features are often crudely emphasized by a stroke or dab of exaggerated value, and luminosity has faded into a dull,{70} sometimes lumpish inertness. Even so, however, compared with the work of other Hollanders, apart from Rembrandt, it still had a quality and a character that render it distinguished; but much of this distinction disappears when you compare him with himself, the later with the earlier Hals. Many of his portraits suggest the perfunctoriness of a man who has got his method down pat, and tediously repeats it. In a word, his technique was so personal and so dependent upon the mood of the moment that it needed the stimulus of enthusiasm, and when this was absent, the vitality of the technique became impaired.{71}

CHAPTER V

REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN

IT is surely no accident that the name of Rembrandt is familiar to thousands who know little or nothing of his art. It has, in fact, become so embedded in the mental consciousness of modern times, that, even as it must have been a household word in his own day, so almost it has grown to be in ours. And for this there seem to be two reasons. In the very use of the word “household” there is a hint of one: the homely, in the sense of plain and simple, and very heartfelt appeal that his conception of the subject-matter generally makes to the imagination. But there is another reason and a greater. It is the magnitude of his personality as an artist. This was but dimly recognized in his own day, in the succeeding century forgotten, and is only beginning to be fully understood in our own times. The influence with which he fertilized art was to prove so great, that it needed a long period of gestation before it came to birth, and a correspondingly long period of development before it reached maturity. Now it has grown to be recognized and felt, until, like all the great contributions to human ideas, it is, so to say, in the air. Unwittingly as well as by conviction the world is conscious of it. Briefly, the nature of the influence is that it has revolutionized our attitude toward beauty. It has not elim{72}inated the old idea of beauty, but supplemented it with a newer one, no less potent and far more adapted to our modern needs. The absolutism of the classic ideal has been overthrown by it. Art, that once was solely aristocratic, has been expanded to include the democratic ideal. It was therefore necessary for the world to have mastered the latter, as a principle of life and conduct, before it could be capable of appreciating Rembrandt to the full.

For Rembrandt’s art is the antithesis of Greek art. The Greek is founded upon a hypothesis, upon the assumption of a possible perfection; Rembrandt’s upon an acceptance of imperfection, upon the facts of life in relation to things as they exist. The one is based upon an artificially constructed absolutism, and is technically expressed through form—form, absolute and supreme. The other, in its recognition of the relativity of everything in life, is based upon tone, as affected by its environment of light. The difference is fundamental both in its technical and psychological aspect.

As long as society was conditioned by the aristocratic theory, Greek art, and the Renaissance interpretation of its principles, sufficed; but, with the growth and spread of the democratic, a new principle became necessary. Rembrandt conceived it, and our own age is learning to apply it. Our appreciation of the character of beauty has become enlarged by a realization of the beauty of character. The latter may be associated with beauty of form and features, though in real life it is more often not; yet, even when it is, we have discovered that the beauty of character is due, not to the form itself, but to{73} the expression inherent in the form, and that character, as revealed by expression, is discernible also in things homely, even in the ugly. Art, in fact, has extended its province until it more nearly corresponds with the universal scheme of earthly conditions, wherein the good is mingled with the bad, and the sun shines alike on the just and the unjust. Meanwhile, even as humanity gropes toward some divine reconciliation of the coexistence of evil with good, so art must find some means of spiritualizing the facts of life and of idealizing the homely and ugly. This preëminently was Rembrandt’s gift.

The few known facts of Rembrandt’s life are clearly associated with his art. Born on the 15th of July, 1606, in Leyden, he was the son of Harmen of the Rhine, a miller in comfortable circumstances. He was sent to a Latin school as a preparation for entrance into the University of Leyden, that “when he became of age he might serve the city and the republic with his knowledge.” But he was destined to serve them in another way. Since he showed no taste for Latin and a single desire to be an artist, he was removed from school and placed with the local painter, Jacob van Swanenburch. He was then about twelve years old, and after spending three years with this teacher had made such progress that the father decided to send him to Amsterdam to study under Pieter Lastman, whose pictures of religious subjects had made him the most popular painter of that day.

With this master Rembrandt remained only six months. Lastman’s influence, however, had been considerable, though scarcely in a direct way. In fact, what{74} he did for Rembrandt was to pass on to the latter the influence which he himself had derived from Elsheimer during a two years’ stay in Rome. For this German painter had made a great reputation by treating Biblical subjects in the natural or anti-classic manner. The scene was suggested by the Italian landscape, and the personages were real men and women, clothed in ordinary costume of the period. It is this translation of the Bible story into the vernacular of the day, corresponding as it did to the motive of Lucas van Leyden in his picture at Leyden of The Last Judgment, which must have been familiar to Rembrandt, that affected the latter’s imagination.

He returned to Leyden and for seven years in his father’s house continued a course of self-study. It was based on direct study from life, his models being himself and his relations, and included (where again one may trace the influence of Lucas van Leyden) the practice of etching. The earliest date recorded of any of these products of his needle is 1628, which appears on An Old Woman’s Head, Full Face, seen only to the Chin, and Bust of an Old Woman.[B] In 1624 appeared another dated etching, Rembrandt, a Bust, and the following year a series of small plates for which he himself was the model: Rembrandt with an Open Mouth; with an Air of Grimace; with Haggard Eyes, and Laughing.

These prints give a remarkable clue to a phase of Rembrandt’s personality that has not been sufficiently emphasized. They show that it included the instinct{75} and faculty of an actor; the consciousness that in his body he possessed a muscular instrument capable of expressing the emotions of the mind; and, moreover, the capacity to play upon it. This throws a new light upon the habit, exhibited at intervals throughout his life, of making portraits of himself and frequently in costume. The latter particular is apt to be dismissed as a harmless pleasantry, whereas it should rather be considered extraordinarily suggestive. For he was not merely “dressing up,” but enacting a part in his own person; actually realizing in his body the idea that possessed his mind. That he could do this and needed to do it for the satisfaction of his own mental and physical impulses, helps to explain his extraordinary facility and power as a draftsman. For the virtue of great drawing consists in its quality of expression, in its ability to infuse feeling into a gesture or movement and so correlate the latter to the mood of mind, presumed to be dominating the subject. This virtue cannot be gained at second hand from a model; it must be inherent in the artist himself, and will be efficient according to the degree in which the artist can feel the emotion in himself and is capable of physically expressing it; in a word, to the degree in which he possesses the instinct of an actor. Viewed in this light Rembrandt’s habit of grimacing before a mirror, dressing up and posturing, gives a most illuminating clue to the source of his amazing versatility and capacity of expression as a draftsman.

In the same year, 1630, which produced the small prints, appeared also two “serious” etchings of himself; also two Biblical subjects, Jesus Disputing with the{76} Doctors and The Presentation with the Angel; and, further, several fine portrait studies. In this year he moved to Amsterdam.

He was twenty-four years old, and, as far as etching is concerned, “was already in the peculiar situation,” I quote from Hamerton, “of an artist who has left himself no room for improvement except in attempting art of another kind, and in overcoming new, though possibly not greater, difficulties.” Among the oil-paintings that he had already executed are St. Paul (Stuttgart); St. Jerome in a Cave (Berlin); two portraits of old men (Cassel); and one of a young man, resembling himself, at The Hague. It was the fame of his portraits that, according to Orlers, brought invitations from Amsterdam to settle there; and during the first years of his sojourn over a shop on the Bloemgracht he executed six that are still in existence. But the most remarkable picture of this year is the St. Simeon in the Temple, now in the Gallery of The Hague. Here we detect for the first time the power and strangeness of Rembrandt’s imagination, displayed in the mysteriously lighted expanse of mammoth architecture and in lustrous fabrics, and, more essentially, the foretaste of his lifelong effort to construct a composition out of colored light.[C] It is the first revelation of his peculiarly individual self.

Meanwhile he had been attending the anatomy classes of the famous Dr. Tulp, and the following year, 1632, produced the Hague picture, The Lesson in Anatomy, as remarkable for clearly defined characterization as the{77} St. Simeon had been for its imaginative treatment of light. Both have elements of indecision, for the artist was only twenty-six, but in them the qualities of Rembrandt’s personality are already established.

The Lesson brought him fame. Pupils flocked to his studio, clients sought his pictures, and the ten years that followed teemed with productivity and fortune. They cover his life with Saskia van Uylenborch, whom he married in 1634 and lost by death in 1642. She appears in frequent portraits and inspired many of his pictures. He occupied houses successively on the Nieuwe Doelstraat, Binnen-Amstel, and the Jodenbreedstraat, living simply, but indulging profusely in the collection of works of art. This heyday of prosperity in the companionship of Saskia is commemorated in the superb portrait of his wife sitting upon his knee, in the Dresden Gallery.

In 1642 his fortunes received a double blow. Saskia died, and his corporation picture, The Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company, popularly but erroneously called “The Night Watch,” was received with disfavor. It proved to be a turning-point in his career. Public recognition began to wane, and financial embarrassments to increase; yet his artistic fecundity continued, marked by more frequent examples of landscape. Toward the end of the forties he enjoyed the sympathetic support of the burgomaster, Jan Six, an enthusiastic lover of books and collector of works of art, whose friendship lasted till his death in 1658. Meanwhile, about 1653, Rembrandt seems to have married the woman who had devoted herself to his care, Hendrickje{78} Stoffels. She died in 1656 and money troubles crowded upon him. He was declared a bankrupt; his household goods were seized by his creditors and later sold at an appalling sacrifice; the house in the Jodenbreedstraat also passed under the hammer, and Rembrandt retired to a house on the Rosengracht. This was in 1658. The house, which still exists, was a comfortable one; and it seems probable that the eleven years during which Rembrandt lived in it, until his death in 1669, were a time of tranquillity, as they certainly were of continued artistic activity. This period, indeed, produced The Six Syndics of the Cloth Hall (Amsterdam), a masterpiece of assured self-possession and complete achievement. It also was marked with many portraits of himself, no less than four having been painted in the last year of his life. One of them shows him blear eyed, with red and bulbous face, but laughing, and holding his maulstick like a scepter.[D]

Eugène Fromentin, skilled alike as a man of letters and a painter, analyzes in his “Maîtres d’Autrefois” the art of Rembrandt. The argument has been so generally accepted, that it must be described here. It may be compressed as follows: Fromentin discovers contradictions in the art of Rembrandt. It is at one time so realistic, and at another so visionary. He explains this apparent contradiction by the theory that Rembrandt’s was a dual nature. On the one side he shared with his fellow-artists their practicalness, direct seeing, and love of clear and definite expression; while on the other he was a solitary dreamer, a visionary, to whom the mystery of things made

chief appeal. Thus, by turns he was realist and idealist; occasionally, as in The Sortie, his pictures seem to have been the battle-ground of his two irreconcilable natures.

Fromentin calls the realist in Rembrandt the “exterior man” as contrasted with the “interior man,” revealed in his examples of idealism. The former he characterizes as an accomplished technician, with certainty of hand and a keenly logical mind. “His aim is to be comprehensible and veracious; he emulates the true colors of the daylight; draws with a fidelity and thoroughness that, while it makes you forget that it is drawing, itself forgets nothing. It is excellently physiognomical. It expresses and characterizes, in their individuality, traits, glances, attitudes, and gestures, that is to say, normal habits of behavior and the furtive accidents of life. His execution has the propriety, the ampleness, the high bearing, the firm tissue, the force and conciseness that belong to passed masters in the art of fine idiomatic expression.” The original of this last phrase is l’art des beaux langues; and we may note, in passing, its significance in connection with the context. Indeed, the whole paragraph might as accurately characterize some fine literary production, such as would satisfy the high standard of the French Academy. It is based upon the clear comprehension and logic of form.

On the contrary, when Rembrandt is in the mood of idealism, Fromentin no longer discovers in him the consummate technician. He sacrifices form to chiaroscuro. And what of his use of chiaroscuro, so peculiar to himself that it has come to be called by his name? Fromen{80}tin, in a beautiful passage, first suggests the general value of chiaroscuro. Ordinarily used, it is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible and of painting an object enveloped in air. “But it is more than any other medium the form of intimate sensations or ideas. It is light, vaporous, veiled, discreet; it lends its charm to things which are concealed, invites curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to the speculation of conscience. In fine, it is concerned with sentiment, emotion, the uncertain, the undefined and infinite; with dreams and the ideal. And that is why it is appropriately the poetic and natural atmosphere, which the genius of Rembrandt did not cease to inhabit.”

It was natural, therefore, that Rembrandt should bring to perfection this method of chiaroscuro, which Fromentin describes as the art of “enveloping everything, of immersing everything, in a bath of shadow, of plunging into it even the light itself, in order to draw out the light therefrom so that it shall appear more distant, more radiant; to cause waves of shadow to revolve round lighted centers; and to modulate these shadows, to hollow them, make them dense and yet render the obscurity transparent, and the less obscure parts easy to penetrate; in a word, to give to the strongest colors a kind of permeability which stops them from being black.”

But it is Rembrandt’s peculiar characteristic that he carried the method of chiaroscuro much further. Fromentin thus sums the matter up: He calls him a luminarist, apologizing for the word, which, when he wrote in 1876, was still a “barbarous” one. And a luminarist he defines to be one who conceives of light as outside of

fixed laws, attaches to it an extraordinary meaning, and makes great sacrifices for it. And, he adds, “if such is the meaning of this newly coined word, Rembrandt is at once defined and judged, for the word expresses an idea difficult to render, but a true idea, a rare eulogy and a criticism.”

Briefly, then, Fromentin’s argument is this: Rembrandt in his ideal moods essayed to use light as the actual material out of which to construct form; he composed in light. The result was admirable, when the character of the subject justified such treatment; but open to serious criticism when it did not. The famous instance of the latter, in Fromentin’s judgment, is The Sortie or “Night Watch.”

“Rembrandt had to represent a company of men-at-arms. It would have been easy enough to tell us what they were going to do; but he has told us so negligently, that people are still unable to comprehend it, even in Amsterdam. He had to paint some likenesses, they are doubtful; some characteristic costumes, they are for the most part apocryphal; a picturesque effect, and this effect is such that the picture becomes undecipherable. The subject, the personages and details have disappeared in the shadowy phantasmagoria of the palette. Ordinarily Rembrandt excels in rendering light, he is marvelous in the art of painting an imaginary subject (fiction); his habit is to think, his master faculty is the expression of light. But here imagination is out of place, life is wanting, and the thought atones for nothing. As for the light, it is unnatural, unquiet, and artificial; it radiates from the inside to the outside, it dissolves{82} the objects that it illuminates. I see some focal spots of brilliance, but I see nothing illuminated; the light is neither beautiful, true, nor reasonable (motivée).”

Before discussing this judgment let us note Fromentin’s approval of Rembrandt’s use of light—in the case of subjects that seem to him to justify it. He instances particularly The Supper at Emmaus and The Good Samaritan, both in the Louvre. He speaks with fine sympathy of the original and infinitely human conception of Christ in the former picture, while upon the technique of the latter he comments as follows: “The canvas is enveloped in smoke (enfumée), all impregnated with somber golds, very rich in depth and, above all, very grave. The material is muddy, yet transparent; the brushwork heavy, yet subtle; hesitating and resolute; labored and free; very unequal, uncertain, vague in some parts, astonishingly precise in others. No contour appears, not an accent added in the way of routine. There is evident an extreme timidity, which is not the result of ignorance and proceeds, one would say, from the fear of being banal or from the price which the thinker attaches to the immediate and direct expression of life. The objects have a structure that seems to exist in itself, almost without the help of formulas, rendering, without any means that you can seize upon, the uncertainties of nature. There are some nude limbs and feet of irreproachable construction—moreover, ‘style.’ In the pale, pinched, groaning visage of the wounded man, there is nothing save expression, something that comes from the soul, from within outward; tonelessness (atonie), suffering; as it were, the sad joy of collecting{83} one’s self when one feels about to die. Not a contortion, not a trait that overreaches moderation, not a touch in this rendering of the inexpressible that is not pathetic and restrained; everything dictated by profound emotion and interpreted by means altogether extraordinary.” And, adds Fromentin: “Examine other painters of sentiment, of physiognomy and characterization, the men of scrupulous observation or of verve. Take account of their intentions; study their scrutiny, measure their domain, weigh well their language, and ask yourself, if anywhere you perceive an equal intimacy in the expression of a visage, an emotion of this nature, such ingenuity in the manner of feeling; anything, in a word, which is as delicate to conceive, as delicate to say, and is said in terms more original, more exquisite, or more perfect.”

Nothing else, I suppose, has ever been written about this phase of Rembrandt’s art that is at once so fine in thought and diction, so enlightening, and so memorable. For one here meets in union the trained thinker and practised writer and the painter; thus getting much more than the painter’s exclusive point of view, and at the same time the latter, interpreted by the painter at first hand. The gist of it is that, when the subject involved an idea, Rembrandt was not only justified in sacrificing the corporeal to the incorporeal, but was master of a technique that could express the idea conclusively and with supreme emotional appeal.

In conclusion, Fromentin considers that the whole life of Rembrandt represents a struggle between the two sides of his nature. The earliest battle-ground was The{84} Sortie, from which, owing to the nature of the problem, he came off worsted. But did he ever succeed in reconciling the “exterior” and the “interior” man? If ever, Fromentin concludes, surely in The Syndics, which, in a word, is a work of imagination and yet of real life.

The whole exposition of Fromentin’s argument, from which these fragments have been gathered, is worth careful study, particularly because of the constructive nature of the criticism. In its combination of technical information and logical point of view, in its subtlety and human sympathy, it affords a model for the method of approaching the serious examination of a great artist’s work. One may acknowledge its value and the benefit derived from it, without subscribing entirely to its conclusions. It may be possible to feel that it has the defect, if one is to find a single word for it, of excessive concentration. It centers too exclusively around one picture, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company.

This picture has suffered from too much exploitation. It has been praised “not wisely but too well” by artists and has been worshiped by the public. Fromentin may have approached it with undue expectations; at any rate, he found himself disappointed; and, being at variance with the general judgment, felt the need of justifying his own attitude. He has done it so exhaustively as to warp his own judgment, until what there is of weakness in the picture has become almost an obsession with him. It is never absent from his thoughts, and continually peeps in on one page after another, and mingles with the judgment of other pictures. Fromentin has used it as{85} a pivot around which to swing his whole appreciation of Rembrandt; and, more than this, has himself been sucked into the vortex of his own revolving argument. It is an expedient scarcely to be warranted by breadth of criticism to select one picture of any artist as a focusing-point for a consideration of his whole work, and least of all in the case of an artist so universal as Rembrandt.

Moreover, Fromentin does not persuade us that he had a very wide acquaintance with the master’s work. He knew his Louvre well; grew up with it, and had become habituated to it and fixed in the impressions he had derived. Later in life he made the acquaintance of the National Gallery and visited Dresden. Then he makes the pilgrimage to Holland. He first reaches The Hague, where The Lesson in Anatomy fails to satisfy his expectations. He is alive to its excellence in parts, but does not find the strength and character of two or three of the heads sustained throughout the canvas. He feels that an unreasonable amount of adulation has been lavished on the picture. It arouses his antagonism and piques in him the critical vein. Then an interval in his approach to Rembrandt ensues. He alights at Haarlem and notes with what definitive skill and clearness of comprehension Frans Hals treated the corporation subject. Fresh from these impressions, he finds himself in front of Rembrandt’s treatment of a corresponding theme. By contrast it seems to him a work of confused motives and manifold uncertainties. Yet how extravagantly it has been lauded! Like The Lesson in Anatomy, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company has been prejudiced by uncritical applause. The critic in{86} Fromentin is now thoroughly roused. With every wish to be fair to Rembrandt, he proceeds to build upon these two pictures a fabric of constructive and destructive criticism. His faculties are narrowed to a focus spot of concentrated heat, are swept into the ardor of their centripetal momentum, and become caught up in the subtleties of their own compressed invention. He elaborates a theory, and into its compact limits would squeeze the genius of Rembrandt.

Further, what kind of mind did Fromentin bring to bear upon this examination? A generous one, desirous of being broad; but a Frenchman’s and an Academician’s; one, that is to say, which clings to logic and bases its expression upon form. It exhibits and demands clarity of reasoning; declares itself in refined exactness. It knew of Impressionism, yet was too old in its convictions, too fixed in earlier traditions, to comprehend it. But, since the day when Fromentin’s mind was in the forming, the world’s point of view toward art, even one may say toward life, has changed; and its attitude toward the manner of expression has progressed, until it has come back to Rembrandt with a new and more intimate comprehension. It recognizes him as an Impressionist of sensations and tries to judge him by what we now know and feel about Impressionism.

Briefly, we have learned that there may be something in art more valuable than the record of a person, place, or incident, and this is, the impression of it conceived and rendered by the artist; that, through this interpretation, the place, person, or incident becomes illuminated, more vitally represented. How, for example, can Bartholdi’s

Statue of Liberty compare with the interpretation of the idea evolved by such a man as Lincoln? The idea thus logically and formally shaped in the Statue will not even bear comparison with that which is expressed by the spontaneous utterance of some poor emigrant, as he finds his foot at last planted on the free soil of his imaginings. In life, as in art, the real thing to us is what we feel about it; in Rembrandt’s art, what he feels about his subject and makes us feel.

Then, again, we have discovered that often we are made to feel most deeply, not by detailed statement, but by suggestion: in the case of a speaker, perhaps by a momentary gesture, or play of features, by a sudden inflection of the voice, or a pause in speech, and the occasional accent of a word or sentence; in the case of a writer, often as much by what he leaves unsaid, by the thought that is veiled behind the statement, by the choice and emphasis of certain features of his record. Further, we may have learned to find occasional value even in uncertainty or indecision. We may sometimes tire of, and possibly distrust, the world’s tendency to “get things down fine.” The latter may seem to imply that the thing itself is small, or that there is smallness in the vision of the man who thus approaches life. We may be conscious of life itself as an aggregate of moments of brilliant realization and more frequent half-tones, enveloped in a sea of shadow; and may reach nearer to the heart and meaning of it by welcoming its mystery.

Surely something of this sort was Rembrandt’s attitude toward life, and therefore his point of view toward art. He has been called unlearned, because he had small{88} taste for Latin and no scholastic acquisitions. But in the wisdom of life, as drawn from life itself and distilled through the brain and temperament of one who searched life deeply and lived his own life ardently, he has had few equals, at least among artists. For the explanation of Rembrandt is that to him life presented itself as an idea.

Thus he is without a rival in the sympathetic rendering of old age. He saw more than the exterior of it; he penetrated into its psychology. For—how shall I express it?—the fruit of living is experience, and experience tends more and more to lose sight of the concrete in the abstract, to replace the substance of the form with the higher reality of the idea. The young man, as he ceases to depend upon the ministrations of the mother, enshrines her in a personal idea of motherhood; the old lover rediscovers the bride of his youth in the idea with which time has enveloped the wife. The idea is the aureole or nimbus that gathers about the form and proclaims its sanctity. It is the idea, then, that Rembrandt, the artist of ideas, the searcher after the higher reality inherent in form, discovered in old age.

On the other hand, while Rembrandt exalted the idea above the substance, he was not indifferent to form. No great artist whose domain is the world of sight can be.

Indeed, the wider the acquaintance with the master goes, whether in the galleries throughout Europe, or through the examples which occasionally emerge from private collections, as in the recent extraordinary display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more one is impressed not only with Rembrand{89}t’s feeling for form, but also with his amazing power of rendering it.

Sometimes, as in the marvelously detailed Portrait of Elizabeth Bas (Amsterdam), the impression he derived of the original was one which he could render only by enforcing the bulk and character and precision of form. This lady, though not of gentle birth, was, as the widow of Admiral Swartenhout, a figure in society. This much we know from the written record; the rest is recorded in the portrait. As Rembrandt saw her, she was a woman of determined personality; a narrow and rigid believer in her own importance, and a stickler for its recognition; an ingrained precisionist, as upright as her backbone and as set in formalism as her corseted figure. Yet the flesh of her face and hands has the dimpled softness and delicate contours of well-preserved old age. She is fully conscious of prerogatives, but her hardness has been made gracious by the kindly touch of time. All this, no doubt, was written in detail on her ample person, and Rembrandt, feeling the intimate value of its completeness, has detailed it in the portrait.

Or take another example of the record of an impression, The Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels in the Berlin Gallery. The devotion of this woman had stayed the artist in his trials, and her exuberant youth had put fresh force into his courage. He had learned to depend upon her watchful solicitude, to lean upon her abundant vitality, and to warm his imagination in the glow of her physical ardor. In the portrait he wraps her strong figure in the rich grandeur of a mantle that burns with wonderful brown lights above an under-robe of golden cream, while{90} a flash of crimson glows in her brown hair, and a golden warmth is exhaled from the full, firm features and hovers above the ripe harvest of her bosom. The portrait is an artist’s apotheosis of the glory and the benediction of physical vitality; and, let us not forget, in the strength of this woman’s companionship Rembrandt achieved his masterpiece of austere and virile intellectuality—The Syndics of the Cloth Workers’ Guild.

And so we might take one by one the pictures of this master, and, whether the impression that it records is drawn mainly from the exterior of its subject or from a penetration of the character or soul within, whether it be the expression of the soul of some fact of Bible story, no matter what the degree of idealism involved, every time it is form or some interpretation thereof, that is the foundation of the picture. Not form, however, for its own sake, for the purpose of rendering it in its logical and reasoned completeness or of exploiting the master’s efficiency in doing what every student aspires, and many can learn, to do; but form so felt, so rendered, that what we are made conscious of is not alone the physical sense of form, but its abstract significance; in a word, if I may say so, the soul of form, as from time to time it is used to interpret some one or other of the artist’s impressions.

You cannot pass from one to the other of the thirty-seven examples of Rembrandt in the exhibition that, as I write, is being held in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, or travel round the galleries of Europe, intent upon the wealth of Rembrandts that they contain, without reaching a conviction, that grows more and more assured, of the profound knowledge and feeling for form

that Rembrandt possessed and communicates. He may reveal clearly but a portion of a figure, veiling or obscuring the rest; but what is revealed is sufficient for the physical appreciation of the whole figure, and enforces the physical significance, while the spiritual significance is profoundly increased by the demand that has been made upon our imagination. After long study one comes to believe, not only that Rembrandt treated form differently from other artists, which no one, I suppose, denies; but also that no other artist has ever treated it with such a mingling of power and subtlety, with so fine and sure a reliance upon its physical qualities, and yet with so marvelous a capacity to interpret its spiritual significance.

Almost similar in motive is Rembrandt’s use of color. He is not a colorist in the sense that the great Venetians were, for they extolled the glory of local color—the actual splendor of hue with which they clothed their radiant figures and wove about them a triumphant orchestration. This also is an abstract use of color, involving a consciousness and suggestion of the effect that color as color has upon the imagination. But Rembrandt went further. He, too, had the love of beautiful fabrics, bought them freely, and as freely used them on his models. But here he parts company with the Venetians; for by this time he has ceased to think of the fabric or its color as something of value in itself. It has become merged in the impression that he has formed of the whole subject. It may occupy a large or small part in the total impression; that is as it may be; but henceforth it is only contributory to the physical and spiritual sensations that{92} he has received and is set upon interpreting. Thus he is at no pains to preserve the material integrity of the local color; he uses it as he does form: extracting from it this or that, here forcing or there veiling its emphasis, plunging much of it in shadow. Therefore, even as his treatment of form has proved an enigma to some critics, so some hesitate to call him a colorist. After the manner of the Venetians, I repeat, he is not. But need theirs be the only manner of the colorist?

Rembrandt used color as he used form, as a symbol of expression; and, to repeat, what he sought to express was the impression that the form and color had aroused in his imagination. When the impression was derived merely from the externals of form, he would elaborate in detail the retinal impression and in such cases usually preserve the integrity of the local color. But it was otherwise when the impression was extracted from the soul of the subject, whether the latter were an individual whose portrait he was painting, or a Biblical incident the significance of which he was elaborating out of his own inner consciousness of its meaning. For then he is not representing things as he sees them, but recreating the impression that they have made in his imagination. The local color becomes merged in the color of his imagination; gathers brilliance from its certainties, fades into the half-lights of its questionings, is threaded through and through with strands of discrimination, and plunged in the mystery of the unknowable.

Finally, in this use of form and color, Rembrandt is nearer to what is most modern in the art of to-day than has been generally recognized. For of late Impression{93}ism has entered on a new development. During some time it was intent upon a more vivid and truthful representation of the facts of life. It sat at the feet of Velasquez, trying to do again what he did so supremely well. It did not succeed in equaling his authority, for the sufficient reason that an imitator never rivals the master; but at the same time it added something to what Velasquez stands for. Helped by science, it has carried further than he did the study of light in the variety and quality of its manifestations, and has gained, especially in landscape, an instrument for interpreting sentiment and moods of temperament. In the intellectual analysis of the appearance of nature Velasquez said the last word; and now in the domain of emotion and of spiritual expression, as interpreted by the representation of nature, there is nothing further to be said. In a word, the ideal of graphic art, as based upon the representation of nature, which since the thirteenth century has occupied the artists of the Western world, is now found to have reached a development beyond which no further development is possible. As a commentary upon this is the development of photography, which along the line of representation vies with painting.

Certain original minds,[E] therefore, have realized the need of a new ideal, a new motive with which to refertilize their art. They are seeking to discover it in a new conception of Impressionism. Their position, in effect, is this: Need the impression that is derived from nature be limited by the necessities of naturalistic representation? Can it not free itself from the liability of being{94} judged by the standard of what it is derived from, and claim to be enjoyed for its own abstract qualities of form and color? May it not detach itself more freely from the concrete, and attain nearer to the abstract? Are there not further possibilities in the conception of form and color as symbols?

The new movement, for such it has grown to be, in France, Germany, Austria, and England, has come by way of the East. The harvest of a century of Eastern exploration, ripened during the last fifty years by an increasing intimacy with the art of Egypt, China, Korea, Japan, India, and Mesopotamia, is at length being stored. We are beginning to realize the Oriental conception of art as decoration, relying upon the abstract qualities of form and color, and using them, not as vehicles of natural representation, but as symbols, appealing freely, without concrete reference, to the imagination. To repeat, these pioneers of the new movement find themselves at the point where the Renaissance started in the thirteenth century. The latter broke away from the remnant of the Oriental ideal, left in Byzantine art, to conquer a new world of natural representation, and its evolution has been completed. The new movement has recovered the Oriental standpoint from which to attempt the conquest of a new ideal. It is a movement, at present, mainly of experiment, and necessarily so. For all of us, whether artists or laymen, are as yet too much under the influence of centuries of inherited tradition to be able to free ourselves from the consciousness of what it stands for.

The artist of our own time whose intuition steered him{95} first in the direction of this new conception and use of form and color is Whistler; and among the potent influences of his own life was Rembrandt. That the latter was habitually desirous of evading the concrete significance of form is contradicted by innumerable pictures; but that in some he did evade it, even as Whistler did in his Nocturnes, is undeniable. Moreover, Rembrandt showed less regard for the traditional use of form and color than any artist up to our own day. With all his sense of its significance, he used it with the complete freedom of personal expression; and so enveloped it in the half-lights and obscurities of an atmosphere of his own invention, that, while the picture represents an incident, it contradicts the idea of material representation. It is, to a more abstract degree than has been reached by any other Caucasian artist, the record of a spiritual impression, based on the symbolic use of form and color. It approaches the brink of that still further detachment from the necessities of natural representation that characterizes the New Thought in modern art.{96}

CHAPTER VI

THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT

BOTH Hals and Rembrandt, each in his different way, have influenced the art of modern times much in the same way in which they influenced their contemporaries. Hals was and still remains a great exemplar of technical method which may be practically adopted, while Rembrandt, with a technique that defies imitation, has influenced his own times and ours by inspiring principles not only of technique but of motive. The difference is inherent in their characters—Hals the raconteur; Rembrandt the thinker.

Hals, with his masterful gift of summarizing the incidents and accidents of an occasion or a personality, resembles the best examples of the modern journalist and magazine writer; keenly alive to the temper of his own time; reflecting everything vividly, as in a mirror, yet with a discrimination for effects. Rembrandt, on the other hand, so absorbed in his own contemplation as to be an enigma to the man who runs and reads, is yet so passionately human that the place he by degrees makes for himself in the imagination and the heart of those who learn to know him expands and deepens. The difference between them is epitomized in their respective kinds of technique. While Rembrandt is a constructor, Hals is a “follower of surfaces.”

This may possibly explain the immediate and direct hold that Hals has exerted upon modern art. The latter has been mainly concerned with imitation, casting around for borrowed motives and for an appropriate method of expressing them. In portraiture especially it has been confronted with the problem of catering to the luxurious and extravagant superficialities of a society largely composed of nouveaux riches. For such the grave intellectuality of that other example of our day, Velasquez, was inappropriate, but Hals’s glib, effective following of surfaces, just the thing. It has authority and style, while its essential commonness of feeling is discreetly veiled by a veneer of aristocratic suggestion, and its evasion of the problems of construction is disguised beneath a handsome showing of virility. His, in fact, was precisely the style that met the demands and suited the temperament of society in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Many, I suppose, will repudiate the notion that Hals was either commonplace or faulty as a constructor of form. He is so much a man of our own time, and in consequence has been so belauded, that to some it may sound like lèse-majesté to dispute his position in modern estimation. On the other hand, if one tries to get beyond the barrier of approbation with which artists and the public have blocked the free view of Hals in relation to other portrait-painters of his own school, such as Rembrandt or Terborch, or of other schools or periods, the suspicion of his comparative commonness of feeling may grow into a conviction. Whether it does so or not is so purely a question of individual point of view and feeling{98} that it would be futile to try to reason the matter out. I can scarcely explain my own conviction. Perhaps I have hinted at the basis of it in applying to Hals the term a raconteur, and in likening his style to that of a brilliant newspaper man. It is the function of both of these latter to make an immediate appeal, not necessarily flashy but certainly striking, to a mixed gathering of listeners or readers, whose first and sole demand is that the gist of the matter shall be hit off attractively. Each in a greater or less degree is addressing a crowd, and, since the latter’s aggregate of mentality and feeling is of a lower order than the mentality and taste of some, at least, of the individuals composing it, the speaker or writer, to prove attractive, must, consciously or unconsciously, adjust his thought and expression to this lower level. Such is the suggestion of Hals and his modern imitators, when their work is compared with that of the great portrait-painters, whose feeling and style are the products of their own high-bred aloofness and self-sustained individuality. The work of the former, by comparison, seems designed to attract, as directly as possible and in a way to make the least demand upon reflection. It skims the surfaces and summarizes the most obvious of their features in the raciest of ways.

On the other hand, it is easier to transmit the conviction that Hals was a follower of surfaces, for one’s eyesight here assists one’s feeling. Look at one of his portraits and observe the fluent skill with which the several planes of the features are rendered; the finesse with which a glove is fitted to the hand, the folds of a costume are expressed, and even protuberances of the form sug{99}gested. It is admirable, marvelous! When painters can achieve such magic, it is no wonder that we have a phrase, “as clever as paint.” But compare this portrait with one of Rembrandt’s, and the latter’s superiority in the matter of solidity and structural strength becomes apparent. The suggestion of form in Hals’s is altogether slighter; you will not be convinced of bone and muscle structure beneath the surfaces, and, if you continue the comparison from gallery to gallery or choose to vary it by comparing Hals with Van Eyck, Dürer, Holbein, and the great portrait-painters of the other schools, will hardly fail to be convinced of his inferiority as a constructor.

On the other hand, it was his skill in following the surface that made his influence so valuable to his contemporaries. The sense of structural form cannot be imparted. It is constitutional; a man has it or he has not. But it is possible to teach efficiency in brushwork; and Hals, one of the most brilliant painters who ever lived, set a standard of painter-like craftsmanship that, passed on by his immediate pupils to others, gave to Holland the merit of producing the most efficient school of painters in the world. The most important of his pupils were Terborch, Metsu, Wouwerman, and Adriaen van Ostade, the last named the teacher of Jan Steen. It is a noticeable fact that all these men were genre painters, for even Wouwerman, by a slight straining of the word, can be included, since the individual charm of his landscapes consists in their animated groups of figures, and it was in his treatment of these that he was especially indebted to Hals. In fact, the latter’s influence on the men of his{100} own day was directly and most characteristically and emphatically shown, not, as in our day, in portraiture, but in genre; in shaping, refining, and giving new distinction to the tendency for genre pictures that the Hollanders had inherited from the united School of Flanders.

In a previous chapter we have spoken of the encouragement which Hals’s example gave to the still-life painting; it was no less effective in encouraging the use of still-life in genre. The motive of the new genre became less that of depicting an incident than of picturing the environment of home life, its accompaniments of furniture and belongings; and these were made contributory to recreating the spirit of the life.

Immediately from this proceeds the second point which the genre painters gained from Hals: namely, an inspiration for the composition of their pictures. It is marked no less by naturalness than propriety, and by an extraordinary feeling of unity. There is an excellent discretion alike in the choice and in the arrangement of details; everything is characteristic and made subservient to the general harmony.

The latter results from the third point enforced by Hals’s example: the principle of relativity in the use of values. Color became the basis of the new genre, and color treated from the point of view of tone; hence again the incomparable unity of impression which examples of the best genre artists exhibit. Some mass of local color, either cool or warm in hue, affords a dominant note. To this, by means of contrasts and repetitions, the whole scheme is tuned. The contrasting values of other local{101} colors are opposed to that of the dominant mass, and higher and lower values of all these colors repeated throughout the scheme. The harmony that ensues may be rich and low or high in key and sprightly, but in the finest examples, and they are very numerous, is always characterized by a choice refinement.

This quality is due in no slight measure to the fourth way in which these artists were indebted to Hals, namely, their skill in brushwork. For they learned from him to lay the color on frankly and directly, without fumbling or indecision. They constructed their forms in color, building them up with layers of modulated values, working generally with a small brush, but one that was fully charged with pigment which was floated on to the surface. Thus the color has not only body and substance, but also a limpid transparency, a quality as of liquidized gems. It is this blend of lightness of touch, of purity of pigment, and withal of solid underpainting, that gives breadth and dignity to the delicacy of these harmonies. To assure one’s self of this it is but necessary to compare a Vermeer or Terborch with a Netscher. The last is felt at once to have less breadth and dignity, and altogether slighter charm; and an examination of his technique helps to explain the reason. There is less underpainting, and in the minute and dainty passages the pigment has not been floated but stippled over the surface. The result is a comparative tightness of feeling and, in place of limpid transparency, a suggestion rather of thinness and hardness.

The influence exerted by Hals in these four directions—namely, in the treatment of still-life, in composition,{102} in regard for values, and in the habit of skilful brushwork—was supplemented by that of Rembrandt, which dates from 1632, the year in which he moved to Amsterdam. The latter also affected the development of genre, but not in the line of direct suggestion. Rembrandt’s technique in its most characteristic aspects was and still remains too personal an expression of his own attitude of mind and of its changes of mood, varying according to the nature of each subject interpreted, to permit of imitation. Rembrandt contributed ideas. He enlarged the scope of genre by the suggestion, on the one hand, of a further range of subject, and, on the other, of a new motive in technique. It was especially the example of his religious pictures that affected the idea of subject, either directly leading other artists to a similar treatment of religious themes or indirectly encouraging them to include some kind of sentiment in the domestic scenes they depicted. Meanwhile, by the example of his own use of chiaroscuro, he encouraged a more subtle study of values, at once more intimate and varied and more expressive.

An admirable epitome of the character of Rembrandt’s influence upon his contemporaries is in the old Pinakothek in Munich. In the first place there is a Holy Family, painted in 1631, the year before he moved from Leyden. It is about six feet high, the figures being life-size; but the conception and treatment of the subject are thoroughly in the way of genre. The picture presents a glimpse of the interior of a Dutch home: the tools hanging on the walls, the face, figure, and costume of the mother, the Child swathed in a shawl, and the fa{103}miliar accompaniment of the cradle—all are distinctively Dutch in character. The mother, with a pretty gesture of tenderness, is fondling one of the Baby’s feet, looking down at it with a gentle smile, while the father bends forward over the cradle in an attitude of reverent solicitude. The whole scene breathes the quiet happiness of domestic life. In its character the picture is essentially a genre subject. At the time it was painted Dou was working in Rembrandt’s studio, and to its influence it is not unreasonable to trace at least some of the tendency that Dou exhibited in later years to introduce just such tender and reverential sentiment into his own work, as witness The Young Mother at the Hague Gallery and The Old Woman Saying Grace in the Pinakothek in Munich. In fact, The Holy Family is already characteristic of the sentiment that became infused into genre by the example of Rembrandt.

Intimately connected with this is the example of Rembrandt’s technical use of chiaroscuro, used either for the purpose of interpreting sentiment or of simply adding to the interest of the color-scheme. The foretaste of this is given in a series of six pictures of Biblical subjects in the Pinakothek, painted for the Stadtholder, Frederick Henry: two of them, The Descent from the Cross and The Elevation of the Cross, in 1633; The Ascension, 1636; The Burial and The Resurrection, 1639; and The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1646. About three feet high, they approximate to the familiar size of genre, and are distinctly genre in conception and treatment. Moreover, they are arched over at the top, a device that became popular with Dou and other genre painters, who{104} frequently substituted for the formal arch a draped curtain, the result being to set the main part of the scene back, and thus increase the effect of looking into it. This, however, is not merely to suggest more vividly the third dimension. For Rembrandt in these pictures has set the example of concentrating the high light on a few features of the composition, surrounding these with lighted objects of lower value, and finally inclosing all in a ring of shadow, so that one seems to be looking into a circular concavity out of the gloom of which certain objects emerge into view with greater or less distinctness. The device is used by Rembrandt to heighten the dramatic and emotional significance of the composition, and was so applied by some of his followers, notably by Maes, while by others the principle was adopted as a means of giving force, variety, and added charm of mystery to their color-schemes. It became, in fact, one of the most characteristic of the technical methods of Holland genre.

Apropos of this series it is interesting to note, as a side-light on Rembrandt’s use of models, that one, The Elevation of the Cross, contains a striking figure of an Oriental. It was transferred in reduced size from a picture of the same subject painted in the preceding year, 1632, which is now owned by the New York collector Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt. Moreover, the head and bust of this man appear as the subject of another picture, painted in the same year as The Elevation, which now hangs in the Munich Pinakothek.

To recapitulate, then, in this series of the Old Pinakothek we have a striking example of Rembrandt’s mo{105}tive in the treatment of Biblical subjects, developed during the period from 1633 to 1646 of his greatest popularity in Amsterdam. It involved, as we have seen, the translation of the heroic and grandiloquent style of religious subjects, as practised by the Italians, into the homelier poignancy and intimate personal suggestiveness of meaning that commended themselves to the simple directness and home-love of the Hollanders. It practically converted the religious picture into one of genre; and its example led to a similar treatment of these subjects by other painters, notably Carel Fabritius, Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout, while to the painters of domestic genre pure and simple it also supplied the motive of sentiment and a new motive of technique.

It is true that sentiment plays a comparatively small part in Holland genre. Dou has been mentioned as following the example of Rembrandt in this respect, and the other prominent instance is Nicolaes Maes, who entered the master’s studio in 1648, that is to say, two years after the completion of The Adoration of the Shepherds, the latest of the Munich series. How far Rembrandt had influenced the bias of Maes’s temperament toward sentiment is conjectural, but that he supplied the younger man with a technical principle for its expression is certain. Maes discovered the possibilities of emotional suggestion that existed in the device of heightening the luster of certain parts of the composition by the contrast of veiled and shadowed color elsewhere. With him it does not reach the dramatic force or depth of emotional appeal that the master’s use of it involves, but neverthe{106}less becomes the expression of a sentiment that, as Bode remarks, is nearer to the sentiment of Rembrandt than that of any other artist of the school.

On the other hand, by those genre artists of the period who were not given to sentiment, the principle of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro was adopted for the sake of æsthetic considerations, founded upon the facts of sight. It may or may not be true that Rembrandt himself derived it from his observation of the light in the dim recesses of his father’s mill, but at any rate the artists of genre interiors soon saw its application to their subjects, and were led by it to study with more discrimination the infinite variety of light value. The result was twofold. Their color-schemes grow more subtle and refined, and the tonality becomes impregnated with the suggestion of atmosphere. Thus the example of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro wedded to that of Hals’s facile craftsmanship developed the inimitable perfection of technique which characterizes the best works of Holland genre.

It is the latter, one may observe in conclusion, that has most affected the modern revival of painting in Holland. While foreign painters, in portraiture especially, have been disposed to follow the direct example of Frans Hals, the Hollanders themselves, both in landscape and genre, have been influenced by the so-called “little masters,” and, in the case of Josef Israels, by Rembrandt himself. And the result of this influence has been to make modern Dutch painters, as a group, the best brushmen of their age.{107}

CHAPTER VII

DUTCH GENRE

THE tendency toward genre painting began before the separation of the Holland Free State from the Spanish Netherlands. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who died in Brussels in 1570, is regarded as the leader of the group of painters who depicted the life of the people, particularly in open-air surroundings. His work, for example, and that of one of his pupils, Lucas van Valckenborch, make a very lively showing in one of the galleries of the Art-History Museum in Vienna. Here, in a number of canvases of considerable size, crowded with figures, are pictured scenes of peasants, merrymaking, harvesting, engaged in a vintage festival, or skating and sleighing, while there is even a representation of rich folk enjoying a picnic in a park. These painters and their contemporaries in similar subjects are to be reckoned in the Flemish School. But there is one, Pieter Aertz, surnamed “Long Pieter,” who, although he died in 1575, before any separation from Flanders was dreamed of, may be considered as a forerunner of distinctly Dutch genre, since he was born in Amsterdam and lived there for the greater part of his life. An interesting example of his work, The Egg Dance, is in the Rijks Museum. The scene is a kitchen,{108} opening into a garden, and the floor is scattered with various articles—a bowl, a shoe, onions and eggs—among which a young man is jauntily dancing, while a group beside the hearth applauds. As far as the character and spirit of the scene go, the picture is thoroughly representative of the older kind of genre, which portrays the type rather than the individual, and numerous little episodes massed into a group, rather than a single incident or phase of life wrought out completely. For this becomes the tendency of the later and distinctively Holland genre, which, as the technical motives of the artists grew in refinement and possibly as the taste of the public became more refined, resulted in the subjects being drawn more and more from the home life of the well-to-do and fashionable. By this time the genre pictures have ceased to represent an amusing picture-book of manners and customs; they have in a sense lost their interest of subject, the matter of which they treat counting for very little in comparison with the charming manner of the treatment.

The three greatest masters of Holland genre, Vermeer, Terborch, and Jan Steen, must be considered separately. Meanwhile we will summarize the method and manner of some of the most important among the able but lesser artists.

ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE

Van Ostade, who was a pupil of Hals and later became influenced by Rembrandt, stands midway between the earlier and the later motives of genre. His favorite and,{109} on the whole, most characteristic subjects are groups of peasants reveling or squabbling in the kitchens or around the doors of inns. The figures are squat and lumpish, curiously like animated roly-poly puddings, only redeemed from commonness by the limpid coloring and the suave, facile manner of the brushwork that he had derived from Hals. Sometimes, however, he selects a few figures and gives them an individual characterization. In fact, the latter pictures, as well as his groups of peasants, show a remarkable affinity to Brouwer’s treatment of similar subjects. For this eccentric and original artist, an “Adonis in rags,” as he has been called, a refined painter of coarse themes, though Flemish by birth, seems to have come under the influence of Frans Hals, lived in Haarlem and Amsterdam, and was really in his art representative of the Holland School of genre. Van Ostade, therefore, must have known him and may well have been affected by his example. At any rate, the character and spirit of his earlier pictures correspond with those of Brouwer’s, though the latter’s work exhibits a more refined artistic sense. In time, however, Van Ostade came under the Rembrandtesque manner; the thinness of his painting develops into a richer impasto, the feeling of the composition becomes larger, the choice of subject more distinguished, and his treatment more studied and sympathetic, while the tone is warmer and more luminous in consequence of the shrewder use of chiaroscuro. Later his manner again changes to one of extreme refinement, almost finical. The surface, to use an expressive French word, léché, seems licked into glossiness; the tone has become cold and grayish; the{110} compositions are more studied but less picturesque; yet the colors have an extraordinary transparency. The whole canvas has less the air of intimate observation than of something wrought over in the studio.

These three phases of Van Ostade’s development can be studied side by side in the examples of his work in the Gallery of The Hague. Representative of his first manner is Peasants’ Holiday, painted in 163-(the last figure is undecipherable); of the second, Marriage Proposal, which belongs to the period between 1650 and 1655; and of the third manner, Peasants in an Inn and The Fiddler, painted respectively in 1662 and 1673.

Van Ostade died in Haarlem in 1685. Among his pupils were his brother Isaac van Ostade (1621-1649), Cornelis Bega (1620-1664), and Cornelis Dusart (1660-1704). The last named inherited a great number of his master’s studies and sketches, which he worked upon and finished. These after Dusart’s death were sold as his own, a fact which helps to explain the similarity of his style to that of Adriaen van Ostade. Bega often imitated the latter’s choice of subject, and also with some success his manner of gray tonality, but his colors lack transparency, and the flesh parts are dry and brickish. The outdoor scenes of Isaac van Ostade, alive with figures in characteristic action, are exceedingly interesting as pictures of the “passing show” of Dutch life. Lastly, it is to the credit of Adriaen van Ostade that he was the teacher of, or at least exercised considerable influence over, Jan Steen during the latter’s sojourn in Haarlem. But the manner of his own pictures is that of the earlier genre which preceded the great School of Holland.

GERARD (GERRIT) DOU

This artist, born in Leyden, 1613, and dying there in 1675, spent his whole life in his native city, helped to found its Guild of St. Luke, and influenced several other genre painters. Among the latter were Gabriel Metsu, Godfried Schalcken, Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland, and Frans van Mieris the Elder, who handed on the tradition of the Leyden School to his son, Willem van Mieris. Dou himself had enjoyed the influence of Rembrandt, in whose studio he worked during the three years preceding the master’s move to Amsterdam in 1631. But before this time he had been instructed by his father, who was a painter on glass, and by Bartholomeus Dolando, an engraver. Dou’s own matured style very remarkably reflects both the earlier and the later experiences of his training. While he learned to feel his subject in the manner of Rembrandt, he contrived also to see it with a precise eye for detail and to render it with the nicety of a painter on glass or of one who uses the burin. He was an impeccable draftsman and a good composer, so long as the subject contained only a few figures and was treated in a small size. For large canvases and the handling of a complicated composition his style was altogether too minute in character. On the other hand, his color is always harmonious, though in some works inclined to an excessive polish; and the chiaroscuro, skilfully applied, is, when the subject permits, very charmingly expressive of the sentiment. He devoted himself to the representation of interiors and, as we have seen,{112} adopted the device of showing them through an arch or beyond a lambrequin, formed of a heavily draped curtain, frequently also representing one or more figures at a window with the obscurity of the room behind them. In thus adapting Rembrandt’s principle of chiaroscuro to the rendering of the physical phenomenon of a concave space more or less immersed in shadow, no one was more skilful than Dou. To give depth and quality to the obscurity of the distance and especially of the ceiling, he would hang a chandelier or lantern in the middle distance and catch the light upon it. Similarly, he would place some objects in the foreground to bring the latter forward, and then between these two foci of secondary light concentrate or scatter the main group of figures in highest illumination.

The two finest examples of his skill in thus building up a composition of values of light are The Young Mother, in the gallery of The Hague, and The Dropsical Woman of the Louvre. The former, because of its charming sentiment, is Dou’s most popular picture; but the other, in consequence of the superior simplicity and concentration of its composition, the comparative breadth of its treatment and fuller richness of color and quality of chiaroscuro, is without much doubt his masterpiece. However, another example which approaches it very closely is A Lady at her Toilet, in the Munich Gallery. Dou’s interest in chiaroscuro led him to experiment with so-called night-pieces, where the gloom of the interior is illuminated by a candle that makes a central spot of brilliance, fitfully reflected in a partially diffused glow. Such are An Old Woman who has Lost her Thread and{113} the Young Man and Girl in a Cellar, both in the Dresden Gallery; while the most elaborate and famous example is The Night School of the Rijks Museum, somewhat damaged by time, in which there are five separate points of varying degrees of illumination.

In a picture in the Dresden Gallery Dou has represented himself at work in his studio, a bare and homely room, lighted by a large window on the left. This window, with slight differences of shape and size, appears in many of his works, occupying a similar position; while, even when it is not shown, its effect is noticeable in the artist’s tendency to light his compositions from the left. Another instance of his tendency to repetition of motive may be traced in the frequency with which he used over and over again the same piece of furniture or object of furnishing. For example, in a still-life (No. 1708) in the Dresden Gallery appears the same candle-stick that is introduced in a number of other pictures. The point is interesting as showing the way in which Dou artificially arranged his subject-matter; and he was followed in this respect as in others by all the genre painters. Each had his particular motive of composition and freely repeated it; his particular bit of costume or article of furnishing that with variations of arrangement he used repeatedly. Holland genre, in fact, ceased almost from its beginning to be a direct representation of actual domestic life. It was based upon the latter, but the artist reserved a complete liberty of selection and arrangement. He was not intent upon illustrating the life, and only borrowed hints from it to assist him in creating a picture of his own invention. It is a point to{114} be observed by the modern public, which is apt to resent, as shallow in motive and uninteresting in subject, a picture which has been designed mainly or solely as a picture; that is to say, for the beauty of form, color, light, and tone that may be expressed in a composition of objects, arbitrarily brought together for this purpose. Such an attitude on the part of an artist is, however, thoroughly justified by the example of the Holland School of genre, which it is the fashion to-day to admire so generously.

NICOLAES MAES

Some may criticize this placing of Maes among the lesser artists of genre. Bode ranks him with Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch among the “great genre painters of Holland,” and adds that “there is scarcely any pupil of Rembrandt’s who approaches the great master so nearly as Maes does in this series of pictures.” He is alluding to Dreaming, or, as it is sometimes called, A Reverie, a young girl gazing out of a window, and to Asking a Blessing, in the Rijks Museum; to The Young Card-Players, in the National Gallery, and to Nurse and Children with Goat-Carriage, in a private collection; and also to certain pictures of old women, such as the one owned by Mr. John G. Johnson of Philadelphia, that was recently seen in the Exhibition of Dutch Art in the Metropolitan Museum. In all of these pictures the figures are life-size, and, to quote Bode, “one weakness is common to all of them: that they present simple motives on a large canvas with rough execution and without the powerful

The truth of this criticism seems to be sufficient of itself to exclude Maes from the ranks of the great genre painters, whose works are great of their kind just because these painters so admirably fitted the size of their pictures to the scope of their intention and their powers, and wrought their canvases to the highest pitch of a personally inspired technical perfection. This became the ideal of Holland genre and remains its chief distinction; and Maes only attains to it in his smaller canvases, such as the two examples of An Old Woman Spinning, in the Rijks Museum, and An Old Woman Peeling Apples (the spinning-wheel near her), in the Berlin Gallery, and The Cradle and The Dutch Housewife of the National Gallery. The period of these small genre pictures, beginning about 1655 and lasting for ten years, represents the high-water mark of Maes’s artistic career.

In his earlier period he shows a preference for red, juxtaposed with black and less frequently with yellow, that continues to characterize his work. But at first, as in The Dreamer, it is the brightness of hue that seems to attract him. He has bathed the red shutter and the girl’s figure and the leaves and fruit of the apricot-tree, that grows beside the window from which she leans, in a warm sunlight, and the latter, blended with soft shadows, glows upon her face and hands. All the several textures are rendered with admirable veracity, and a resemblance to life, that would be startling but for the quiet, pensive expression of the girl’s figure that pervades the canvas. The picture attracts and charms, but does it hold one’s inter{116}est? Scarcely, if you come back to it after seeing the more imaginative treatment of chiaroscuro in the Card-Players of the National Gallery; and still less, if you compare it with one of Maes’s smaller genre pictures in the Rijks Museum; for example, An Old Woman Spinning (No. 1504). Here the red reappears in the table-cloth, and the black spot is made by her head against the drabbish white of the wall, but the yellow is disguised in her olive-green dress, which shows the whitish-gray sleeves of the undergarment. It is a cooler scheme of color, more restrained yet richer, and it is lighted without any striking contrasts of chiaroscuro. Instead, the humble apartment is permeated with a dimly luminous atmosphere, out of which certain parts of the composition emerge into clearness, while the rest is veiled in half-tones and shadow. The picture is extraordinarily real, exquisite in technique, and deeply moving in its suggestion of the half-lights of existence among the aged and the poor. The secret is, that what was experiment or assertion in the larger canvas has here become the free expression of the artist’s simple and sincere sentiment. Sentiment and expression are united in a natural and complete equipoise.

During the last twenty-five years of his life Maes seems to have gained a rather scanty subsistence by painting portraits. Some of these are of high merit; the Portrait of a Man, for example, in the Fine Arts Museum at Budapest, which represents a gray-haired and bearded man, with black velvet cap and black coat edged with brown fur, sitting in a red-backed chair. Thus it repeats the artist’s favorite color-scheme, and moreover,

in its grave, tender rendering of old age, preserves the fine sentiment of his best period. But such noble characterization of humanity is rare with him, for, impelled by need and very likely by the taste of his public, he became an imitator of Van Dyck’s elegance. With Maes this elegance became pinchbeck, his fine ladies and gentlemen being very cheap imitations of their models.

GABRIEL METSU

Born in Leyden in 1630, the son of a painter, Gabriel Metsu was one of the precocious talents of the Holland School, for in his sixteenth year he helped to form the Guild of St. Luke in his native city. For the purpose of studying his art, his brief career of thirty-seven years (he died in 1667) may be conveniently divided into two parts, preceding or following the year 1655, in which he moved to Amsterdam and came under the direct influence of Rembrandt. But it would appear from his own early pictures, that even during his life in Leyden he had by some means obtained a knowledge of this master’s work. Metsu’s actual teacher, according to Houbraken, had been Dou, though his own work shows no direct trace of the latter’s influence. On the other hand, that of Hals is apparent. Meanwhile he experimented for himself and produced several pictures which, like The Blacksmith, in the Rijks Museum, are founded on the motive of a workshop, lighted fitfully by a forge and scattered with tools. In fact, as Bode says, the work of his early period is distinguished by “restless composition, hurried movement, and careless treatment.{118}”

Moving to Amsterdam, he became one of the group that circled round Rembrandt, and at first was directly influenced by Maes, and perhaps by Rembrandt himself; witness his Old Woman in Meditation of the Rijks Museum and his fine portrait of an old lady in the Berlin Gallery. Then almost at a jump he reaches an individual style of his own. It grows out of his attitude toward the subjects that—with occasional exceptions of marketing scenes, such as the two pictures respectively of a man and of a woman selling poultry, in the Dresden Gallery, and the Vegetable Market of the Louvre—he now favors. They are intimate presentations of the graciously prosperous life of the middle-class burghers, before extravagance and ostentation had eaten their way into Dutch society. That his art thus settled to a distinct purpose may be partly attributed to the fact that the artist himself settled down to domestic life, marrying Isabella Wolff, April 1, 1663. A picture in the Dresden Gallery, dated two years earlier, Lovers at Breakfast, shows himself and the lady sitting side by side, one of his arms about her shoulders and the other lifted as he holds a tall wine-glass. It is curiously interesting in its resemblance and difference to Rembrandt’s picture of himself and Saskia that hangs in an adjoining gallery of the same museum.

The style which Metsu formed for himself is in accordance with the character and treatment of the subjects to which he now devoted himself. He abandons the Rembrandtesque principle of chiaroscuro, for there is no mystery or depth of sentiment in his point of view. He is frankly and simply interested in the genial externals{119} of his subject; yet something of the Maes influence still affects his outlook. He sees the comfort and happiness of the home life and reflects it in the composure and refined orderliness that now pervade his compositions. Devoting himself to the simplest and directest way of presenting the subject, he avoids all striving after effect and secures a quietly balanced ensemble, wherein every figure and object is rendered with sureness of drawing, regard for the beauty of local color, and the utmost perfection of truthful realization. The date at which Metsu thus found himself is placed about 1660, and the picture in the Metropolitan Museum, A Music Party, dated 1659, serves to mark the transition. Its composition is still inclined to be “restless”; but the treatment, far from being “careless,” is distinguished by a very sincere feeling for the objective beauty of the salient details, while at least one figure, that of the cavalier on the right, exhibits the concentrated repose of movement which became one of the most delightful elements of Metsu’s art. It is seen developed throughout the whole composition in Mr. J. P. Morgan’s Visit to the Nursery, where, notwithstanding the sprightliness of feeling that animates the figures, each of them has its own plastic individuality of self-contained movement. Every detail has a perfection of finish that is never finical or at the expense of the unity of the whole. The hands and heads have a special distinction of fluent modeling and of exquisite expression. These qualities, combined with richness of local color, characterize the pictures of the sixties, as may be seen in the examples in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the galleries of Dresden,{120} Amsterdam, and The Hague. Toward the end of this ten years of highest production Metsu’s pictures grow stiffer in composition, colder in color, and harder in their surfaces. The beginning of this change is noticeable in the portrait group of The Family Geelvink, in the Berlin Gallery, and characterizes also some of his latest genre subjects. Probably the cause was failing health, for toward the end of his life he suffered from the effects of a bungled operation.

PIETER DE HOOCH

Pieter de Hooch, the son of a butcher, was born in Rotterdam in 1630, being therefore the same age as Metsu and two years older than Maes and Vermeer. With these last two he has been ranked by some critics, who consider that the trio represents the high-water mark of Holland genre. With Maes’s claim to this distinction one has ventured to disagree, and may also dispute De Hooch’s for somewhat the same reason. The latter’s best period was confined to ten years, 1655-1665, and outside of that, especially toward the end of his life, he did some quite indifferent work.

Houbraken makes the statement that his teacher was Nicolaes Berchem. It is accepted as a fact, the presumption being that Berchem at the time was living in Amsterdam, in which case De Hooch would have become acquainted with Rembrandt’s style. That it did not affect him, immediately at any rate, is evident from his early work, which represents lively scenes of soldiers{121} and young girls, painted rather in the manner of Dirck Hals or Duyster. It is possible, however, that even thus early the Rembrandt influence may have been operating upon him, as upon so many of the painters in Amsterdam at that time, by drawing his attention to problems of light, which eventually became the characteristic of his art.

From 1653, for two years, he served as “painter and footman” to Justus de la Grange, a rich merchant adventurer, with whom he lived both in Haarlem and The Hague. Then he married a girl from Delft and moved to that city, his name appearing among the members of its guild from 1655 to 1657. It was now that he came in touch with Vermeer, whose example helped to bring out all that was best in him. His pictures now became veritable poems of light, wrought with extraordinary conscientiousness and to a high pitch of refinement. He paints the courtyards of city houses, aglow in bright sunshine, cool rooms opening into warmly lighted ones, the vista often terminating in a street or canal. Always the varieties of light are rendered with delightful naturalness and in a way that gives a special charm to every detail which the light illumines. He is not very skilful in the representation of figures, but a master in the art of placing them. They and every object in the scene not only occupy their respective planes with absolute justness, but the position assigned to them has been selected with an unerring eye for decorative effect. Moreover, no artist has been so successful in rendering what visitors to Holland rarely fail to observe—the propriety and cleanliness of the Dutch home, and the sentiment that{122} seems to attach to every object in it and around it. Among the loveliest of these interiors is No. 426 in the Munich Pinakothek; The Mother, in the Berlin Gallery; The Interior of the National Gallery; The Pantry and The Interior, in the Rijks Museum, and an Interior in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; while two notable outdoor scenes are the National Gallery’s A Dutch Courtyard and the Family Group of the Berlin Gallery. All these and others that might be cited belong to the period between 1655 and 1665. But the enthusiasm which these arouse is sadly dashed by many examples of his later manner, which are disconnected or restless in composition, hot in color rather than luminous, and heavy in the shadows, while others are marred by excessive hardness of surface and triteness of overwrought detail. The latest date that appears on any of his paintings is 1677, wherefore it is surmised that De Hooch’s death occurred about this time.

FRANS VAN MIERIS THE ELDER

Of the painters bearing the name Van Mieris the most considerable was Frans van Mieris, surnamed the Elder, to distinguish him from his grandson, Frans van Mieris the Younger. Between them came Willem van Mieris, and the merit of the three as artists corresponds with the order of their succession.

The elder Frans, born at Leyden in 1635, became a pupil of Gerard Dou, though, like the latter, he had first been taught by a painter on glass. The earliest part of his career was still within the best period of Holland{123} genre, but before he died in 1681 the decline was come; and it was to this that his son and pupil, Willem, succeeded. Willem’s pictures are still clever but tricky, hard and glossy in texture, trivial and often silly in motive. As for his son, Frans the Younger, he belongs to the decadence, and the Dutch consider his pictures of no merit. There was still another Mieris, Jan by name, the brother of Willem, who, however, lived mostly abroad and died at the age of thirty in Rome.

Frans the Elder was popular in his own day and continued to be held in high esteem by collectors of the eighteenth century. He has been ranked with Metsu, but not with justice to the latter, for some of his work betrays that pettiness of motive and method which marked the decadence of genre and has been aptly called the “snuff-box” style. On the other hand, he had his moments of more genuine artistry, when he would paint a picture that even in comparison with Metsu is acceptable. These are chiefly to be found in the galleries of Munich, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Among the Munich examples is The Sick Woman; she seems to have sunk to the floor in a faint and is being tended by an old woman, while a doctor in the shaded background is holding up a bottle of cordial to the light and gazing at it—a figure very familiar in Dutch genre. Unfortunately the subject suggests Jan Steen and the superior esprit with which he would have treated it. The lady wears a reddish jacket trimmed with white fur, and the same garment reappears in The Oyster Breakfast. Here a girl is seated at a table holding an oyster in one hand and a wine-glass in the other. The picture represents the finer{124} side of Van Mieris, though it is surpassed by another example in the Munich Gallery, The Girl Before a Mirror, which possesses the quality that has suggested the coupling of this artist’s name with that of Metsu.

In the Art-History Museum of Vienna is A Lady and Her Doctor, in which he stands feeling her pulse as she sits beside a bed. It is sentimentally imagined, but extremely clever in a superficial way, the fabrics being imitated with extraordinary skill. Far more satisfactory is Cavalier in a Shop. On the right of the foreground is a mass of sumptuously colored stuffs, but the man’s costume and the jacket of the woman, who stands at a table offering something to his notice, are of black velvet. Beside her is a curtain of ashy purple, and the color of the background of the dim interior is a darkish olive, the whole forming a tonal scheme of subdued richness. But the cavalier is chucking the woman under the chin, her coy smile responding to his smile of amorous complacency, while an old man out of the shadow of the ingle-nook watches them. It is this sort of thing, coupled with the skill in imitating textures, that especially commended this artist to the taste of the eighteenth century.

The decline of genre reflects the changed conditions of Holland society. For the old ideal of liberty had given way to one of money and the power that comes in its train. Statesmen, soldiers, and patriots had been succeeded by self-seeking politicians and ambitious tradesmen, who disdained to be burghers and aspired to the luxury and ostentation of merchant princes. “Taste” now became the shibboleth, and it was a taste that aped

the standards and manners of the French, whose influence became more and more powerful in Holland as the seventeenth century drew to a close.

Gerard de Lairesse, a painter of Flemish extraction, who settled in Amsterdam in the sixties, helped to establish the vogue of “taste.” He had a considerable following of students and dilettanti to whom he expounded his views on art, assailing the vulgarity of such as Hals, and advocating the courtly style by which the theme is “ennobled.” He himself introduced the fashion for historical pictures, vapid and theatrical; and these qualities, interpreted in a minute and precise style, found their way into genre. The Dutch interiors became transformed into palatial chambers, decked with columns, amid which the inmates strut and pose with affectation of superior elegance and refinement. Such are the genre pictures of Caspar Netscher. Now and then, as in A Lady at the Clavichord of the Dresden Gallery, his motive and execution remind us that he had the privilege of being a pupil of Terborch; but these moments are rare. Usually his pictures are but petty and meretricious echoes of the great days of genre. Nor are his portraits less trivial. They are numerously represented in the Rijks Museum and other galleries, suggesting the popularity that he enjoyed and also explaining it; for, with few exceptions, they exhibit the shallowness and display of a society that, like the jackdaw in the fable, has borrowed the plumes and is aping the manners of the peacock. The same is true of the portraits of Godfried Schalcken, who also indulged in genre that supplemented the poverty of the artistic mo{126}tive by the mild humor of its subjects. To these names of the decadence may be added that of Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland.

Before completing the story of Dutch genre with a separate notice of Terborch, Jan Steen, and Vermeer, allusion must be made to the “society pictures.” Their prototype appears in Flemish painting, in such canvases of fashionable life as we have already noted by Lucas van Valckenborch. The Dutch development of this motive, however, produced smaller canvases, very carefully composed, with superior quality of color and skilful rendering of detail. The leader in this class of picture was Dirck Hals (1591-1656), who was a pupil of his brother Frans; and it is the latter’s corporation pictures that became the model for corresponding groups of “society people,” banqueting, engaged in concerts, or disporting themselves in garden-parties. Dirck’s pictures are bouquets of gay color, animated with lively and characteristic action, and, notwithstanding their slightness of motive and superficiality of technique, form attractive spots in the galleries of Europe. He, like the rest of the society painters, varied these subjects with others of an unfashionable and sometimes coarse description, involving the amusements of the soldiery on furlough or in the intervals of peace. Willem Cornelisz Duyster, who died in 1635, painted creditably both these kinds of picture; and two other names, frequently met with in the galleries and not unacceptably, are Palamedesz (1601-1673) and Pieter Codde (1600-1678).

CHAPTER VIII

GERARD TERBORCH, JAN VERMEER, AND JAN STEEN

TERBORCH is the aristocrat among Dutch painters, Rembrandt excepted. But Rembrandt’s is an aristocracy of genius, while Terborch’s is an aristocracy of talent and temperament. He owed something of this to his father, who, besides being a painter, held an official post in his native town, Zwolle, where Gerard was born in 1617. The father had enlarged the horizon of his life, by travel and the study of foreign languages, and the son followed his example. He was already a good draftsman, when he moved to Haarlem to study with the landscape-painter, Pieter Molyn. After three years spent in Haarlem, during which he experienced the influence of Frans Hals, he spent some time in England and later in Italy. Then followed some five years in Amsterdam, where he profited by the example of Rembrandt. In 1646 he went to Münster, in Westphalia, being present there during the negotiations of the peace, mingling with the delegates and painting portraits, which he afterward embodied in the famous group-picture, The Peace of Münster, now in the National Gallery, to which it was presented by the late Sir Richard Wallace. On the completion of this picture in 1648 he visited Spain and made the acquain{128}tance of Velasquez and his work. Returning to Holland, he spent four years in Zwolle, and then, in 1654, the year in which he married Gertrude Matthyssen, settled in Deventer. Here he continued to reside until his death in 1681.

All these details of his career are pertinent, for they point not only to the various influences, successively of Hals, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, under which he came, but also to the scarcely less important fact that he had mixed with a variety of men of parts and consequence and become acquainted with various kinds of civilizations. His experiences enabled him to form a very distinguished technique of his own, and at the same time cultivated in him an extraordinarily refined taste and a very high regard for the dignity of human nature. In technique, taste, and point of view he became essentially a true aristocrat.

His portraits eminently epitomize these qualities. Usually very small in size, they suggest Velasquez in miniature; exhibiting the same discretion in avoiding unnecessary accessories, the same eloquent use of blacks and grays, occasionally relieved with old rose or blue, and, despite their minuteness, a corresponding breadth and distinction of fluency and simplicity. All these traits of technique are the expression of his attitude toward his subject, which is essentially one of respect for its humanity. This attitude is a rarer one in portrait-painting than might be expected. Certainly in the Dutch School one is not impressed with its prevalence. There is characterization, good, bad, and indifferent, and the suggestion of the subject’s position in his or her social

environment, but of the reverence for humanity as such, very little. Indeed, outside of the portraits by Rembrandt, Terborch, and occasionally Maes, I question if you will often find it.

A similar reverence for humanity and its environment—the product, I take it, of the artist’s high-bred respect for himself and his art—distinguishes also Terborch’s genre pictures. He began by painting guardroom scenes and continued to be fond of subjects in which officers and soldiers figured. Sometimes the circumstances are equivocal, but their salience is not enforced; indeed, as Bode points out, the models for the ladies appear to have been his sisters, while his brothers posed for the military. The scene and the occasion are but an excuse for a picture. In fact, the subject counts with him for very little; it is the pretext that it offers for pictorial representation in which he is interested first and last. And to this he brings an extraordinary degree of refined sensibility and of virile and at the same time exquisite realization.

The virility appears in the drawing and construction of his figures, to which Fromentin has paid so high a tribute in his analysis of The Gallant Soldier, in the Louvre. And, as the French critic points out, in discussing the representation of the man’s shoulder and arm, it is a virility tempered with extreme sensibility. It has nothing of the improvisation of Hals in the following of surfaces, but rather Velasquez’s mastery of plane-construction; only here, in the case of this small figure, it is not with the open palm but with most sensitive touch of finger-tips that we imagine ourselves discovering the{130} reality of the form. Or, again, examine the wonderful example of drawing in The Concert of the Berlin Gallery, where the foreground is occupied by a seated figure of a lady, whose back is toward us, as she plays the violoncello. Even more remarkable than the fine structural reality of the figure is its play of expression, as it bends over the instrument and seems to be vibrating to the touch of the strings. Again, what extraordinary realization of action, at once broadly and subtly characterized, appears in the two figures of Officer Writing a Letter, in the Dresden Gallery; or, in the same museum, in the figures of the mistress and her maid in Lady Washing Her Hands; or in the action of the hands followed so absolutely by the gesture of the head in the Old Woman Peeling Apples of the Art-History Museum, Vienna! These are but examples, taken more or less at random, of Terborch’s gift of drawing, which in its mingling of virility and exquisite sensibility is unsurpassed in Holland painting.

Nor less admirable is the marvelous unity that he imparts to the whole scene. Tonality has much to do with it, yet that is but a means. The cause is in himself, in the reverence that he has even for the accessories in his pictures; and the result is a harmony that is at once esthetic and intellectual. Mind, as well as taste, has ordered everything. All the artists of Dutch genre had more or less the faculty of heightening the value of beauty in the accessories they used; but none, not even Vermeer, to so extraordinary a pitch of artistic propriety as Terborch.{131}

His discretion in the selection is so choice, and his feeling for arrangement at once so big and simple and so concentrated, that the presence of his own high-bred feeling pervades almost every interior he has painted and makes its privacy a thing of exquisite aloofness and, if I may say so, of consecrated self-possession.

Equally distinguished is Terborch’s use of color. His gamut of local hue is larger than Vermeer’s, and his treatment of values scarcely less subtle; while his feeling for color is, I believe, superior. He has the faculty of raising a local color to its highest power of esthetic suggestion; witness the lady’s jacket in The Concert of the Berlin Gallery, a gallery, by the way, exceptionally rich in examples of this artist’s work. To specify its color we may call it salmon, but this only vaguely suggests its place on the palette; the precise register of its hue and, still more, its quality are indescribable. Similarly evasive and yet profoundly suggestive is his treatment of blue, yellow, red, black, and the hues of gray from drab to pearly white. These are enveloped in tonality. For in this respect particularly Terborch differs from Vermeer. The latter in his most characteristic pictures shows himself a student of daylight. But in Terborch’s pictures, so far as I recall them, there appears no window; the interior is dim, and the light has no pretensions to being natural. It is a studio invention, distributed or concentrated to suit the imagined scheme of harmony, Vermeer is, in the modern phrase, a plein-airist, while Terborch, true to the traditions of the Dutch School, is a tonalist. It is in the invention and realization of his{132} tonal scheme that he is the superior of the other genre tonalists, and the reason in the final analysis is that to taste and technique he brought the refining discretion of a superior quality of mind.

JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER OF DELFT

Johannes or Jan Vermeer, who is also called Johannes van der Meer of Delft, was born at Delft in 1632. His life was spent continuously in this city until his death in 1675. There are records to show that he studied with one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Carel Fabritius, and that he was not only a high official in the local Guild of St. Luke, but highly esteemed in his community. After his death, however, his very existence as a painter of the Dutch School was forgotten, and his pictures, very few of which bear signatures, were attributed to a Vermeer of Haarlem and to another painter of the same name in Utrecht, and to De Hooch and others. The reason for this seems to have been the unaccountable omission of the artist’s name in Houbraken’s book of Dutch painters. Anyhow, the silence of more than a century and a half was not broken, until the French connoisseur Thoré, who wrote under the nom de plume of “W. Bürger,” attracted by the beauty of some of the signed pictures, set on foot an investigation which resulted in the rehabilitation of Vermeer. Since then criticism has disproved some of Bürger’s ascriptions, but included other pictures, until now there are thirty assigned with certainty to Vermeer’s brush. A few others, shown

by the records to have existed, are as yet unidentified; but it is assumed that the total output of his twenty years of activity did not much exceed the number already discovered. It falls far short of the productivity of most of the Dutch painters—a fact which has been explained by the scrupulous care with which Vermeer painted, and the degree of perfection to which he wrought each canvas.

The appreciation of Vermeer’s art has increased rapidly during the last twenty-five years, until to-day he is generally ranked as the finest of the artists of genre, and, as a painter, without rival in the Dutch School, while some are disposed to consider him the most accomplished painter in the history of art. These extreme admirers are, as a rule, painters, who find in Vermeer’s technique and point of view precisely what they value most highly in painting. For this artist is a modern among moderns. He is not so in the sense that Rembrandt’s influence is now being felt. The latter is indirect in its suggestion of a conception of beauty other than the classical, and in its equally indirect suggestion of the expressional value of light and of the symbolic use of form and color. Rembrandt’s appeal is rather to the mind; Vermeer’s to the eye. He saw the world as the modern painter sees it, enveloped in natural light, and rendered it, as the modern painter tries to render it, by a close discrimination of delicately different values. To produce a harmony he did not introduce an arbitrary tonality, but, following nature’s plan, drew all the local colors into a balanced relation by the unifying effects of diffused light. In this respect Vermeer was unique in the Dutch School, and it is because the artist of to-day, if he is alive to the modern{134} spirit, works with the same motive and in the same way, that he prizes Vermeer so highly. If, as one enthusiast remarked to me, “the whole art of painting consists in the right relation of values, and there can be no doubt that it does, then Vermeer is the greatest painter that ever lived.”

The value of the criticism, of course, depends upon the acceptance of the major premise, respecting which this individual had no doubt. On the other hand, one may beg to doubt it, without depreciating Vermeer. For it comes dangerously near the position that the whole art of painting consists in its technique; it is an echo, in fact, of that old shibboleth of our youth, “art for art’s sake.” It lays undue stress on the purely sensuous appeal of painting, upon the “mint and cummin,” and neglects the “weightier matter” of possible appeal to the higher faculties of the imagination. Moreover, it overlooks the fact that the method which Vermeer brought to such perfection, and which because of its perfection is so justly admired, is essentially one for small canvases. And it was not until Vermeer settled down to these that he developed his characteristic style.

The earliest of his dated pictures is The Proposal, in the Dresden Gallery, which belongs to the year 1656. The figures are of life size, and the treatment is proportionately broad, almost “rough” as Bode says, who adds: “It does not yet show us Vermeer in his developed individuality.” Yet some elements of the latter are already established: the superb plasticity in the modeling of the forms and the frank enjoyment in local colors, the lemon yellow of the girl’s jacket forming a splendid spot

against the equally brilliant scarlet of the young man’s coat. Again, a minor point, an Oriental rug of crimson and yellow and blue design appears here as in later pictures, such as the Girl with Water-Jug of the Metropolitan Museum. But the Dresden masterpiece of the artist’s youth—he was only twenty-four—differs from his later work not only in the size of the figures and breadth of brushwork, but also in the treatment of the chiaroscuro. The scene is not illumined with diffused light, but with a stroke of light which gives brilliance to the two principal figures and leaves the subordinate ones in shadow. It is an arrangement, suggestive of the example of Rembrandt, and hints at the fact that the picture was produced while Vermeer was still close to the influence of his teacher, Carel Fabritius.

Another early example, betraying the same influence, is Diana at Her Toilet of the Hague Gallery, which in the 1905 edition of the Catalogue is still assigned to Vermeer of Utrecht, though later criticism accepts it as by the artist of Delft. Closely following in subject a Diana and Her Nymphs, painted by Jacob van Loo in 1648, which is now in the Berlin Gallery, this picture is in the freer, looser method of The Proposal, and even repeats the same colors of red and yellow, though subtilized here to a delicate rose and a kind of snuff color. The light is still partially distributed so as to dapple the figures, and these are painted with a flickering brushstroke that helps to increase the fluttering effect of the light.

Two other examples have been acquired in recent years by the Hague Gallery: an allegorical picture, The New Testament, and Head of a Girl. In both are intro{136}duced the cool blue and white that characterize many of Vermeer’s later pictures. The subject of the former, which is owned by Dr. Bredius of The Hague, is curiously affected, representing a lady in blue and white silk costume, resting her foot on a globe, as she sits beside a table on which are a crucifix, chalice, and book. On the wall behind her hangs a large picture of Christ upon the cross, attended by Mary and John; and on the left of it is a superb tapestry of orange, blue, and mellow green, while a crystal ball is suspended from the ceiling. In contrast with the glowing warmth of the curtain and the shadowed warmth of the picture on the wall, the lady’s figure presents a cool, white-lighted spot. The plastic feeling is strongly pronounced, the brushwork wonderfully limpid and firm, and the tonality extraordinarily fine. For the picture is still a study of tone, in which it differs from the Head of a Girl. For the latter is represented in a clearly diffused light, which is brightest around the head, and illumines in a subtle way the tender flesh-tints of the face, the bluish-white linen head-dress, and the bright full blue of a portion of the gown. The face wears a charming expression of concentration. This picture, indeed, very decidedly forecasts Vermeer’s developed individuality, yet Bode places it among his earlier pieces, about 1656. To this period also probably belongs the beautiful Sleeping Girl, recently acquired from the Rudolph Kann Collection by Mr. B. Altman.

To a somewhat later date following close on 1656 Bode assigns the View of Delft, one of the greatest treasures of the Hague Gallery. There is a record of its sale in 1696, together with two other landscapes, one of{137} which has disappeared, while the other is in the Six Collection in Amsterdam. The Hague picture is an unusual example of the artist, not only because it is a landscape, but also because of the warm light that pervades it. From a triangle of rosy yellowish foreground one looks across the quiet sheet of grayish-blue water to the line of houses of reddish-drab and brown bricks, and red and blue and yellow roofs, above which shows a high expanse of sky. The coloring, which again, it is to be observed, includes red and yellow, is brilliantly variegated, yet held in control by the stretches of sky and water. The ensemble is superbly artistic, while as a presentation of a late afternoon scene it could not be surpassed in naturalness. The picture, in fact, stands out among all the landscapes of the seventeenth century as being extraordinarily modern in feeling and manner, and its influence has been very great in the modern development of landscape-painting in Holland.

Another picture of the period immediately following 1656 is The Cook, in the Rijks Museum. She is standing in front of a whitish wall, lighted from a window on the left, pouring milk into a red earthenware pitcher that stands upon the table. The latter hides the lower part of her figure, which is clad in a lemon-colored body, reddish-brown skirt, and deep-blue apron, while a white cap covers her head. Here in these details—cap against light wall, prominent note of blue, the three-quarter length of figure, the cool lighting from a window on the left, lastly, the plasticity of the form—we find the ingredients of Vermeer’s later manner; but as yet the brushwork has not the limpid exquisiteness, compressed{138} yet fluent, of his full development. On the contrary, it is broad, inclined to roughness, loose and free, magnificent in the gusto with which it has been applied, and vigorously stimulating in its appeal to sense imagination.

Also in the Rijks Museum is a picture which recalls the fact that De Hooch was a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Delft from 1655 to 1657, and that, while he benefited most by contact with Vermeer, the latter was also somewhat influenced by him. For in this picture, The Letter, Vermeer seems to have experimented, not over-successfully, with De Hooch’s device of showing one room beyond another. For an anteroom opens into two others, side by side, in one of which on the black and white marble floor a lady is seated in an amber dress trimmed with ermine. She pauses in her playing of a lute to take a letter from a servant. The picture is exceedingly choice in color and technique, but the composition is a little awkward in its division into two parts—a device, by the way, that recalls De Hooch’s The Visit, owned by Mrs. Henry O. Havemeyer, the composition of which is open to a similar criticism.

Again, in the Rijks Museum is Young Woman Reading a Letter. Here in the delicate modeling of the face one observes the exquisite gray tones that distinguish so many of the examples of Vermeer’s fully developed style. Also notable is the arrangement of the composition, the girl facing left, her feet hidden by a chair and table, the latter forming a dark spot so as to increase the luminosity on the figure and the wall. It is repeated very closely in The Lady with a Pearl Necklace of the Berlin Gallery, where chair and table occupy the same

position, and the girl stands between them with her hands similarly raised, only as she holds the necklace she looks up, instead of down to the table as in the other picture. She wears a canary-colored jacket edged with ermine, that appears again in Mrs. Collis P. Huntington’s Lady with Lute. In the Berlin picture it sounds a note of liveliness that is exquisitely sustained in the silvery resonance of the lighted room; the effect of which is induced by the tones of olive in her skirt and the table-cloth, by a deep almost colorless blue drapery over the latter, and a shaft of dull yellow, formed by the velour of the window-curtain. The ensemble, in fact, is one of piquant decision and indescribable delicacy, illustrating Vermeer’s faculty of sight imagination, so that he not only renders what he sees, but actually creates.

Between Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s Lady Writing and The Lace-Maker of the Louvre there is a remarkable companionship of arrangement and feeling. In each case the figure is seated, bending over a table; the jacket is canary-colored, and blue is introduced in the table-cloth of the former picture and in a cushion in the other, while in both the sensitive expression of the head and hands is echoed in the delicate precision of the objects on the table. In both cases the luminosity of the scene is enhanced by a shadowed mass on the left of the foreground. Mr. Morgan’s picture in loveliness of color, exquisiteness of handling, and inexpressibly subtle feeling rivals its sister piece of the Louvre.

It is in this element of feeling alone that these two pictures possibly excel the Girl with Water-Jug of the Metropolitan Museum. For the latter’s beauty of color, with its deep bell-like note of blue and the resonance of{140} blue, more or less faintly hovering over the cap and kerchief and permeating the atmosphere, is unsurpassable. Perfect also is the handling of this picture, both as to its suggestion of the plastic reality of everything represented and its consummate delicacy of manipulation; while in one particular it surpasses both the others and is in Vermeer’s finest possible manner. This is the extraordinary propriety with which each detail of the composition is introduced. Everything has been selected and placed with the choicest discretion; nothing is confused or unexplained, everything is a triumph of incomparable simplicity and exquisite adjustment. Only, I repeat, in feeling; in the expression of the head, arms, and hands is there lacking something of the exquisite finesse of the above two pictures and of certain other examples.

Occasionally, as in The Coquette of the Brunswick Gallery, A Lady at a Spinet, in the National Gallery, and The Music Lesson, owned by Mr. Henry C. Frick, the figures display a consciousness of themselves or of the onlooker; their personality looks out from its own surroundings. On the other hand, it is rather a characteristic of Vermeer as of Terborch, that the people in his pictures seem immersed in themselves. The scene is wrapped in privacy, undisturbed by the suggestion of an outsider. But the most signal instance of a scene, actually arranged, and posed as if to be viewed by others, is the example of The Artist in His Studio, in the Czernin Gallery, Vienna. In color and mingled breadth and delicacy of treatment it is superb; but in place of the artist’s usual sincerity of feeling, it is possible to detect a suspicion of affectation.

A signal example of Vermeer’s sincerity and, inasmuch as it is a portrait, unique, hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. It is the Portrait of a Lady. She is heavy-featured and of homely type, rather resembling the woman in the Rijks Museum picture, The Cook. A white cap tightly grasps her head; a broad white collar, fastened with a tuft of gold braid, falls over her black dress, the cuffs of which are of white lawn. She folds her hands at the waist, one of them in a cream kid glove, trimmed with gold braid, the other suspending its fellow, while she holds a black fan. The face is relieved on one side by greenish-black transparent shadows and wears an expression of dull self-oblivion that is almost poignant and gives to the portrait a grave distinction.

In conclusion, it is worthy of note that Vermeer’s painting-career of scarcely more than twenty years passed from its experimental stage to a full development from which there was no decline. He did not toward the finish lapse from his finest ideals, like Maes and De Hooch, nor mingle pot-boilers with masterpieces in the manner of Jan Steen. He maintained consistently the artistic integrity of a scrupulously exacting conscience.

JAN STEEN

Jan Steen was the chameleon of Dutch painting. Besides genre he essayed portraiture and Biblical subjects; alternated between small and large canvases; at one time suggests a recollection of some other artist, by turns Van Ostade, Terborch, Maes, Metsu, Van Mieris, or even{142} Vermeer; at other times is incomparably himself, and still again not infrequently falls below his own standard. He has left more examples than any other genre artist; for dozens mentioned in old catalogues have disappeared, yet still some five hundred survive. He is numerously represented in public and private collections, yet in so many styles and varieties of quality that his artistic personality is apt to seem evasive, while the impression he arouses is by turns one of enthusiasm, indifference, and resentment.

By degrees, however, his personality emerges, as one becomes conscious of a trait that is shared by all his pictures. It is their liveliness of characterization, exhibited not only in the individual figures, but also in the inventiveness of grouping and in the peculiar vivacity with which the spirit of the scene has been rendered. He is of all the genre artists the supreme delineator of Dutch life among the lower middle classes in the Leyden and Haarlem of his day; depicting it, by turns, with something of the large-heartedness of a Shakspere, the wit and satire of a Molière, and the coarseness of a Rabelais. But in every vein, whether of broad survey or trenchant scrutiny, he is human; for the most part genial in his outlook, and always fresh in observation. It is probably because of this that Waagen characterizes him as “next to Rembrandt certainly the greatest genius among the painters of the Dutch School,” an opinion which is shared by W. Bürger (Thoré), while Dr. Bredius styles him “the greatest genre painter of the seventeenth century, one of the wittiest delineators of human folly, the character painter par excellence.{143}”

The standard, in fact, by which these and other admirers test him, and which must be applied by every one who would reach a just estimate of this many-sided artist, is bigger than that of technique. Steen drew well, but could be slipshod and incorrect in drawing; exhibited an extraordinary gift of improvised and occasionally studied composition, yet could huddle his canvases with a superabundance of material; in one picture would display a fine sense of color, to lose it in another; now would work with a juicy and limpid brushstroke, now in a thin method as dry as brick-dust, and could be indifferent to tonality, while at other times a tonalist of choice distinction. Therefore you cannot measure him as you do a Terborch or a Vermeer, or, indeed, range him for comparison alongside of any of the other genre artists. With them, at their best, the pictorial representation is the chief concern, and they invite you to judge them by their technique. But it is otherwise with Steen. You cannot hold him to so narrow a test, any more than you can Shakspere. Both are technicians who at times throw technique to the winds. You may regret it or resent it; but, to be just, must condone the fact in face of the bigness that looms behind.

The jovial humanity of Steen and the joy that he took in humorous characterization were responsible for the deficiencies he often exhibited as a painter. He would frequently be more interested in the subject than in the technicalities of an artistic problem; which, as we have seen, is precisely the reverse of the attitude that most of the great genre painters came to adopt. They were concerned primarily with the making of a picture; Steen was{144} quite frequently engrossed with the delineation of a phase of life. He was so interested in the story-telling element of the subject that under some circumstances he permitted himself to supersede the pictorial quality of the presentation. This should be frankly recognized in approaching the study of Jan Steen, otherwise by coming upon one or two of his inferior examples we may be led into a hasty depreciation of this great artist.

He belonged to an old respected family of Leyden, where he was born about 1626, his father being a brewer in prosperous circumstances. The son’s name is inscribed in the records of the University of Leyden, as having been one of its students in 1646; then we hear of him as a pupil of Nicolaes Knupfer, the painter of genre and of Biblical and mythological subjects. Afterward Steen studied with Jan van Goyen, whose daughter Margaret he married. He was one of the first members of the local Guild of St. Luke, established in 1648. From 1649 to 1654 he lived at The Hague; then returned to Leyden for seven years, during which time he owned a brewery near Delft. From 1661 to 1669 he resided at Haarlem, but in the last year lost his wife and returned to Leyden, where he remained until his death in 1679. In 1672 he had obtained permission from the magistrate of Leyden to maintain a café at his house, and the following year took a second wife, Maria van Egmont, the widow of a local bookseller. Houbraken states that they lived happily together, though their larder was often ill-stocked; but he is not so charitable toward Steen’s connection with the liquor trade. This fact, coupled with the jovial character of the artist’s pictures and enlivened

by hearsay information from a painter, Carel de Moor, led this story-monger into much tittle-tattle about the artist’s reckless habits. To-day, by the best authorities, this view of Steen is discredited. It is, however, quite clear that he was often in desperate states; for example, in the February after his first wife’s death an apothecary seized his goods and sold his pictures to satisfy a debt of ten florins! But the reason was not idleness, for he was the most prolific painter of his day; it is to be found in the miserable price for which he had to sell his work. No wonder he tried to eke out his finances by keeping a brewery, which, by the way, was a privilege specially granted at that time only to a few families of particular respectability. As to the café, since he had to turn to trade, he naturally adopted the one with which his family had been connected; the disgrace, if there were any, not being his, but the public’s, who paid him better for drinks than for his pictures.

So far as the dates on his pictures show, his period of production lasted for twenty-five years, from 1653 to 1678, so that his output averaged more than twenty pictures a year. The best period may probably be reckoned during the years from 1654 to 1669, which covered his second sojourn in Leyden and his visit to Haarlem. His family was growing up around him, and the children from year to year figure in his pictures, and his handsome wife, Margaret, appears as a center of kindliness and comfort, while his own person often adds the note of jollity. To these pleasant times belong the incomparable “family scenes”—A Homely Scene, The Feast of St. Nicholas, and The Happy Family of the Rijks Mu{146}seum; The Christening Party of the Berlin Gallery; While the Old Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe of the Hague Gallery; and the Cassel Gallery’s Twelfth Night, where Margaret appears for the last time, since the picture was painted in the year of her death.

These and other group-pictures, such as The Prince’s Birthday of the Rijks Museum, are works of genius, unique in painting. For they are not constructed according to the methods of the schools, but are the products of a natural gift of seeing and rendering naturally a glimpse of busy life. Yet with a tact that avoids confusion; places everything in its own plane of space with admirable precision and propriety; leaves no intervals of uncertainty or obscurity; but secures to the whole an artistic reasonableness and completeness; and all this with an art that conceals art, and makes the scene appear to be one of complete naturalness. No other artist has ever reconciled nature and art quite so happily; and when one passes from the technical appreciation to a study of the varieties of character, depicted in the personages of all ages from the baby to the grandparents, and notes the mingling of humor and tenderness in the sentiment and the embracing large-heartedness that has inspired the whole, it is to marvel at and rejoice in the uniqueness of Steen’s genius.

Then, by way of contrast, mark his treatment of a subject in which only a few persons figure. To myself his series of medical visits presents perhaps the most charming example of this concentrated phase of his art. Witness The Sick Lady of the Rijks Museum, where the young woman sits with her head supported by a pil{147}low, its whiteness against the pallor of her face, while the doctor stands counting her pulse. It is a masterpiece of tender characterization, for here the physician also is gentle and solicitous. However, he is not so in A Doctor Visiting a Sick Young Woman (No. 166) of the Hague Gallery. There he is boorish in appearance and suggests ignorance; in rough contrast to the pathetically fragile little lady, lying in bed and so ruefully gazing at the medicine-glass in the maid’s hand. The picture is not dated, but I wonder if it was painted after the artist’s rude experience with the apothecary who sold him up for ten florins! Again, in The Doctor’s Visit of the National Gallery, the man presents a different trait of behavior. It is not tenderness toward a delicate young thing as in the Amsterdam picture, but respectful solicitude toward an older woman, who, by the way, reminds one of Steen’s wife, Margaret. She is dressed in a jacket of old rose, edged with fur, and a silvery-blue skirt, while the doctor wears a suit of black with olive velvet sleeves. In the Amsterdam picture his black costume is relieved by a silk cloak of ashy brown, while the young woman is in pearly-gray satin, trimmed with white fur, a peep of blue slipper appearing from beneath the skirt. In fact, the color of these pictures is exceedingly choice; differing from the richness and liveliness of the family groups; corresponding in its subtle delicacy to the delicate pointedness of the characterization that is not without a certain dry flavor of wit.

It is between these two extremes of generous freedom and highly wrought restraint that the pendulum of Steen’s art swings, with such wealth of variety that it is{148} impossible to specialize further. However, a word or two must be said in conclusion about his treatment of Biblical subjects, of which The Marriage at Cana and The Expulsion of Hagar, both in the Dresden Gallery, may be cited as typical examples.

Steen’s treatment of Biblical, as of occasional mythological, subjects was purely in the vein of genre; not, however, with any resort to emotional or dramatic appeal, as in the case of Rembrandt. In translating the old scene into the vernacular of Dutch middle-class or low-class life, Steen preserves nothing of its religious significance, or even of its epic dignity. The theme with him becomes simply a vehicle for characterization and possible humor. Thus, in The Marriage at Cana, Christ is standing at the table in the act of blessing a Dutch wedding-party, but all this is in the background. The salient features of the scene are occurring in the foreground, where a fat cellarer hands a glass of wine to a fiddler, and a slattern woman leans against a cask, giving a drink to a boy. In The Expulsion of Hagar, Sarah sits inside the door, “examining” the little Isaac’s head; Hagar weeps as Abraham sadly dismisses her: while Ishmael strings his bow, two spaniels are catching fleas, and sheep, cows, and poultry are scattered through the yard. Meanwhile, though the pictures make no appeal to the spiritual imagination, the sensuous imagination may be stimulated by the choiceness of their charm of color. Perhaps, however, if one wishes to epitomize Steen’s attitude toward the subjects he took from the Bible and the classics, one may best compare his rendering of The Disciples at Emmaus (Rijks Museum) with{149} Rembrandt’s treatment of the same subject in the Louvre. Instead of Christ being the pathetic center of divine illumination, as in the latter picture, Steen has placed Him in the shadow of the background, leaving the room, while the disciples, attended by a serving-woman, are gazing disconsolately at the table, which is garnished with—of all imaginably incongruous things—a lemon.{150}

CHAPTER IX

BIBLICAL SUBJECTS AND PORTRAITURE

TO the Dutch method of treating Biblical subjects we have already alluded in the case of Rembrandt and Jan Steen. It shows in common the motive of translating the story into the vernacular of Dutch life, accompanied on the part of Rembrandt with strong emotional and dramatic appeal, expressed by means of color and chiaroscuro. It was also Rembrandt’s practice to employ models selected from the Ghetto in Amsterdam. Among his followers was a group of men who emulated his treatment of Biblical subjects, while they also distinguished themselves in portraiture. Hence the convenience of considering these two branches of Dutch painting in the same chapter. Moreover, the incongruity between the two is not so great as it may appear at first sight, since the Dutch perpetuated the Flemish tendency, which was also German, of not only personifying the sacred characters by personages of their own day, but of reproducing so faithfully their characterization that the heads were practically portraits.

Among the pupils of Rembrandt who varied portraiture with pictures from the Bible story were, in order of their age, Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, Carel Fabri{151}tius, Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout, and Aert de Gelder; while another, who is known solely as a portrait-painter, was Dirck Dircksz Santvoort.

GOVERT FLINCK

This artist (1615-1660) began by being so close an imitator of Rembrandt’s method of chiaroscuro that many of his pictures used to be taken for his master’s; later, however, when the fashion for Italian art was revived, he abandoned the chiaroscuro and devoted himself to line and form. Indeed, he seems to have been an able opportunist; but to mistake him for Rembrandt suggests a shallow conception of the latter. Flinck’s Biblical masterpiece is probably the Isaac Blessing Jacob; in the Rijks Museum. The patriarch’s half-figure, as he sits propped up by pillows, is clad in a splendid crimson robe; the gesture of the arms is full of dignity, and the head crowned with the majestic character of old age. And the aged face of Rebecca is reverently characteristic. The color throughout is rich, and the light and shadow are warm and luminous. It is an effective rendering of a grave incident, but the latter has been seen rather than felt, and certainly not with the depth and poignancy of feeling that Rembrandt would have suggested. Another fine example of Flinck’s is in the Dresden Gallery—David Handing the Letter to Uriah. Crimson again appears in the king’s robe, contrasted with which is a large mass of golden yellow with red border, formed by the cloak of{152} a secretary at his side, while Uriah’s figure, kept in shadow, is clad in peacock blue and purplish brown. The whole forms a splendid scheme of color, and again the characterization is extremely interesting, especially that of the black-haired and-bearded king, who shows a certain mingling of hardness and nervousness in his face and demeanor. The treatment is seriously conceived, but with rather a faint grasp of the dramatic possibilities involved in the theme.

In the Angel and the Shepherds of the Louvre there is still less feeling for the scene, except in so far as it offered an opportunity for chiaroscuro. Even the composition is rather perfunctory, the shepherds being huddled on the right, balanced by a cow and sheep on the opposite side of the foreground, while the angel who brings the message of Christ’s birth appears above in the center with cherubs. Nor is the chiaroscuro satisfactory, for while there are some nice passages of color in the lighted parts, the shadows are without quality and seem used only as foils to the light, and not as having individual value. More successful in its recollection of the Rembrandt manner, and altogether a picture of considerable charm, is the classical subject, Diana and Endymion, in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna.

In the Dresden Gallery are two of the old-men studies that this artist frequently painted, while a more important example of his fondness for representing old age is shown in the Art-History Museum, Vienna. This Gray-Bearded Old Man suggests, like the others, the influence of Rembrandt, but superficially. It has the venerableness of old age, but not the power of expres{153}sion that makes Rembrandt’s treatment of this subject so spiritually compelling.

The Louvre has a charming Portrait of a Little Girl, in an olive-green dress, holding a spade. In arrangement of costume and choice of color it is quite Rembrandtesque. Again, in the Berlin Gallery is a very pleasing Portrait of a Young Woman. But it is in the Rijks Museum that the portraiture of Flinck can best be studied, both in corporation pictures and single figures. They vary in quality from the quite impressive bust portrait (No. 931) of M. Johannes Wittenbogaert (?), with its mellow flesh tints and strong suggestion of character, to the showy but perfunctory Fête of the Civil Guard, Münster,, 1648. In this there is no charm of flesh and little of fabrics. The whole is pompously theatrical, done apparently for “business,” with no eye to anything but satisfying the vanity of the subjects.

FERDINAND BOL

Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680) in the beginning of his career reproduced the manner of Rembrandt. His coloring was mellow and enriched by chiaroscuro. Later, about 1650, the chiaroscuro became less pronounced and the color insipid. While he is esteemed chiefly for his portraits, he also treated Biblical subjects, as may be seen by three examples in the Dresden Gallery and two in the Rijks Museum. The most pleasing of the Dresden pictures is Jacob Presented to Pharaoh by Joseph. There is a very characteristic look of scrutiny in Pha{154}raoh’s face, while his jewel-bespangled cloak, with its broad border of white and black fur, affords a fine mass of scintillating color, juxtaposed to the rich creamy costume of Joseph and the crimson of the old man’s. The picture, indeed, presents a very handsome color-scheme, though one may discover a certain stiffness and theatricality in the gesture of Joseph’s hands. The accompanying picture, Rest of the Holy Family during Its Flight into Egypt, is over six feet high and suggests a canvas too large for the material introduced, so that one third of it is filled up with supernumerary articles, such as a saddle and a basket of tools. One suspects that the picture may have been intended as a decoration for some wall-space, as the very large example in the Rijks Museum certainly was. For this, Abraham Receiving the Angels was one of five panels painted for a room in a house at Utrecht, the other four being now in the abbey of Middelburg in Zeeland. A mild reflection of Italian Renaissance feeling is suggested by the comme il faut disposition of the angels’ draperies, but their coloring of golden amber is finely Rembrandtesque; so, too, the glow of the yellowing beech-tree that spires up into the top of the composition, and the plum-gray velvet of Abraham’s robe. The picture, in fact, while shallow in its treatment of the incident, is finely decorative. On the other hand, the Salome Dancing before Herod, a work apparently of Bol’s later period, is an absurdly bad picture, bright and flimsy in color and entirely trifling as a study of form.

Of Bol’s capacity in portrait-painting a good example is Portrait of a Mathematician, in the Louvre. He is shown resting one arm on a balustrade, the body, in{155} black with a white collar, being in profile, while the gray-haired head, covered with a black cap, is facing round to the spectator, as he points with a ruler to a geometrical figure on a blackboard. It is a piece of honest characterization, blending vivacity and dignity. In quite a different vein is his portrait of a girl in profile in the Liechtenstein Gallery. She has soft pale blond hair, and the figure is enveloped in that yellow tonality which marks Bol’s transition from the Rembrandtesque manner to his later one. The girl with her protruding forehead bears a striking resemblance to a girl, painted by Rembrandt, in Room VI of the same gallery, and a comparison of the two pictures offers an interesting commentary upon the essential difference between the master and one of his most successful pupils.

Among five portraits by Bol in the Munich Pinakothek No. 338 may be specified as particularly handsome. It is that of a man with dark-brown hair and a mustache and imperial of lighter hue, possibly Govert Flinck. He wears a black cap and cloak and leans his arm upon a table. The following number in the catalogue is allotted to a portrait of this man’s wife. She is shown as far as the waist, where her hands are folded, the body full front, the head a little to the left. The face is beautifully modeled in clear flesh-tones, surrounded by golden-brown hair in ringlets. Beneath her white stomacher is a dull-red gown with olive sleeves. Thus the color-scheme is Rembrandtesque, with an envelop of warm amber atmosphere, while the serious sympathy with which the characterization has been rendered would not be unworthy of Bol’s great master.

Unfortunately, Bol by no means maintained this high{156} standard, as may be seen among the numerous examples of his portraits in the Rijks Museum. They mostly belong to his later period. The best is the earliest one, painted in 1657, representing the Six Governors of the Huiszittenhuis, seated round a table in black clothes and steeple hats. The heads are well characterized and the flesh-tones luminous; but an air of attitudinizing pervades the assemblage, which has rather the prim, set manner of a photographic group. And much the same feeling is aroused by the Four Governors of the Leper House, which is considered in Holland his masterpiece. In fact, it is not in the formal arrangement of a corporation picture, but in a single figure, that Bol is seen to best advantage. Yet some of the examples of these in the Rijks Museum, such as the Roelof Meulenaar and Maria Rey, are commonplace parodies of Rembrandt’s manner, while that of the sculptor Artus Quellinus is a parody of Van Dyck’s elegance. Bol, in fact, was an able assimilator of his master, Rembrandt, and as long as he retained the enthusiasm of his youth, painted creditable and often excellent portraits. Later, however, he drifted into the swim of social decadence, and his work is characterized by affectation, vapidity, and perfunctoriness.

CAREL FABRITIUS

Fabritius (about 1620-1654), after studying with Rembrandt, resided in Delft, where he became, it will be recalled, the teacher of Jan Vermeer. His life was prematurely cut short by the explosion of a powder-{157}magazine, while he was in the act of painting the portrait of Simon Decker, sacristan of the old church at Delft. In consequence, the number of his pictures is small, and some of those which appear under his name in the catalogues are of disputed attribution. He must have had a precocious talent, for the Portrait of Abraham de Notte, in the Rijks Museum, is dated 1640, when the artist was scarcely twenty. It is a bust portrait in which the black-haired head, set against a light background, is well enveloped in atmosphere, while the features are fluently modeled in warm, luminous tones. It proves him to have been an exceptionally apt pupil of the master, and helps to justify the attribution to him of the other picture in the Rijks Museum, The Decapitation of St. John the Baptist, a powerful and attractive work. A golden luminosity, rich in quality, pervades the whole canvas. The characterization of the figures is striking. The executioner, a sturdy, brutal figure, with a rubicund, swollen face, showing above his white shirt, holds the head upon a salver, with the absolute unconcern of a butcher serving meat. A corresponding lack of emotion is apparent in the two female figures, daintily dressed and of girlish refinement, Salome’s eyes gazing into vacancy with a wistful expression, while Herodias, looking but little older, gazes at the head with a slight air of curiosity. The conception of these women is early Italian rather than what one would associate with Dutch of the seventeenth century, and recalls the expression of Mantegna’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes. They suggest a sexless abstraction, moved by no active impulse, yet hauntingly fascinating in its{158} young passionlessness. In the Berlin Gallery a Study of a Man Praying is attributed to Fabritius, while in the Munich Pinakothek are two portraits of young men associated with his name. The bust portrait, No. 344, is definitely assigned to him, while the half-length, No. 345, once attributed to him, is now assigned to Rembrandt. It represents a young man with long hair parted in the center, who, holding a sheaf of paper and a pen, seems to have paused in his writing and is looking up and out of the picture with an expression of rapt meditation. In its different way it is akin to the expression of the Salome in the other picture. That so gravely fine a picture should have passed for a Fabritius suggests the character of the estimation which hangs about the memory of this artist, who did not live to fulfil the promise of his youth. Moreover, what is known and what is conjectured about him suggests the value of his influence upon Jan Vermeer, whose own tendency to give his figures a concentrated absorption may possibly be traced to this source.

GERBRANDT VAN DEN EECKHOUT

Eeckhout (1621-1674), the son of an Amsterdam goldsmith, was the first pupil to enter Rembrandt’s studio and one of his closest imitators. For example, in The Woman Taken in Adultery of the Rijks Museum, the face of the lonely figure of Christ is the center of light amid the coruscation of rich coloring formed by the costumes of the scribes and Pharisees, while a quieter note of dignity appears in the fine green and plum{159} draperies of the kneeling woman. The color is sonorous, yet its echo does not penetrate to the depths of the surroundings, the shadows of which are inclined to be opaque and unexplorable. Better in this respect, that its shadows are more luminous, is the Christ with the Doctors of the Munich Pinakothek. Here the strongest light centers on the head of an old rabbi, so as to bring out the color of his turban and beard while leaving his face in shadow; a device which makes the little face of the Child Christ, though it is clearly illuminated, seem by comparison pathetically insignificant. Meanwhile the light touches here and there the other figures in the group and penetrates their environment of shadow. It is worth while to compare this picture with the series of Biblical subjects by Rembrandt in the same museum, particularly the Adoration of the Shepherds. In the Berlin Gallery Eeckhout is represented by Raising of Jairus’s Daughter and a Presentation of Christ in the Temple. These pictures, particularly the latter, are wonderfully reminiscent of Rembrandt, finely composed in masses of light and shade and sumptuous in color. In a third example, Mercury and Argus, Eeckhout has treated this mythological subject with some charm. The young nude figure of Mercury, with a blue drapery over his knees, as he sits playing his pipe, is a charming white spot against the warm ruddiness of the rocky landscape, where beside a white and red cow the brown nude form of Argus is stretched, as if in sleep. Farther back in shadow are the sheep and goats. The feeling of the picture is pleasant; but its suggestion is inclined to be rather superficial.{160}

Of this artist’s portraits there is an example in the Brunswick Gallery and one excellent specimen in the National Gallery. This is The Wine Contract, in which the four governors of the Wine Guild of Amsterdam, dressed in black, are seated at a table, examining a contract.

AERT DE GELDER

De Gelder was a pupil of Rembrandt’s old age. He himself was not born until 1645, and, it is supposed, was little over fifteen when, after studying with Hoogstraten in their native city, Dordrecht, he went to Amsterdam. Then he returned to Dordrecht and resided there until his death in 1727. He is thus one of the latest of the artists of the period we are considering. An early work, dated 1671, directly inspired by Rembrandt, is in the Dresden Gallery. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple is a reproduction in color of Rembrandt’s well-known etching of this subject, worked out in red and brown and olive green, enveloped in a dull, warm glow, which, however, has more of mannerism than of suggestion to the imagination. The accompanying example in this gallery, An Important Document, shows a man and woman seated at a table, covered with a red cloth, examining a paper. The coloring is warm, the hands and faces, however, inclining to an unpleasant brickiness of red, while the whole aspect of the scene is lifelike but uninspired. The Dresden Gallery also owns the Portrait of a Halberdier, a well-painted and fairly interesting study of a stout man, with rosy, glowing face be{161}neath a fur-brimmed hat, whose uniform is of various tones of olive green.

De Gelder is also represented by three portraits in the Rijks Museum and by a Biblical subject, Judah and Thamar, in the Hague Gallery, but the best example of the latter kind is in the Museum of Art at Budapest. This Esther and Mordecai, dated 1685, shows the queen, seated at a table before an open book, resplendent in a brocaded and jeweled cloak and a tagged and tufted dress, listening while Mordecai, bending forward with humble admiration, addresses her. The coloring is rich and mellow, and the delineation of character, especially in the case of Mordecai, has considerable suggestion of the spirit of the story.

DIRCK DIRCKSZ SANTVOORT

If it is a fact, as generally supposed, that Santvoort (1610-1680) was one of Rembrandt’s pupils, he did not follow the master’s use of chiaroscuro, but rather the example of his elaborately detailed portraits. In Santvoort’s own case, as he may be studied in the Rijks Museum, this led at first’ to hardness of modeling, as may be seen in the portrait group of the Dirck Bas Jacobsz Family, dated 1634, where the stiffness of the composition is increased by the gaze of every face being focused to one point. Still hard, but full of character, is a later portrait, dated 1638, of Four Ladies of the Spinhuis. The latter was the house of correction, and these guardians and matrons look competent to rule it firmly.{162} More theatrical in arrangement, with hands pointing this way and that, is the Four Governors of the Serge Hall (1643). Meanwhile, three years earlier, Santvoort painted the single portrait of Frederick Dircksz Alewyn, which again is harsh in texture and bronze-like in color. On the other hand, the portrait of this man’s wife, Agatha Geelvinck, has a distinct charm. The light falls upon her forehead and soft hair, which is frizzed out with little curls, while the features are modeled with a dainty discretion that recalls a Florentine primitive. Then follow two portraits of children, respectively ten and nine years old, Martinus and Clara Alewyn. They are represented as a shepherd and shepherdess, the former in a rose tunic, with a scarf of goldish sheen, quite Rembrandtesque in quality, the latter in a satin dress of the hue of strawberries and cream. She carries a bow and arrow, and is accompanied by lambs, while the boy is attended by a black greyhound. The hands and faces are well modeled and have expression, while the painting throughout is fluent and limpid. The pictures are inclined to sentimentality, which, however, is more easily excused because of the youngness of the children and the painter-like quality of the technique.

BARTHOLOMEUS VAN DER HELST

From the above followers of Rembrandt, who reflect the manner but so little of the greatness of the master, it is a relief to turn to a portrait-painter who, while he owed something to Rembrandt in the way of chiaroscuro, was

an independent personality and one of force. It is Bartholomeus van der Helst, born in Haarlem in 1613, whose life, however, was spent in Amsterdam, where he died in 1670. It is in the Rijks Museum that he is most brilliantly represented, though his single portraits stud the galleries of Europe. Their usual feature is direct and vivid characterization, conveyed without much persuasiveness of manner, but singularly sincere. One example, however, the Portrait of Paul Potter, is an exception, being both in technique and feeling one of the most persuasive portraits to be met with. It has in it also a suggestion of the feeling for decorative arrangement, which was elaborated on so sumptuous a scale in the corporation pictures of the Rijks Museum.

In the chapter on Hals I alluded to Van der Helst as his inferior in composition and characterization. And the judgment stands, especially when you find yourself at Haarlem in the presence of the superb facility and quality of Hals’s genius. None the less, when you face the prodigious output of Van der Helst’s talent in the Rijks Museum, you realize that, while he was less efficient as a painter, less gifted with the ease, as it were, of improvisation, in his compositions, he had yet an exuberance of invention and a gusto for characteristic generalization, so amazing that from a distance one may be disposed to question if Hals, after all, was so much greater. At his best he undoubtedly was, having the artist’s fine gift of heightening the significance of what he handled, and even in his less memorable work exhibiting more or less of that magical manipulation which is itself an inspiration. Beside him Van der Helst is less{164} the artist than a mighty craftsman, and, when one grows enthusiastic over him, it is not because he has heightened the appeal of his material, but because he realizes so wonderfully the prodigal physical exuberance of his day. This reaches its culmination in his masterpiece, The Banquet of the Civic Guard (No. 1135). Grouped around the standard-bearer, who is in black velvet with a sash of the same blue silk as the flag, are some two dozen figures, arranged in natural positions, with easy gestures and heads and hands individually characterized. In these particulars and the treatment of the fabrics there is more than mere craftsmanship. The latter has been regulated by a superior order of intellect.

It is here that one seems to discover the essential difference between Van der Helst and Hals. The former is intellectually the bigger man, while Hals’s distinction is a superiority of feeling. His work, therefore, has the sensuous charm in which the other’s is deficient. When in the light of this you reëxamine Van der Helst’s masterpiece, it is to discover that what is lacking in it is the esthetic quality. The composition is not pervaded with atmosphere, in the various planes of which the figures might take on differences of subtle value; and, while there is an arrangement of light and shade, it is used only to assist the modeling of the figures, and with no feeling for heightening the beauty of the color-scheme by the luminosity of the hues. The result is that the scene, for all its assertion of vital force, is lacking in vivacity. The same test, applied to the other corporation pictures and single portraits by this artist in the Rijks Museum, corroborates the conviction that, apart{165} from Rembrandt, Van der Helst was the biggest intellectual force among the portrait-painters of Holland, but that he lacked the esthetic feeling and accordingly the quality of technique which alone make him inferior to Hals.

THOMAS DE KEYSER

Son of an architect and sculptor, Thomas de Keyser was born in Amsterdam, 1596 or 1597, and died there in 1667. His career is divided by a date about 1628. Before this his portraits are similar in character to those of Nicolaes Elias, with which they have been confused. The figures have a hardness and some stiffness, but unmistakable carrying power; the flesh is leathery, dull in color, and expressionless, and the composition either formally arranged in rows, or artlessly strung out in separate items. Thus his earlier portraits present a curious mingling of power and naïveté. They are representative of real people, but are not yet conceived with an artist’s eye. Then by 1628 a change begins to appear in De Keyser’s work, as it also did a few years later in that of Elias. Atmosphere creeps into his pictures; the flesh becomes more luminous, the composition at once more varied and more unified, and the figures, without losing their character, acquire amenity and dignity. It is said that De Keyser’s work influenced the young Rembrandt when he first settled in Amsterdam, and it would seem as if also the older man gradually gained something from the younger.

In the Rijks Museum an example of De Keyse{166}r’s early style is The Company of Captain Cloeck (No. 1300). It is true it is dated 1632; but it still exhibits the hard-fleshed, vacantly staring faces, the figures in unimaginative poses and in no atmospheric envelop, and spiritless treatment of the fabrics. But compare The Family Meebeeck Cruywaghen (No. 1349). Here the group is held together by a pleasing background of trees and house, bathed in a yellow glow. It is the homestead, and the comfort of it is reflected in the charming spontaneousness of feeling in the figures—father, mother, and grandmother, and six happy children. Each is delightfully individualized, and the expression of the whole picture is one of dignity and sweetness. Or for dignity, again, of a very refined order, take the equestrian Portrait of Pieter Schout (No. 1650). There is here a fine feeling for color, the black horse and its rider’s black hat and yellow coat showing grandly against the drab gray of the lofty sky, below which are sand-dunes with light-green verdure. The picture, though scarcely three feet high, has a sense of space and the bigness of a large canvas.

The startling difference between De Keyser’s two styles is well exemplified in the Berlin Gallery, where you can compare the hard spread-out arrangement in black dresses of An Old Lady and Her Three Daughters with the genial dignity of An Old Man and His Two Sons. An exceedingly interesting Portrait of a Woman hangs in the Museum of Art in Budapest. About fifty years old, she is seated in an arm-chair almost facing us; in a handsome black silk dress, trimmed with brown fur, with a wide starched ruff and a lawn cap

with wings over the ears. Her honest face is modeled in firm planes, and is ruddy with health. This painter-like and admirably human portrait is dated in the year that has been adopted as separating the artist’s two periods: namely, 1628.

Among the portrait-painters whose work exhibits the characteristic qualities of Dutch seventeenth-century art are Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt (1567-1641) and Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, both of whom lived at The Hague, where they are well represented in the Mauritshuis; Salomon de Bray (1597-1664), who lived in Haarlem, where he can be seen to best advantage, and Paulus Moreelse (1571-1638), who was born and lived the greater part of his life in Utrecht. To the average student of painting the last named is probably the most interesting. The others are highly esteemed in Holland, though it is pointed out that in the latter part of their lives quality gave way to quantity. Indeed, they were so prolific that one tires of trying to pick good examples out of the mass of mediocrity. In the case of Moreelse, however, it is different. His works, less numerous, have a choiceness of feeling and execution, his portraits of women and children being especially gracious in conception and treatment. Witness, for example, in the Rijks Museum the Maria van Utrecht and the portrait of a child of some seven years, The Little Princess. In place of breadth and freedom, these pictures are precise and meticulous in brushwork, the details of the costumes elaborately reproduced, the faces softly modeled with faint greenish-gray shadows. Yet{168} they have character and suggest reality and possess an undeniable charm. Somewhat broader in method is his Portrait of a Young Lady, in the Budapest Museum. Seen to the waist, she is in black velvet, with cuffs and a deep collar of exquisite point-lace. Her pleasantly thoughtful face is painted with a somewhat dull and heavy brush, yet the expression is that of life, and its charm is increased by the soft hair being worn in large rolls over the ears and confined in a cap, of which only the dainty edges of lace appear. It is a portrait of singularly choice refinement.

To the occasional portraiture of the genre artists Maes, Terborch, and Netscher we have alluded in another chapter.{169}

CHAPTER X

LANDSCAPE

IN the Berlin Gallery are two small examples of Holland Landscape with the Hamlet of Rhenen. They are by Hercules Seghers, whom Bode points to as the father of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape. Similar in general design, they are distinguished by a fine sweep of almost clear sky, swimming with vapor, from which a level country, dotted with the roofs and church towers of a hamlet and threaded by a stream, stretches in pale-yellow tones, broken up with brownish shadows, to the foreground. The identification of the scene and the assignment of these pictures to Seghers have been made possible by comparison with some etchings of the same artist that modern Dutch research has discovered. By the same means other pictures, including a Landscape in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, which used to be attributed to Rembrandt, have been restored to Seghers. This one again shows a plain, intersected by a stream, but bounded on the right by the abrupt shoulder of a mountain, whose top is merged in dark cloud, while the rest of the sky is an open expanse of whitish light. In the contrast of this with the dark tones of the ground, weirdly interspersed with fitful gleams, there is an extraordinary impressiveness. It is no wonder that it was mistaken for a Rembrandt; and the interest in{170} Seghers deepens when it is ascertained that Rembrandt himself was strongly influenced during his earlier years in Amsterdam by the older artist. This has been proved by a comparison of certain of the etchings of the two men.

Hercules Seghers, in fact, seems to have been in his own day very much what Michel was to the modern revival of landscape-painting in France. He was a forerunner of the later movement, but unrecognized by the world, while almost the only records that exist of him are documentary evidences of debts. He was born in 1590, probably in Haarlem; worked in Haarlem, Utrecht, and The Hague, but chiefly in Amsterdam, where he died about 1640.

In the few examples of his work that still survive, we can trace the twofold tendency of Dutch landscape: in one direction its note of simple truthfulness to the facts of nature, and in the other the tincture of these facts with a romantic spirit. And, in addition to thus setting the motive, Seghers proclaimed the Dutch artist’s fondness for effects of sky, for tonalities of grays and browns, sparingly enlivened with greens.

For the Dutch landscapists were tonalists. With the single exception of Jan Vermeer, who approximated the plein-air of modern art, they transposed the hues of nature into a scheme of color which is none the less arbitrary and unnatural, although it preserves the values of nature’s coloring. In comparison with the naturalistic achievements of the modern artist, who studies nature in her own environment of light and renders her hues as actual light affects them, the Dutch artist was a com{171}poser on the theme of nature, but not a naturalist. The same, however, in only a less degree, is true of the Barbizon artists. They, too, were composers of schemes of tonality, so that, students of nature though they were, their landscapes will not compare in naturalness of suggestion with the work of many a modern man who will probably never enjoy their fame. Let me add that I do not mean to imply by this the essential superiority of the modern landscape-painter. That is another question, and only to be decided by each person for himself, according as he selects or does not select naturalistic representation as the standard of his taste. To one who does not the tonal transposition may seem preferable. Both methods, indeed, have their warrant in art.

But I press the distinction because, unless it is recognized, Dutch landscape-painting cannot be properly appreciated. If people approach it, and it is my experience that many do, with modern plein-air achievements in their eye and basing their judgment upon them, they can only suffer disappointment. The Dutch paintings will seem “old-fashioned,” false to nature, and uninspired. On the other hand, once the necessary attitude is assumed of accepting this transposition of color and light phenomena of nature into an equivalent of tonal values, proper appreciation is possible. Then one begins to study the examples partly for the quality of their tonality, partly for the degree in which they embody the character and spirit of the landscape, and partly, and probably chiefly, for the quality of the artist’s personality infused into them.{172}

REMBRANDT

Rembrandt was a master of both landscape motives, able alike to record with truthfulness the physical aspects of a scene or to infuse it with romantic suggestion; and nowhere more remarkably than in his etchings. In these, with a few lines that summarize the salient features of the scene, or with tonal effects of light and shade that elaborate and enrich the facts, he executed plates of pure landscape or of landscape as a setting for the figures. Among his paintings the examples of pure landscape are rare. The beautiful Tobit and the Angel of the National Gallery may be considered one, as the figures are insignificant, and another, which, however, is a sea-piece, is in the Liechtenstein Gallery (No. 606): water, dotted with a boat and a few distant sails, stretching back to a low horizon, over which spreads a vast open creamy sky, with some finely buoyant clouds. It is as a setting to figures, especially in the Biblical subjects, that Rembrandt’s use of landscape may best be studied. Here it serves as an orchestration to the theme, enriching it with sensuous and emotional suggestion, and giving a free range to the artist’s romantic and dramatic imagination.

PHILIPS KONINCK

Rembrandt’s best-known pupil in landscape was Philips Koninck, who was born in Amsterdam, 1619, and died there in 1688, some of his career being spent abroad.{173} The character of his work suggests that he, too, may have been influenced directly by Hercules Seghers, for he affected far-reaching panoramas of flat country, interrupted by occasional low hills and traversed by streams. A fine sky extends above the ground, which is constructed in tones of warm pale yellow, olive green, and reddish brown. Notwithstanding the comparatively large size of the canvases and the extent of the scene included, the latter has been felt so synthetically, as well as comprehensively, that there is no lack of unity. An excellent example is The Dunes, “The Valley of the Rhine near Arnheim,” owned by Sir William van Horne of Montreal. Another memorable example is in the Dresden Gallery, Dutch Landscape, a view from the dunes looking across the level country. This canvas is scarcely so large, but involves the same sense of bigness. The foreground, which shows some red-roofed cottages amidst the olive greens, is constructed in an ample way; a river occupies the middle distance, and the further plain is dotted with little trees. Overhead is a sky of drabbish gray and rosy cream. The Berlin Museum owns a handsome example with figure and cattle in the foreground, and the Rijks Museum contains two. Here also are to be seen four portraits by Koninck of Joost van den Vondel, two at the age of seventy-eight and two at eighty-seven; the subject evidently being a friend of the artist, for on the back of one of the pictures is a dedicatory inscription.

The great nursery of Holland landscape was the city of Haarlem. Van Goyen, it is true, belonged to Leyden,{174} while Amsterdam, which produced Seghers and Koninck, in course of time claimed many others. But the majority were citizens of Haarlem or at least spent a portion of their working life in that city. They include Salomon van Ruisdael and his nephew Jacob; Pieter Molyn, Jan Wynants, Allart van Everdingen, and the painters of landscape with animals and figures, Philips Wouwerman, Adriaen van de Velde, and Nicolaes Berchem.

Salomon van Ruisdael (about 1600-1670), it has been conjectured, may have been a pupil of Van Goyen’s because of a similarity between the early work of both, that has lead to their pictures being attributed to each other. But later the similarity disappears, Van Goyen displaying an ampler and more poetic style, while Salomon van Ruisdael continues to be the industrious painter of landscapes that, while admirably faithful to the appearance of nature, are comparatively prosaic in feeling. While he was a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem and lived there continuously, he visited other cities, for some of his pictures exhibit views of Leyden, Dordrecht, and Nimwegen. The characteristic of his work is a quiet, homely dignity, that, while it gives a pleasant record of the Holland of his day, seldom stirs one to enthusiasm. Perhaps his chief claim to recognition is that he was the teacher of Jacob van Ruisdael.

Pieter Molyn (about 1600-1661) was a successful teacher, who had the capacity to foster the individuality of his pupils. Among these the most famous was Gerard{175} Terborch, who occasionally collaborated with his master by introducing figures into his landscapes. Molyn’s own pictures were inclined to be meager in composition, and dryly precise in execution.

Jan Wynants (about 1605-1679), again, was fortunate in having a collaborator, for more than one hundred and fifty of his pictures were enlivened with figures by that skilful and attractive artist, Adriaen van de Velde. They add brilliance and animation to landscapes that in themselves are painstaking but apt to be monotonous.

Allart van Everdingen (1621-1675) is not to be confounded with his brother Cæsar, who was a rather indifferent painter of portraits, genre and historical pictures. Allart was a pupil of Pieter Molyn and then worked in Sweden, subsequently spending seven years in Haarlem and the last twenty-two years of his life in Amsterdam. His fame also rests on his connection with Jacob van Ruisdael, who was induced by the success of Everdingen’s Swedish landscapes to abandon the direct study of nature and to invent scenes of romantic impressiveness. In the Rijks Museum there is a chance, in Nos. 2078 and 907, to compare side by side the work of these two men. The result, I think, is to discover that, while they may use practically the same material in the same way, Ruisdael gives a character to each object, that makes you feel as if he had penetrated into the heart as well as the marrow of the scene, while Everdingen remains merely a lover and recorder of the picturesque.{176}

AERT VAN DER NEER

Van der Neer was born in Gorkum in 1603, and died in poverty at Amsterdam in 1677. In his youth he was steward in the family of the Van Arkels, and at this time only occasionally indulged his love of painting. Later he devoted himself to art, but found few purchasers for his pictures and was continually harassed by creditors, and at one time, like Jan Steen, kept a tavern. He is distinguished particularly for his winter and moonlight scenes, the best of which date from about 1646. They exhibit not only a close study of nature but a poetic feeling, which is deep and sincere and often very impressive. He was a painter of moods, expressing the sentiment usually in delicate tonalities, so delicate, indeed, that his pictures, hidden away in the corners of galleries or confronted with more robust pictures, seem at first monotonous and cold. It is not until, as Bode points out, they are isolated in a good light that their merit becomes apparent. This famous expert also compares the method of Van der Neer’s moonlight scenes with that of Rembrandt’s interiors. The latter projects a shaft of light into the hollow gloom, while Van der Neer represents a concavity of light, the luminosity of which is heightened by the shadows. His method, in fact, is the exact reverse of Rembrandt’s.

Two memorable examples of his moonlight scenes appear in the Berlin Gallery, where one is impressively somber, while the other is dramatically stirred by the yellow and red flare and turbid smoke from a burning{177} house, and figures in movement agitate the foreground. Others are in the National Gallery and in the Imperial Art Museum at Vienna. The example in the latter shows a darkened canal, with a boat, stretching back to a town that broods beneath a sky in which the moon rides at full, surrounded by fleecy clouds.

In the Vienna Gallery also is an example of one of his winter scenes, others appearing in the National Gallery and in the Wallace Collection. In these the artist indulges in a freer and livelier use of color, though the animation of the ground and its group of figures does not interfere with the delicate observation and sensitive feeling, that still regulate his treatment of the skies. It is on this that Van der Neer, like all painters of poetic moods, relies chiefly for expression.

In one of Van der Neer’s landscapes in the National Gallery, cattle were painted by Cuyp. The reminder may serve at this point of our story for an introduction to the important part played in Holland landscape by those artists who enlivened it with figures and animals.

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES AND ANIMALS

The popularity of this branch of painting in the seventeenth century can be explained by its affinity to genre painting. It is but a step from depicting a party of people in an interior to showing them engaged in some sport or occupation in the open air. The same tendency to depict the incidents of Dutch life, or to use such incidents as the theme of a pictorial presentation, ap{178}pears in both; and some of the artists of this out-of-door genre, Wouwerman, Adriaen van de Velde, Cuyp, and Berchem, reached proficiency that compares favorably with the masterpieces of interior genre. As for the fondness for depicting cattle, we may recollect how Troyon, after visiting Holland, turned from pure landscape to cattle studies, while every observant visitor to that country has enjoyed the spots of rich color which the grazing herds make in the far stretches of green pasture. They form one of the notable features of the Holland landscape, and it would have been surprising if the painters, so intent on the study of their home surroundings, had overlooked it. The signal member of this group of painters is Paul Potter.

PAUL POTTER

Potter is the prodigy among Dutch artists. At the age of twenty-two he produced a masterpiece that, despite its shortcomings, has compelled the admiration of the world. This is a work of trenchant, even brutal force, while the majority of his work, especially in his later years, wins by its charm of persuasiveness. He is personally known to us through the beautiful portrait by Van der Helst. It was painted in the year of Potter’s death, and shows him a man of distinguished mien, with soft auburn hair curling upon his shoulders, and a face that is marked by a high forehead, heavy-lidded eyes, a strong nose, and full, impulsive lips; a face upon which consumption has set the impress of fell refinement.

The son of an obscure painter, Potter was born at Enkhuizen in 1625. From 1646 to 1648 he resided at Delft, where his masterpiece, The Young Bull of the Hague Gallery, was painted. In 1649 he moved to The Hague and married the daughter of an architect, Adriana Balckeneijnde. In 1652 he moved to Amsterdam and continued to reside there until his death in 1654.

The Young Bull is an amazing achievement of self-discipline and almost passionate pursuit of truth. It suggests the attitude of the painter to have been that once and for all he would master the creature’s appearance. He set himself a great task of prolonged endurance and has carried it through to an extraordinary realization. The character of the beast, as it shows itself to the eye; the incidents of its form and carriage; the glossy pelt with its actual surface of hair, the brilliant eye, the damp nozzle—every detail is of life. Having completed this study, which established for himself the knowledge and skill he had sought and became a model for the instruction of other artists, he filled in the rest of the canvas in a somewhat perfunctory manner. The sky has good quality, but remains a background in the rear of the composition; the intermediate landscape, overspread effectively with a pale light, does not maintain its proper plane. The beasts in the foreground are as hard as wood, the details of the tree niggling, and the figure of the man ill drawn and tamely comprehended. In fact, it is not as a picture that the canvas is remarkable, but for its consummately realistic treatment of the one overpowering detail.{180}

Other large canvases, also products of the artist’s extreme youth, are the Bear Hunt of the Rijks Museum and the Boar Hunt in the Carstanjen Collection of the Berlin Gallery. They are open to the same general criticism, without the wonderful exception. They are evidences of a young man’s exuberant indiscretion, though he was probably induced to it by the high value that clients set upon such pictures. Meanwhile, as early as 1646, that is to say, when he was twenty-one, he was settling down to the smaller pictures, artistically felt and rendered, that mark the end of his career. One of the earliest of these, dated 1648, is the scene of Cattle and Bathers, in the Hague Gallery; finely composed and full of happy observation of country life, but somewhat hard in texture. Yet the previous year had produced the Horses at the Door of a Cottage of the Louvre, where the scene is enveloped in the soft half-light of a glowing evening sky. Another beautiful evening scene is Landscape with Cattle of the National Gallery.

PHILIPS WOUWERMAN

This charmingly original and versatile artist, whose works abound in public and private collections, was born in Haarlem in 1619 and died there in 1668. He studied landscape with Jan Wynants, but the teacher who set the tenor of his career was Frans Hals. It was from the latter that he derived his skill in handling figures, composing them in groups, placing them in space, and ren{181}dering them with fluency and vitality of brushwork; and the principles thus acquired were applied by him also to the treatment of the landscape. On his own part he brought to his work a singularly alert observation, that was happy in hitting upon the fugitive and accidental aspects of a scene, and a fancy that invests his subject with a lyrical grace.

His fecundity was such that it is estimated he left some seven hundred examples, which may be divided into those of his early period, which extended through the forties, and those of his maturity, which belong to the fifties and early sixties. He was brought up during the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years’ War, and the impressions of soldiering suggested many of his subjects of cavalry, skirmishing, on the march, or halting at an inn. Elsewhere it is hunting parties, riding parties, gay cavalcades of ladies and gentlemen; then, again, scenes of farming life: the bringing home of hay, watering of horses, scenes in the smithy—an inexhaustible array of incidents in which figure men and women and their friends, the horse and dog. With such unusual productivity it is not strange that some of his pictures suffered by haste of execution. This is especially true of his latest pictures, where the shadows have come through and destroyed the brilliance of the colors. For, though Wouwerman was not a colorist, he was an adept at suggesting the gaiety of color, and his best pictures are bouquets of animated brilliance.{182}

AELBERT CUYP

Son of a prosperous portrait-painter of Dordrecht, Aelbert Cuyp enjoyed ample means, married a widow, rich and well connected, was highly esteemed and held public offices in his own community, and throughout the eighteenth century continued to be prized by collectors as the “Dutch Claude.” The result was that he could paint to please himself. It is true that occasionally he was persuaded to paint portraits of his wife’s aristocratic connections, some on horseback, but these less characteristic pictures are exceptions. Living far from the centers of artists, he was devoted to country life, making visits occasionally along the Maas to Nimwegen or up the Rhine as far as Bergen, but for the most part indulging his love of nature in the neighborhood around his native city. The happiness of the man and the artist’s joy in the life of simple things—his ample means made possible the simple life—are reflected in the sunniness of his landscapes, and in the big, lazy, comfortable kine that graze and bask and chew the cud beside slowly moving waters in the neighborhood of pleasant homesteads, steeped in the warmth of sunshine. “Only in his own home on the lower Maas,” writes the modern artist, Jan Veth, himself a native of Dordrecht, “only near Dordrecht, could he find this happy country, where a delicate vapor from the rich marshy lands lies over the meadows, which in the morning and evening hours are covered with a peculiar golden veil.”

His best pictures are in private collections in England and Paris and in the National Gallery, the Wallace Col{183}lection, and the galleries of St. Petersburg and Budapest. They number nearly fifty that can be regarded as masterpieces. On the other hand, the pictures by which he is represented in many galleries will disappoint the student who has formed a high expectation of this artist’s merit. For he was as unequal in his manner as he was varied in his choice of subjects, which, besides landscape and portraiture, included also genre, still-life, church interiors, and historical paintings.

He was born in Dordrecht in 1620 and died there in 1691. Besides the instruction that he received from his father, he is supposed to have been influenced by Van Goyen, for his early work shows a recollection of the latter’s grayish tones.

ADRIAEN VAN DE VELDE

In the Rijks Museum is a portrait by Adriaen van de Velde that represents himself and his family. In a country spot they have alighted from their carriage, and while a groom attends to the handsome horses, the artist and his young wife, a little child, and a nurse with the baby in her arms are grouped in the road. The artist is of refined and gracious mien, while the spirit of the whole scene breathes prosperity and happiness. The portrait is indicative of his art, of the gracious freshness, joyousness, and sweet tranquillity that characterize his landscapes. For, though he painted some Biblical and historical subjects, his true métier was landscape, with the ingratiating addition of groups of figures and animals. So highly appreciated was his gift of treating{184} these groups that many of the landscape artists of Amsterdam employed him to introduce them into their pictures. Hobbema was among the number, as may be seen in that artist’s picture, The Water Mill, owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, where the cow and the figures of the man and woman are by Van de Velde.

Born in Amsterdam in 1636, Adriaen belonged to the Van de Velde family of artists, his earliest teacher being his father, the naval painter, Willem the Elder. Then he studied with Jan Wynants at Haarlem and later with Philips Wouwerman. He was also influenced by Potter and Nicolaes Berchem, perhaps gaining from the latter his occasional fondness for the Italianized kind of landscape. But this is mere supposition.

Even Berchem (1620-1683) is only supposed to have visited Italy, because of the character of the subjects he represented. All that is definitely known about him is that he resided in Haarlem and Amsterdam. His treatment, however, of the Italianized landscape, with its goats and cows and peasants, is inferior to the art of Van de Velde. It charms at first by its sunny picturesqueness; but it is discovered by degrees to be a product of routine and mannerism. A studied affectation becomes apparent in the arrangement of the groups, and a monotonous reiteration of the effects of light: some object always placed near the center to catch the chief illumination, while a corresponding formality is repeated again and again in the distribution of the light and shade.

But such mechanics of picture-making never occur in Van de Velde’s landscapes. There is always a freshness{185} of vision, characterized, moreover, by delicate observation, that puts him on a par with Wouwerman, though the sentiment of his pictures is his own.

THE NAVAL AND MARINE PAINTERS

It has already been remarked that the naval and marine pictures are an exception to the general rule that Dutch painting reflects nothing of the war and the turbulence of the times. The headquarters of the craft was naturally the great shipping and commercial center, Amsterdam. Here in the early part of the seventeenth century lived Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom. Born in Haarlem in 1566, he had, previously to his settling down in the Dutch capital, visited France, England, and Italy, while there is good reason to believe that shipwreck had increased his experiences by enforced sojourn on the west coast of Africa. He makes a brave showing in the Rijks Museum with records of Dutch vessels running down Spanish galleys and a sea-fight on the Haarlem Meer, and always his signature appears proudly on a pennon at the masthead of a winning ship.

Simon de Vlieger, a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in 1693, is another painter of stirring sea-fights, though he also represents the peaceful side of shipping; witness A River Scene, in the Rijks Museum, where a big-sailed merchantman from the Indies lies near some little boats on the wind-flecked water, a picture full of bracing suggestion.

Lieve Verschuier (1630-1686), also a native of Rot{186}terdam, could present with vigorous effect the busy aspect of the harbor, as may be seen at the Rijks Museum in his Charles II Entering Rotterdam, 24 May, 1660.

But the greatest of this stalwart group were Willem van de Velde the Elder, and his son, Willem the Younger. Both were born in Leyden, the former in 1611, the younger in 1633, and, after a period in Amsterdam, settled in England, where the father died in London, 1693, and the son at Greenwich, in 1707. The characteristic of these men is their treatment of the shipping; for with them, as with the others, the shipping and the sky are of more concern than the water. They give the great galleons and bulky Indiamen the personality almost of sentient things: creatures of power and importance, swelling with the pride of consequence.{187}

CHAPTER XI

VAN GOYEN AND HOBBEMA

THE greatest name in Holland landscape, second only to Rembrandt, as many believe, in Dutch art, is Jacob van Ruisdael. Of the comparative merits of the other two leaders of Dutch landscape, opinions may differ; but personally I give the palm to Van Goyen.

Jan Josephsz van Goyen, to give his full name, was born in Leyden, in 1576. He was the pupil of several teachers, including Esaias van de Velde. At about the age of twenty-one he made a journey to France in the company of one of his teachers. Later he visited Belgium and the northern part of France, the sketches of this trip being still preserved in the Print Collection of Dresden. Moreover, from the subjects of his pictures, it is evident that he traveled extensively in Holland. Toward 1634 he settled at The Hague, continuing to work there until his death in 1656. His pictures found ready sale, but he speculated unfortunately in houses and pictures and was a victim of that Dutch “South Sea Bubble,” the speculative mania in tulips. Consequently he died poor.

His work embraces three manners. The first, which lasted until about 1630, shows a tendency to brown, with highly colored figures in which notes of red predominate. This is the period of Esaias van de Velde’s influence. In{188} the second period he begins to be himself; the color becomes more subdued, the skies more clear, and the tonality mingles grayness with the browns or becomes greenish. This lasts for some years, and then gradually a finer sense of picturesqueness regulates the compositions; the technique gains in breadth and authority; the tonality is attained almost without color.

An example of the early method is View of Dordrecht, in the Hague Gallery. The town is seen in the distance across an expanse of water, furred by the wind; in the left foreground, the harbor bank with figures and horses; a sail-boat scudding toward the right. It is a gray day, translated into tones of brown; an exquisitely impressionistic vision of the occasion and scene.

A very remarkable picture of the transition stage between the first and second periods is the Landscape (No. 990) of the Rijks Museum, illustrated in this book. In the coat of the man on the left the vivid spot of red appears; his companion’s coat is blue; and these two notes of color vibrate sharply against the drabbish lowering sky. The ground is buffish green and the oaks brown. It is a picture of extraordinary dramatic effect.

Two fine examples of the artist’s middle and later period are in the Berlin Gallery: View of Arnheim (1646) and View of Nimwegen (1649). The former shows a horseman in the foreground and a cart farther back, where a gleam of light strikes, while the distant town is in shadow; and above this striking contrast is a magnificent height of sky filled with light and scattered with a few loose, well-constructed clouds. The tonality is composed of cream, gray, brown, and green. The{189} later example already shows the prevalence of brown. The architecture is constructed in tones of pale brown and buff; the water in front is grayish white, and the ample sky admits a little rose amid the grayish blue. It is a picture of large feeling, and yet the details are still drawn in with that wriggling stroke of the brown brush which characterizes Van Goyen’s work, especially in the beginning and more or less to the end. It exhibits the feeling of one who is an engraver, as indeed he was; it is drawing rather than painting. The result is that some of his pictures seem more than a trifle niggling in their method. On the other hand, while he never gets away from it, he gets the better of it. He continues to model with these diminutive curlicues of vermicelli, now brown, now green, but the method disappears in the big impression aroused by the ensemble. Other notable examples of his later period are The River and Banks of a Canal, in the Louvre.

But in the final analysis it is not the manner of an artist that is of most account, but the quality of his appeal. In the case of Van Goyen it is spirituel, not infrequently expressive of spirituality. Transmuted by his vision, the corporeality of the scene has been dissolved into a spiritual impression. It is, as it were, a mirage of nature that is offered to one’s imagination. Van Goyen lacks at once the height and depth of Jacob van Ruisdael; his moods are dreamy rather than poignant, and he appeals where the other compels. But his moods are those of a highly rarefied spirit, that seeks to interpret the bigness and the subtlety of what it feels by means as abstract as possible.{190}

MEINDERT HOBBEMA

Hobbema is the very contrary to Van Goyen. A plain, practical, matter-of-fact man, he is content to paint what he sees, the objective appearances of the landscape, viewed through the unimaginative medium of a healthy naturalism. He was as little addicted to moods of feeling as to dreams; neither curious for new experiences nor moved to artistic ambition, for, having found a motive to his liking, he repeated it again and again with slight variations. Gifted with a strong sense of form and with an unusual faculty of representing it, he learned from Jacob van Ruisdael to cultivate both, but was too phlegmatic to receive inspiration from the master’s genius. Now and then he rose from his usual level to a height of objective grandeur; but for the most part was a prosy bourgeois, pottering round the parish.

He was born in 1638, his birthplace being variously assigned to Haarlem, Koevorden, and the village of Middelharnis, though it may have been Amsterdam, where he spent his life. At the age of thirty he married a maid-servant four years his senior. She had been in a well-to-do family, and through the influence of the latter a place was found for Hobbema in the Wines-customs. It was sufficient to keep him from actual want, but the fact did not spur him on to artistic effort. He painted, it would seem, only when he “felt like it,” which was not often, for the number of his pictures is for a Dutch artist inconsiderable. The earliest date on any of his pictures is 1650; the last that can be assigned with certainty is 1670, for though it is generally accepted that the date

of The Avenue of Middelharnis, in the National Gallery, is 1689, the “8” is scarcely decipherable. If this date is accepted, it leaves the last twenty years of his life, for he died in 1709, unproductive. No reason for this is known, nor whether he retained his official position; the only fact ascertained being that, like his great master and so many other Dutch artists, he died in extreme poverty.

Neglected by his own countrymen, his best works found their way into English private collections, from which they are beginning to emerge into the hands of American collectors: witness The Water Mill, known as the “Trevor Landscape,” and the Wooded Landscape, or “Holford Landscape,” now owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, and the Wooded Road, in the possession of Mrs. William L. Elkins. Meanwhile Hobbema’s masterpiece is The Avenue of Middelharnis, in the National Gallery, while the Louvre also owns a fine example in The Water Mill, and the popularity and reputation which these works have so worthily obtained has led to an overestimation of this artist’s rank. He has even been classed with Van Ruisdael. On the evidence of The Avenue this is intelligible, but unfortunately this picture is a unique example. The other pictures mentioned above are also examples to stir enthusiasm, but they, too, are exceptional. You will not find their equals anywhere in the galleries of Europe. On the contrary, those which you do find are dryly objective reiterations of oak-trees, water, mills, and houses, perfunctorily seen and rendered. They inspire little enthusiasm and weary by repetition.

The Avenue, on the contrary, is an extraordinary in{192}stance of a moment’s heightened vision of the facts, boldly grasped and carried through unerringly to a grand conclusion. Again, in the other pictures named, especially in Mr. Morgan’s The Water Mill, there is evidence of something more than talent. A consummate knowledge of forms, skill of compositional construction, and ability to create an ensemble of tonality are here reinforced by a comprehension of the feeling of the scene, that has lifted it out of mere representation and enhanced its significance. But unfortunately the talent, transfigured in these examples, is, in the general run of this artist’s pictures, squandered; used without conscience and permitted to drift into heartless mannerism.

The fact is that, judged by the final test of the quality of the painter’s mental and artistic attitude toward his subject, the majority of Hobbema’s pictures rank considerably below par. It is such work as the generality of his, which makes the student of Dutch art sometimes pause in his wanderings through the galleries and ask himself whether there is not a great deal of perfunctoriness and tedious iteration among these old masters of Holland. There is, and the fact may as well be grasped first as last. It is a school of great craftsmen, who sometimes worked indifferently, punctuated with a considerable number who rise conspicuously above their fellows, but among these exceptions, save on rare occasions, Hobbema is not to be reckoned.

CHAPTER XII

JACOB VAN RUISDAEL

THERE is a tendency to identify Jacob van Ruisdael too exclusively with his pictures of mountainous scenery and rocky waterfalls; hence to speak of him as a romantic painter. But the true Ruisdael must be sought elsewhere. These romantic subjects belong to his latest period, in the seventies, when the indifference shown by the public to his own manner had induced him to imitate that of Everdingen’s Swedish landscape, and of the pictures of Swiss scenery by Roghman and Hackaert. How superior he was to Everdingen, we have already noticed [F] in comparing the examples of these two men that hang close together in the Munich Pinakothek. Ruisdael’s knowledge of and feeling for form, his power of construction not only of the details but also of the ensemble, his mastery of sky and cloud effects, and, above all, his individual and powerful personality combine to produce in these scenes of wild solitude with their plunging cataracts a suggestion as of great organ music, beside which Everdingen’s pictures have only the tinkle of picturesqueness. Yet while Ruisdael, as was to be expected, was superior to Everdingen, he is in these pictures inferior to himself. That his health was failing may possibly account for it; that{194} he painted on dark grounds and the black has in many cases come through and dulled the resonance of the colors, overdarkening the shadows, is another reason; but the chief one is to be found in his changed attitude. He was no longer drawing his inspiration direct from nature itself.

The finer examples of his latest style, such as the Landscape with Waterfall of the National Gallery, still exhibit his power in rendering the movement and the mass of water, while others are impregnated with that solitary grandeur which was a characteristic quality of his genius. But it is in these instances touched with moroseness, with something possibly of the sentimental sorrows of a Werther. The great artist, whose lonely bachelor life had been spent in meditating upon the bigness of nature, was now brooding over the littleness of the world’s appreciation of himself; introspection had taken the place of that large looking out upon the world which hitherto had been the habit of his life. These romantic subjects, in fact, represent the waning of his powers; for the complete revelation of his genius we must look elsewhere, beyond the invented landscapes, to those in which nature itself has inspired the mood which dominates its interpretation.

Meanwhile let us glance at the brief facts of the artist’s life. He was born in Haarlem, in 1628 or 1629, the son of a picture-frame maker, and nephew of Salomon van Ruisdael, who was probably his teacher. At about the age of twenty he was enrolled in the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Some years later he settled in Amsterdam and was admitted to the rights of citizenship.

Among his pupils at this period was Meindert Hobbema. At the age of fifty-three he returned to his native city, broken in health and without means of subsistence, and through the intervention of some friends of the Mennonite faith was given refuge in the poorhouse. Here he lingered a few months and died in 1682, one more example among so many in the story of Dutch painting of an artist dying in poverty. This is the ugly side of the story. In telling it we have tried to do justice to the part played by the young republic, out of whose hard-won nationality a great school of artists grew; but at the same time we have not overlooked the quick decadence of national and social spirit that followed upon the attainment of political liberty. And of this sapping of the morality of the people the indifference paid to her great artists was not the least notable symptom.

Ruisdael’s youth and the prime of his manhood were spent in studying the wooded dunes, open country, seashore, and large stretches of water in the neighborhood of Haarlem and Amsterdam. These supplied the subjects for his finest and most characteristic pictures, while others suggest that he traveled in different parts of Holland and even penetrated into the neighboring German principality of Münster, a hilly country with forests and old castles: witness Castle Bentheim of the Dresden Gallery. The dated pictures are comparatively rare and belong chiefly to Ruisdael’s earliest period, but it is possible to assign approximate dates to many later ones through examination of the figures which were introduced by other artists. As Bode points out, those to which Adriaen van Ostade, Nicolaes Berchem, and{196} Wouwerman contributed may with much probability be assigned to the Haarlem period, which terminated about 1655; on the other hand, when, among the Amsterdam artists, Adriaen van de Velde was his collaborator, the picture must antedate that artist’s death in 1672.

Like all the greatest artists of landscape, Ruisdael was a close student of form, his drawings and etchings being often so conscientious in treatment as to suggest that he was something of a botanist. At any rate, few men have shown a more thorough knowledge of trees, their character of bulk and build, their branch-growths and manner of leafage, while the same constructive sense appears in his delineation of ground, rocks, water, and in that final test of great landscape-painting, the comprehension and rendering of skies. In his earlier work this preoccupation with form results in an excess of detail and a considerable tightness and hardness of method, as may be observed in the little Village in the Wood of the Dresden Gallery.

Later his works acquire breadth; details are treated more freely and are less obtrusive; the feeling for ensemble is more complete. And corresponding with this ampler motive is a clearer eye for the local colors, a richer and fuller tonality. Then, by degrees, the true Ruisdael discovers himself. As we know him in the finest works of the Amsterdam period, his genius is declared in the amplitude of his conception of nature. We are in the presence of one who has comprehended the vastness of its suggestion, and entered into it, merging therein the pettiness of personality. At these great moments it would be hard to mention a landscape-painter{197} whose outlook is larger, freer, and more impersonal than Ruisdael’s, whose attitude is more truly epic; usually with an ample expression of serene benignity, but, even when there is stir of conflict, with an all-embracing vision that merges the accidental in the universal.

In the attainment of this magnificent composure it is the skies that play the greatest part. They occupy a large, often the larger, portion of the canvas. They are not only expanses of light, contrasted with the darker tones of the ground, as in the case of most Holland landscapes, but are pervaded with vibrating atmosphere that, while it penetrates to the front, seems to communicate with endless space. To this element of universal suggestion is added the stimulus of the poised or drifting cloud-forms. They are not merely shapes of vapor, but have bulk and weight and carrying power. They are to the fluid mass of the sky what the wave is to the ocean: a manifestation of its boundless energies. While to him the ground and its forms of tree and rock or dune are symbols of stability and static force, the sky is symbol of dynamic energy unbounded. It is because Ruisdael thus felt and could interpret the symbolism of nature that his finest landscapes and marines create and maintain so profound an impression.

Among the pictures prior to 1655 is View of Haarlem from the Hill of Overveen, a subject by which Ruisdael seems to have trained and disciplined himself, for he often repeated it. There are said to be twenty examples, some of which are in the galleries of The Hague and Berlin, in the Rijks Museum, and used to be included in the Holford and Kann collections. From the{198} elevation in the foreground one looks down and across a stretch of level country, broken up with trees and houses and a field where strips of linen are bleaching, to the city, over which rises the mass of the Groote Kerk, St. Bavon. But two thirds of the canvas is given to the sky. The picture presents an elaborate study in the art of ground-and sky-construction, in the difficult differentiation of the planes of a level country, and in building the sky’s volume and depth. Already there are distance and spaciousness, but as yet little expression, while, in the case of the Berlin example especially, the technique is still a trifle hard and dry.

But, without attempting any chronological order, turn to The Beach at the Hague Gallery, a replica of which, Shore at Scheveningen, is in the National Gallery, while there are others elsewhere. A cliff projects on the right; otherwise the water, dotted with wading figures and sail-boats, extends clear back from the front to a low horizon, above which is a sky piled and scattered with loose, buoyant clouds. There is wind in them, and it ruffles the long reaches of waves that glide in over the sand. Here is freedom not only of brushwork but of imagination, which has been stirred by the sense of vastness and of movement. The sea itself spreads far and is alive with briskness, but in the endless distance of the sky the clouds are moving grandly. This picture already gives the clue to Ruisdael’s fully developed genius. It prefigures his capacity to comprehend the big in nature; to go out to it and mingle with it; to find it, not in stupendous spectacles, but in the sense of vastness that even familiar scenes may convey to one who realizes and{199}

feels the bigness in nature everywhere about us. For compare The Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede, Ruisdael’s masterpiece in the Rijks Museum. Familiar enough in Holland are the ingredients of this scene: gray water, gray lowering sky, olive-green, brown, and pale-buff ground and trees, a gleam of light on the body of the mill; yet with what a majesty of conception they are clothed! Everything is heightened and made poignantly compelling by a beautiful, tremendous dignity.

Nor was it only under aspects of stirring movement that Ruisdael found bigness. He could find it in calm: witness The Swamp in the Wood, in St. Petersburg, and the Oak Wood of the Berlin Gallery. In front, pale amber-green lily-pads, floating on depths of olive-green water, in the mingled light and shade of rich, somber golden-green and ruddy foliage; distant water and dunes, and over all a sky in which balloons of clouds hang drowsily. It recalls another masterpiece, this time of the Imperial Art-History Museum, Vienna, The Big Wood. Again a clump of oaks and a shattered silver birch, massed high and wide against a sky of wonderful luminosity. Everything is simplicity itself, yet expresses magisterial authority. The amplitude of conception on this occasion has no trace of stress or poignancy, nor is it one of calm; it is buoyant with a glorious joyousness.

Another remarkable example, heightened into grandeur by impulse of the imagination, is the Landscape with Fence, in the Vienna Academy: a bit of sloping ground with some wooden sheep-cotes and a willow. But the light from a dull-gray slaty sky pales upon the willow and gleams with a strange whiteness on the boards{200} of the fence. The picture, moreover, is painted with unerring mastery of form and splendid fluency, which, combined with its startling arrangement of light, produces an effect of extraordinary impressiveness.

By a method of lighting, somewhat similar, a mood of profound and bitter melancholy has been interpreted in The Jewish Cemetery of the Dresden Gallery. In the murk of the distance a ruin glooms gauntly under a heavy purplish slaty sky, where a faint rainbow shows amid the turbid clouds. In the foreground a blasted tree-trunk cuts white against a dull mass of trees; but the brightest light, pallid and cold, is concentrated upon one of a group of tombs. The stillness is broken by a stream that shatters itself on the stones and rushes on. Is this solemn picture an allegory of Ruisdael’s own darkened life and its approaching end? Possibly, for his signature, undated, appears upon a tombstone on the left.

The examples quoted above are fairly representative of an artist who handled the prose of nature with so large a sense of its significance that he lifts it up to poetry, of epic and occasionally tragic grandeur. For Ruisdael, like Rembrandt, saw into the soul of facts. That in a period of fifty years or thereabouts a school of artists could be formed, wherein there are so many excellent craftsmen, not a few masters of technique and expression, and two great masters of the soul, is a marvelous record. Such was Holland’s legacy of the seventeenth century to the civilization of the modern world.

INDEX

A
Abraham Receiving the Angels [Bol], 154
Actor’s instinct in art, 75
Adoration of the Shepherds [Rembrandt], 103, 159
Aertz, Pieter, 19;
studied at Amsterdam, 43
Albert, Archduke, 45
Altman, Mr. B., owner of The Sleeping Girl [Vermeer], 136
Alva, Duke of, 22, 23, 46
Amsterdam, school of painting, 38, 43;
artists born there:
Aertz, 107;
Eeckhout, 158;
De Keyser, 165;
Koninck, 172;
Adriaen van de Velde, 184;
school of:
Scovel, 16;
Rembrandt, 73;
Maes, 115;
Metsu, 117;
Fabritius, 157;
Eeckhout, 158;
De Gelder, 160;
De Keyser, 165;
Koninck, 170;
Hobbema, 190;
residence of:
Rembrandt, 76;
Aertz, 107;
Van Ostade, 109;
Lairesse, 125;
De Keyser, 165;
Seghers, 170;
Koninck, 170;
Van der Neer, 176;
Potter, 179;
Van de Velde, Willem, Elder and Younger, 186;
Van de Velde, Adriaen, 184;
Berchem, 184;
Hobbema, 190;
Ruisdael, Jacob, 194
Angel and the Shepherds [Flinck], 152
Antwerp, glory of, 7;
“Image-Breaking” at, 22;
school of painting, 22;
birthplace of Hals, 50
Antwerp Museum, Day of Judgment [Van Orley], 15
Art:
the need of the people, 4;
French at time of Revolution, 5;
imitation death of national art, 6;
decline of Dutch in eighteenth century, 6;
affected by imperialism, influenced by Church, 11;
by Renaissance, 12;
condition at abdication of Charles V, 14;
realism of Dutch, 27;
moral and scientific character of, 28;
commencement of great period of, 29;
still-life, 31;
portraiture, 49;
beauty of inanimate things, 59;
democratic ideal of Dutch, 72;
Rembrandt’s compared to Greek, 72;
actor’s instinct shown by painters, 75;
abstract in, 94;
decorative, 94;
Barbizon, 171
Art-History Museum, Vienna. See Vienna
Artist in his Studio [Vermeer], 140
Asking a Blessing [Maes], 114
Asselyn, Jan, 44;
Enraged Swan, The, 44
Avenue of Middelharnis [Hobbema], 191

B
Bakhuysen, Ludolf, 44
Balckeneijnde, Adriana, wife of Paul Potter, 179
Bank of a Canal [Van Goyen], 188
Banquet of the Civic Guard [Van der Helst], 164
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew [Hals], 66
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George [Hals], 64
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George [Hals], 65
Barbizon artists, 171
Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, 87
Beach, The [Jacob van Ruisdael], 198
Bear Hunt, The [Potter], 180
Bega, Cornelis, 110
“Beggars, The,” 21
“Beggars of the Sea,” 23
Berchem, Nicolaes, 30, 39, 43, 174, 178, 184, 195
Berlaymont, 21
Berlin:
pictures in gallery:
St. Jerome in a Cave, Rembrandt, 76;
Portrait of Himself, Rembrandt, 78;
Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt, 89;
Old Woman Peeling Apples, Maes, 115;
Portrait of Old Woman, Metsu, 118;
Family Geelvink, Metsu, 120;
The Mother, De Hooch, 121;
The Concert, Terborch, 130;
Diana with her Nymphs, Vermeer, 135;
Lady with a Pearl Necklace, Vermeer, 138;
The Christening Party, Steen, 146;
Portrait of a Young Woman, Flinck, 153;
A Man Praying, Fabritius, 158;
Raising of Jairus’s Daughter, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Mercury and Argus, Eeckhout, 159;
Old Lady and her Daughters, Old Man and his Sons, De Keyser, 166;
Landscape and Cattle, Koninck, 173;
Boar Hunt, Potter, 180;
View of Arnheim, View of Nimwegen, Van Goyen, 188;
View of Haarlem from the Dunes, Jacob van Ruisdael, 197
Biblical pictures, 74, 103-105, 150;
by Steen, 148;
Flinck, 151;
Fabritius, 156;
Bol, 163;
Eeckhout, 158;
De Gelder, 160;
Van de Velde, 183
Big Wood, The [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
Blacksmith, The [Metsu], 117
Boar Hunt, The [Potter], 180
{204}Bode, W., quoted, 54, 114, 117, 134, 176-195
Bol, Ferdinand, 30;
school, 43;
appreciation, 153;
Jacob Presented to Pharaoh, Rest of the Holy Family, Abraham Receiving the Angels, Salome Dancing before Herod, 154;
Portrait of a Girl, Portraits in the Pinakothek, 155
Boston Museum, pictures in:
An Interior, De Hooch, 122
Both, Johannes, 30
Boucher, 5
Bray, Jan de, 19
Bray, Salomon de, 39, 167
Brederode, feast at, 21
Bredius, Dr., 136;
estimate of Steen, 142
Brueghel, Pieter the Elder, 107
Brunswick Gallery, pictures in:
The Coquette, Vermeer, 140;
Portrait, Eeckhout, 160;
Oak Wood, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
Brussels, scene of abdication of Charles V, 7;
ancient grandeur of, 7;
treaty of 1577 signed at, 23
Budapest, Fine Arts Museum, pictures in:
Portrait of a Man, Maes, 116;
Portrait of a Lady, Vermeer, 141;
Esther and Mordecai, De Gelder, 161;
Portrait of a Woman, De Keyser, 166;
Portrait of a Young Lady, Moreelse, 168;
Landscape, Cuyp, 183
Burial, The [Rembrandt], 103

C
Cassel Gallery, picture in: Twelfth Night, Steen, 146
Castle Bentheim [Jacob van Ruisdael], 195
Cattle and Bathers [Potter], 186
Cavalier in a Shop [Van Mieris], 124
Charles V, abdication, 3-8;
birth and education, 7;
rule in the Netherlands, 7
Chiaroscuro, Rembrandt’s, 79
Christ with the Doctors [Eeckhout], 159
Christening Party, The [Steen], 146
Church, influence of, on art, 11;
attempt to fasten Catholic on Holland, 20;
schism in Protestant, 37
Codde, Pieter, 126
Concert, The [Terborch], 136
Cook, The [Vermeer], 137
Coquette, The [Vermeer], 139
Count of Orange, William, 8
Cradle, The [Maes], 115
Craftsmanship, Dutch love of, 32
Cuyp, Aelbert, 30, 178;
appreciation, 182
Czernin Gallery, Vienna, pictures in:
The Artist in his Studio, Vermeer, 140;
The Company of Captain Cloeck, De Keyser, 166

D
David Handing the Letter to Uriah [Flinck], 151
Day of Judgment [Van Orley], 15
Decapitation of St. John the Baptist [Fabritius], 157
Delft, School of, 38, 41;
born in: Vermeer, 132;
studied at: Vermeer, 132;
residence in: Vermeer, 132;
Steen, 144;
Fabritius, 156
Descent from the Cross [Rembrandt], 103
Diana and her Nymphs [Vermeer], 135
Diana at her Toilet [Vermeer], 134
Disciples at Emmaus [Steen], 148
Doctor Visiting a Young Woman [Steen], 147
Doctor’s Visit, The [Steen], 147
Dordrecht, School of, 38, 43;
De Gelder, 160;
Cuyp, 182;
residence of Cuyp, Hoogstraten, 43;
of De Gelder, Potter, 179
Dort, assembly of Estates, 23
Dou, Gerard, 30;
school, 40;
life, 111;
appreciation, 111;
The Young Mother, 103;
Old Woman Saying Grace, 103;
The Dropsical Woman, 112;
Lady at her Toilet, 112;
Old Woman who has Lost her Thread, 112;
Young Man and Girl in a Cellar, 113;
Night School, 113
Dresden Gallery:
Old Woman who has Lost her Thread, Dou, 112;
Young Man and Girl in a Cellar, Still-life, Portrait of Himself, Dou, 113;
Man and Woman Selling Poultry, Lovers at Breakfast, Metsu, 118;
A Lady at her Clavichord, Netscher, 125;
Officer Writing a Letter, Lady Washing her Hands, Terborch, 130;
The Proposal, Vermeer, 134;
The Marriage at Cana, The Expulsion of Hagar, Steen, 148;
David Handing the Letter to Uriah, Flinck, 151;
Jacob Presented to Pharaoh, Bol, 153;
Rest of the Holy Family, Bol, 154;
Presentation of Christ in the Temple, An Important Document, Portrait of a Halberdier, DeGelder, 160;
Dutch Landscape, Koninck, 173;
Castle Bentheim, Jacob van Ruisdael, 195;
Village in the Wood, Jacob van Ruisdael, 196;
Jewish Cemetery, Jacob van Ruisdael, 200
Dropsical Woman, The [Dou], 112
Dunes, Valley of the Rhine near Arnheim [Koninck], 173
Dürer, Albrecht, 15
Dusart, Cornelis, 110
Dutch, pioneers of modern era, 3;
independence of, declared, 24;
defeated Spain by sea, 26;
love of genre, 30, 31;
advance in commerce, science, agriculture, and the crafts, 36;
political and religious dissensions, 37;
art one of portraiture, 49;
character of genre, 107-109;
change of conditions of society, 124;
society pictures, 126;
landscape, 170;
with cattle, 177;
occasional tediousness of landscapes, 192
Dutch Courtyard [De Hooch], 122
Dutch Housewife [Maes], 115
Duyster, Willem Cornelisz, 121, 126

E
Eeckhout, Gerbrandt van den, 30;
school, 43, 151;
life, 174;
appreciation, 175;
The Woman Taken in Adultery, 158;
Christ with the Doctors, Raising of Jairus’s Daughter, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Mercury and Argus, 159;
{205}The Wine Contract, 160
Egg Dance, The [Aertz], 107
Egmont, Count, 22, 46
Egmont, Maria van, 144
Elevation of the Cross [Rembrandt], 103, 104
Elias, Nicolaes, 165
Elizabeth of England assists Dutch, 25
Elkins, Mrs. William L., owner of Wooded Road, Hobbema, 191
Elsheimer, German painter who influenced Rembrandt, 74
Enraged Swan, The [Jan Asselyn], 44
Esther and Mordecai [De Gelder], 161
Etchings of Rembrandt, 74:
Old Woman’s Head;
Bust of Old Woman;
Rembrandt, a Bust;
Rembrandt with an Open Mouth;
Rembrandt with an Air of Grimace;
Rembrandt with Haggard Eyes;
Rembrandt Laughing
Everdingen, Allart van, 30;
school, 39;
paints in Sweden, 39;
in Amsterdam, 43
Everdingen, Cæsar van, 175
Expulsion of Hagar [Steen], 148

F
Fabritius, Carel, 30;
school, 41;
in Amsterdam, 43;
teacher of Vermeer, 132;
Biblical subjects, 150;
appreciation, 156;
tragic death, 157;
Portrait of Abraham de Notte, 157;
The Decapitation of St. John the Baptist, 157
Family Geelvink [Metsu], 120
Family Group [De Hooch], 122
Feast of St. Nicholas [Steen], 145
Fête of the Civic Guard, Münster, 1648 [Flinck], 153
Fiddler, The [Van Ostade], 110
Fishers for Souls, The [Van de Venne], 44
Flanders, School of, 100, 107
Flemish nobles aid Holland, 21
Flinck, Govert, 30;
school, 43;
Biblical pictures, 150;
appreciation, 151;
Isaac Blessing Jacob, David Handing the Letter to Uriah, 151;
Angel and the Shepherds, Gray-Bearded Man, 152;
Portrait of a Little Girl, of a Young Woman, of M. Johannes Wittenbogaert, Fête of the Civic Guard, Münster, 153
Fragonard, 5
Frederick Henry, Stadtholder, 37, 45
Frick, Henry C., owner of The Music Lesson, Vermeer, 140
Fromentin, quoted, 6, 49;
on Rembrandt, 78-85;
Terborch, 129

G
Gallant Soldier, The [Terborch], 129
Gelder, Aert de, 151;
appreciation of, 160;
Presentation of Christ in the Temple, An Important Document, Portrait of a Halberdier, 160;
Judah and Thamar, Esther and Mordecai, Three Portraits, 161
Genre painting, 107;
inspiration from Hals, 100;
high-water mark of, 120;
decline of, 124;
society picture, 126;
of Terborch, 129;
not realistic, 130;
Valckenborch, Aertz, 107;
Van Ostade, 108;
Dou, 111;
Maes, 114;
Metsu, 117;
De Hooch, 120;
Willem and Frans (Elder and Younger) van Mieris, 122;
Lairesse, Netscher, Schalcken, 125;
Dirck Hals, Duyster, Palamedesz, Codde, Slingeland, 126;
Terborch, 127;
Vermeer, 132;
Steen, 141
Gerard, Balthasar, assassin of William of Orange, 25
Ghent, birthplace of Charles V, 7
Girl before her Mirror [Van Mieris], 124
Girl with Water-Jug [Vermeer], 134
Gorkum, 176
Goyen, Jan Joseph van, 19, 39, 40, 42, 173, 174, 183;
life, 187;
appreciation, 188;
compared to Ruisdael, 189;
View of Dordrecht, of Arnheim, of Nimwegen, Landscape, 188;
The River, Banks of a Canal, 189
Grand Pensionary, 47
Grange, Justus de la, employer of Pieter de Hooch, 121
Gray-Bearded Man [Flinck], 152
Greek art compared to Rembrandt’s, 72
Guild of St. Luke, the Painters’ Guild, at Delft, 121, 132;
Haarlem, 51, 174, 194;
Leyden, 111, 117, 144

H
Haarlem, school, 39, 50;
Scovel, 16;
Hals, 50;
Terborch, 127;
De Bray, 167;
Ruisdael, Salomon and Jacob, 174;
Molyn, 174;
Wynants, 174;
Everdingen, 174;
Van de Velde, 174;
Berchem, 174;
birthplace of Seghers, 170;
Wouwerman, 180;
Ruisdael, 194;
residence of Hals, 51;
Van Ostade, 110;
De Hooch, 121;
De Bray, 157;
Seghers, 170;
Van de Velde, 174;
Wouwerman, 180
Haarlem Municipal Museum, 32, 39, 52;
corporation pictures, Hals, 64:
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, 64;
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, 65;
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew, 66;
Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew, 67;
Officers of the Archers of St. George, 68;
Regents of the Hospital for the Poor, 52;
Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth, 69
Hague:
Dutch independence declared, 24;
school, 38, 42;
Ravesteyn, 167;
Mierevelt, 167;
residence of De Hooch, 121;
Steen, 144;
Seghers, 170;
Potter, 179;
Van Goyen, 187
Hague Royal Museum, 37;
Portrait of a Young Man, St. Simeon in the Temple, The Lesson in Anatomy, Rembrandt, 76;
The Young Mother, Dou, 103;
Peasants’ Holiday, Peasants at an Inn, Marriage Proposal, The Fiddler, Van Ostade, 110;
Diana at her Toilet, New Testament, Head of a Girl, Vermeer, 135;
View of Delft, Vermeer, 136;
While the Old Ones Sing, etc., Steen, 146;
{206}Doctor Visiting a Sick Woman, Steen, 147;
Judah and Thamar, De Gelder, 161;
The Young Bull, Potter, 179;
Cattle and Bathers, Potter, 180;
View of Dordrecht, Van Goyen, 188;
View of Haarlem from the Dunes, Jacob van Ruisdael, 197;
The Beach, Jacob van Ruisdael, 198
Hals, Dirck, 5;
place in art, 126
Hals, Frans, 19;
birth, 29;
life, 50;
Guild of St. Luke, 51;
death and burial, 51;
personal character, 52;
technique, 52;
humor, 53;
point of view, 54;
still-life, 57;
compared with Van der Helst, 57;
an Impressionist, 59;
use of values, 63;
light, 63;
brushwork, 64;
color, 64;
simplicity of gesture, 67;
decline of power, 69;
Hals and Rembrandt, 96;
modern influence, 97;
overestimated, 97;
pupils, 99;
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, 64;
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, 65;
Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew, 66;
Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew, 67;
Officers of the Archers of St. George, 68;
Regents of the Hospital for the Poor, 52;
Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth, 69
Hals, Harmen, 58
Happy Family, A [Steen], 145
Harmen van Rijn, father of Rembrandt, 73
Head and Bust of Oriental [Rembrandt], 104
Head of a Girl [Vermeer], 135
Helst, Bartholomeus van der, 43;
compared with Hals, 57;
appreciation, 164;
Banquet of the Civic Guard, 57, 164;
Portrait of Paul Potter, 163, 178
Hendrickje, 78;
Portrait of, 89
Hermanszoon, Anneke, 50
Heyden, Jan van der, 31
Hobbema, Meindert, 31, 39, 43;
life, 190;
appreciation, 192;
The Water Mill, 191, 192;
Avenue of Middelharnis, Wooded Landscape, Water-Mill (Louvre), Wooded Road, 191
Holland, growth of, 3;
pioneer of modern era, 3;
misrule of Philip, 19;
independence of, 24;
birthplace of new art, 26;
Duchess Isabella, 45;
consolidated, 45;
Stadtholdership hereditary, 46;
family of Orange entangled with Stuarts, 47
Holy Family [Rembrandt], 102
Homely Scene, A [Steen], 145
Hondecoeter, Melchior d’, 31;
school, 38;
in Amsterdam, 43
Hooch, Pieter de, 31;
school, 41;
in Amsterdam, 43;
life, 120;
influence of other painters, 138;
The Mother, Interior, The Pantry, A Dutch Courtyard, Family Group, 122;
The Visit, 138
Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 43
Horn, Count van, 22, 46
Horses at the Door of a Cottage [Potter], 180
Houbraken, historian-painter, 52, 120, 144
Huntington, Mrs. Collis P., owner of Lady with a Lute, Vermeer, 139

I
Important Document, An [De Gelder], 160
Impressionism, 59, 60;
of Rembrandt, 86, 92, 93
Interior [De Hooch], 122
Isaac Blessing Jacob [Flinck], 151
Isabella, Duchess, 45
Israels, Josef, 106

J
Jacob Presented to Pharaoh by Joseph [Bol], 154
Jerome in a Cave, St. [Rembrandt], 76
Jesus Disputing with the Doctors [Rembrandt], 75
Jewish Cemetery [Jacob van Ruisdael], 200
Johnson, Mr. John G., collector of Philadelphia, 114
Judah and Thamar [De Gelder], 160
Judith with the Head of Holofernes [Mantegna], 157

K
Kalf, Willem, 31
Keyser, Thomas de, 43;
appreciation, 165;
Company of Captain Cloeck, Family Meebeeck Cruywaghen, Portrait of Pieter Schout, Old Lady and her Three Daughters, Old Man and his Two Sons, Portrait of a Woman, 166
Koninck, Philips, 30;
in Amsterdam, 43, 174;
appreciation, 172;
The Dunes, Valley of the Rhine near Arnheim, Dutch Landscape, Landscape with Cattle (Berlin), Landscape with Cattle (Rijks), Four Portraits of Joost van den Vondel, 173

L
Lace-Maker, The [Vermeer], 139
Lady and her Doctor [Van Mieris], 124
Lady at a Spinet [Vermeer], 140
Lady at her Toilet [Dou], 112
Lady at the Clavichord [Netscher], 125
Lady Washing her Hands [Terborch], 136
Lady with a Lute [Vermeer], 139
Lady with the Pearl Necklace [Vermeer], 138
Lady Writing [Vermeer], 139
Lairesse, Gerard de, 125
Landscape, 169;
painters of:
Seghers, 169;
Rembrandt, 173;
Jacob van Ruisdael, 173, 193;
Salomon van Ruisdael, 174;
Molyn, 173;
Berchem, 174;
Wouwerman, 174, 180;
Wynants, 175;
Van der Neer, 176;
Van de Velde, 183;
with cattle, Potter, 179
Landscape with Cattle [Koninck], 173
Landscape with Cattle [Potter], 180
Landscape with Fence [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
Landscape with Waterfall [Jacob van Ruisdael], 194
Last Judgment [Van Leyden], 74
Lastman, Pieter, 73
League of Nobles, 21
{207}Lesson in Anatomy [Rembrandt], 76
Letter, The [Vermeer], 138
Leyden, founding of university, 35;
School of, 38, 40;
Dou, 111;
Steen, 144;
birthplace of Rembrandt, 73;
Dou, 111;
Metsu, 117;
Mieris, 122;
Steen, 144;
Willem van de Velde, Elder and Younger, 186;
Van Goyen, 187;
residence of Rembrandt, 74;
Dou, 111;
Steen, 144
Liberty, Statue of, 87
Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna:
Portrait of a Girl, Bol, 155
Louvre:
The Supper at Emmaus, The Good Samaritan, Rembrandt, 82;
The Dropsical Woman, Dou, 112;
Vegetable Market, Metsu, 118;
The Gallant Soldier, Terborch, 129;
Angel and the Shepherds, Flinck, 152;
Portrait of a Little Girl, Flinck, 153;
Portrait of a Mathematician, Bol, 154;
Horses at the Door of a Cottage, Potter, 180;
The River, Banks of a Canal, Van Goyen, 189;
Water Mill, Hobbema, 191
Lovers at Breakfast [Metsu], 118
Lucas van Leyden, 15, 74;
The Last Judgment, 74
Luminarist, 80

M
Maas, River, 182
Maes, Nicolaes, 31, 144;
school, 43;
influenced by Rembrandt, 105;
life, 114;
appreciation, 115;
A Reverie, Asking a Blessing, Nurse and Children, 114;
The Young Card-Players, 114, 116;
Old Woman Peeling Apples, The Cradle, Dutch Housewife, 115;
Old Woman Spinning, 115, 116;
Portrait of a Man, 116
Man and Woman Selling Poultry [Metsu], 118
Manet, Edouard, 60
Mantegna, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 157
Marine-painters, 44;
Vlieger, 44, 185;
Bakhuysen, 44;
Verschuier, 185;
Willem van de Velde, Elder and Younger, 44,
Vroom, 185
Marriage at Cana [Steen], 148
Marriage Proposal, The [Van Ostade], 110
Matisse, French artist, 93
Maurice, Stadtholder, 37, 45
Mercury and Argus [Eeckhout], 159
Metropolitan Museum, New York, 88, 90;
A Music Party, Metsu, 119;
Girl with Water-Jug, Vermeer, 135
Metsu, Gabriel, 31;
school, 40;
in Amsterdam, 43;
pupil of Hals, 99;
influenced by Dou, 111;
life, 117;
appreciation, 117-119;
The Blacksmith, 117;
Old Woman in Meditation, Man and Woman Selling Poultry, Lovers at Breakfast, 118;
A Music Party, Visit to the Nursery, 119;
Family Geelvink, 120
Meyer, Baron A., photographs of, 58
Mierevelt, Michiel Jansz van, 19, 41, 167
Mieris, Frans van, the Elder, 40;
influenced by Dou, 111;
life, 122;
appreciation, 123;
The Sick Woman, The Oyster Breakfast, 123;
The Girl before a Mirror, A Lady and her Doctor, Cavalier in a Shop, 124
Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
Models, Rembrandt’s use of, 104, 150
Monet, Claude, 60
Moral character of Dutch painting, 27
Moreelse, Paulus, 167
Morgan, Mr. J. Pierpont, owner of Visit to the Nursery, Metsu, 119;
Lady Writing, The Lace-Maker, Vermeer, 139;
The Water Mill, Hobbema, 184, 191;
Wooded Landscape, Hobbema, 191
Moro, Antonio, 16
Mother, The [De Hooch], 122
Munich Pinakothek. See Pinakothek
Music Lesson, The [Vermeer], 140

N
National Gallery, London:
Peace of Münster, Terborch, 39, 127;
The Young Card-Players, Maes, 114, 116;
The Cradle, Dutch Housewife, Maes, 115;
An Interior, De Hooch, 121;
A Dutch Courtyard, Family Group, De Hooch, 122;
Lady at a Spinet, Vermeer, 140;
The Doctor’s Visit, Steen, 147;
The Wine Contract, Eeckhout, 160;
Tobit and the Angel, Rembrandt, 172;
Moonlight Landscape, Landscape with Trees, Landscape with Cattle, Van der Neer, 177;
Landscape with Cattle, Potter, 180;
Landscape with Cattle, Cuyp, 182;
Avenue of Middelharnis, Hobbema, 191;
Landscape with Waterfall, Jacob van Ruisdael, 194;
Shore at Scheveningen, Ruisdael, 198
Neer, Aert van der, 30;
school, 43;
appreciation, 176;
Moonlight Scenes, in National Gallery and Imperial Art Museum, Vienna, 177;
Winter Scene, Scene with Cattle, 177
Netscher, Caspar, school, 42;
appreciation, 125;
A Lady at the Clavichord, 125
New Testament, The [Vermeer], 136
Night School, The [Dou], 113
Night Watch, The [Rembrandt], 77, 79, 81, 84
Nurse and Children [Maes], 114

O
Officer Writing a Letter [Terborch], 136
Old Lady and her Three Daughters [De Keyser], 166
Old Man and his Two Sons [De Keyser], 166
Old Woman in Meditation [Metsu], 118
Old Woman Peeling Apples [Maes], 116
Old Woman Peeling Apples [Terborch], 136
Old Woman Saying Grace [Dou], 103
Old Woman Spinning [Maes], 114
Old Woman who has Lost her Thread [Dou], 112
Orange, Prince William of, 23, 29, 46
Oriental art, 94
{208}Oriental Figure [Rembrandt], 104
Orley, Barend van, 15;
The Day of Judgment, 15
Ostade, Adriaen van, 30;
school, 39;
pupil of Hals, 99;
life, 108;
appreciation, 109;
pupils, 110;
The Peasants’ Holiday, Peasants at an Inn, Marriage Proposal, The Fiddler, 110
Ostade, Isaac van, 110
Oyster Breakfast, The [Mieris], 123

P
Palamedesz, Antonie, school, 41;
appreciation, 126
Pantry, The [De Hooch], 122
Paul, St. [Rembrandt], 76
Peace of Münster, 46
Peace of Münster [Terborch], 39, 127
Peasants at an Inn [Van Ostade], 110
Peasants’ Holiday [Van Ostade], 110
Petersburg, St., The Swamp in the Wood, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
Philip I, 3, 9, 10
Philip II:
misrule of Netherlands, 19;
nobles resist, 21;
ambition, 25;
close of reign, 26
Pieter Schout, Portrait of [De Keyser], 166
Pinakothek, Munich:
Holy Family, Rembrandt, 102;
The Descent from the Gross, The Elevation of the Cross, Rembrandt, 103, 104;
The Burial, The Resurrection, Rembrandt, 103;
The Adoration of the Shepherds, Rembrandt, 104, 159;
Old Woman Saying Grace, Dou, 103;
Lady at her Toilet, Dou, 112;
The Sick Woman, The Oyster Breakfast, Van Mieris, 123;
Girl before a Mirror, Van Mieris, 124;
Portraits of Man and Wife, three others, Bol, 155
Plein-air, 63, 131, 170, 171
Portrait of a Girl [Bol], 155
Portrait of a Little Girl [Flinck], 153
Portrait of a Man [Maes], 116
Portrait of a Woman [De Keyser], 160
Portrait of a Young Man [Flinck], 152
Portrait of A. de Notte [Fabritius], 157
Portrait of Elizabeth Bas [Rembrandt], 89
Portrait of Himself [Rembrandt], 78
Portrait of M. Johannes Wittenbogaert [Flinck], 152
Portrait of Old Woman [Metsu], 118
Portrait of Paul Potter [Van der Helst], 178
Portraits, painters of, 33;
school of Haarlem, 39;
Delft, 41;
The Hague, 42;
Hals, 49;
Rembrandt, 89;
Maes, 116;
Terborch, 128;
Vermeer, 141;
Santvoort, 151, 161;
Flinck, 151;
Bol, 155;
Fabritius, 156;
Eeckhout, 160;
De Gelder, 160;
Van der Helst, 162;
De Keyser, 165;
Mierevelt, 167;
Ravesteyn, De Bray, Moreelse, 167
Portraits of Man and Wife, three other portraits [Bol], 155
Portraiture, 150
Potter, Paul, appreciation, 178;
life, 179;
The Young Bull, 179;
Bear Hunt, Boar Hunt, Cattle and Bathers, Horses at the Door of a Cottage, Landscape with Cattle, 180
Pourbus, Pieter, 16
Presentation of Christ in the Temple [De Gelder], 160
Presentation of Christ in the Temple [Eeckhout], 159
Presentation with the Angel [Rembrandt], 75
Prince’s Birthday [Steen], 146
Proposal, The [Vermeer], 134

R
Raising of Jairus’s Daughter [Eeckhout], 159
Ravesteyn, Jan Anthonisz van, 19;
school, 42, 167
Regents of the Hospital for the Poor [Hals], 52
Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth [Hals], 69
Rembrandt, Harmensz van Rijn, 71;
individuality, 4;
birth, 30;
School of Leyden, 40;
Amsterdam, 43;
Holland’s leading painter, 49;
life, 72;
etchings, 74:
personality, 75;
in Amsterdam, 76;
beginning of fame, 77;
marriage and death of Saskia, second marriage, 77;
bankruptcy, 78;
Fromentin’s criticism, 79, 85;
chiaroscuro, 80;
abstract idea, 88;
color, 91;
symbolism, 92;
Impressionist, 93;
compared with Hals, 96;
influence on genre, 102;
use of the arch, 104;
St. Paul, St. Jerome in a Cave, St. Simeon in the Temple, 76;
The Lesson in Anatomy, 76, 85;
Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company (The Night Watch), 77, 79, 81, 84;
The Syndics of the Cloth Guild, 78;
Portrait of Himself, 78;
Supper at Emmaus, 82, 148;
Good Samaritan, 82;
Portrait of Elizabeth Bas, 89;
Holy Family, 102;
Descent from the Cross, 103;
Elevation of the Cross, 103, 104;
Burial, Resurrection, Adoration of the Shepherds, Oriental Figure, Head and Bust of an Oriental, 104;
Tobit and the Angel, 172
Renaissance art, 72
Rest of the Holy Family [Bol], 154
Resurrection, The [Rembrandt], 104
Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew [Hals], 66, 67
Reverie [Maes], 114
Reyniers, Lysbeth, 51
Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, 44, 59;
The Enraged Swan, Asselyn, 44;
Fishers for Souls, Van de Venne, 44;
Syndics of the Cloth Guild, Rembrandt, 78;
Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company, Rembrandt, 78, 79, 81, 84;
Portrait of Elizabeth Bas, Rembrandt, 89;
The Egg Dance, Aertz, 107;
The Night School, Dou, 113;
A Reverie, Metsu, 114;
Asking a Blessing, Old Woman Spinning, Metsu, 115, 116;
The Blacksmith, Metsu, 117;
Old Woman in Meditation, Metsu, 118;
The Interior, The Pantry, De Hooch, 122;
The Cook, Vermeer, 137;
Young Woman Reading a Letter, Vermeer, 138;
A Homely Scene, The Happy Family, The Feast of St. Nicholas, Steen, 145;
{209}The Prince’s Birthday, The Sick Lady, Steen, 146;
The Disciples at Emmaus, Steen, 148;
Isaac Blessing Jacob, Flinck, 151;
Portrait of M. Johannes Wittenbogaert, Fête of the Civic Guard, Münster, 1648, Flinck, 153;
Abraham Receiving the Angels, Salome Dancing before Herod, Bol, 154;
Six Governors of the Huiszittenhuis, Four Governors of the Leper House, Roelof Meulenaar, Maria Rey, Artus Quellinus, Bol, 156;
Portrait of Abraham de Notte, Decapitation of St. John the Baptist, Fabritius, 157;
Woman Taken in Adultery, Eeckhout, 158;
Three Portraits, De Gelder, 161;
Portrait of Dirck Bas Jacobsz Family, Four Ladies of the Spinhuis, Santvoort, 161;
Banquet of the Civic Guard, Van der Helst, 57, 164;
Portrait of Paul Potter, Van der Helst, 163;
Company of Captain Cloeck, Family Meebeeck Cruywaghen, Portrait of Pieter Schout, De Keyser, 166;
Maria van Utrecht, The Little Princess, Moreelse, 167;
Four Portraits of Joost van den Vondel, Two Landscapes with Cattle, Koninck, 173;
Landscape, Everdingen, 175;
The Bear Hunt, Potter, 180;
Portrait of the Van de Velde Family, Van de Velde, 183;
Charles II Entering Rotterdam, 24 May, 1660, Verschuier, 186;
Landscape, Van Goyen, 188;
View of Haarlem from the Dunes, Jacob van Ruisdael, 197;
Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
River [Van Goyen], 188
Rotterdam, birthplace of De Hooch, 120;
Vlieger, 185;
Verschuier, 185
Rubens, Peter Paul, 18
Ruisdael, Jacob van, compared to Goyen, 189;
appreciation, 193;
life, 194;
increase of power, 196;
compared to Rembrandt, 200;
Landscape with Waterfall, 194;
Castle Bentheim, 195;
Village in the Wood, 196;
View of Haarlem from the Hill of Overveen, 197;
The Beach, Shore at Scheveningen, 198;
The Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede, The Swamp in the Wood, The Oak Wood, The Big Wood, Landscape with Fence, 199;
Jewish Cemetery, 200
Ruisdael, Salomon van, 174

S
St. Simeon in the Temple [Rembrandt], 76
Salome Dancing before Herod [Bol], 151
Santvoort, Dirck Dircksz, 151;
appreciation, 161;
Portrait of Dirck Bas Jacobsz Family, Four Ladies of the Spinhuis, 161;
Four Governors of the Serge Hall, Frederick Dircksz Alewyn, Agatha Geelvinck, Martinus Alewyn, Clara Alewyn, 162
Saskia van Uylenborch, 77
Schalcken, Godfried, 42;
influenced by Dou, 111;
appreciation, 125
Schatter, Captain Johan, 66
Scovel, Jan van, life, 16;
appreciation, 17;
portrait group of twelve Knights Templars, 17
Seghers, Hercules, 19;
born at Amsterdam, 43;
appreciation, 169;
influenced Koninck, 173, 174;
Holland Landscape with the Hamlet of Rhenen, Landscape, 169
Shore at Scheveningen [Jacob van Ruisdael], 198
Sick Woman, The [Van Mieris], 123
Sidney, Sir Philip, 25
Sleeping Girl [Vermeer], 136
Slingeland, Pieter Cornelisz van, influenced by Dou, 111, 126
Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company [Rembrandt], 77, 79
Spain, downfall of, 26
Spanish Fury, 22
Steen, Jan, 31;
school, 39, 40;
appreciation, 141;
humor, 143;
life, 144;
stories of reckless life, 145;
A Homely Scene, Feast of St. Nicholas, Happy Family, 145;
The Christening Party, While the Old Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe, Twelfth Night, The Prince’s Birthday, The Sick Lady, 146;
Doctor Visiting a Sick Young Woman, A Doctor’s Visit, 147;
The Marriage at Cana, Expulsion of Hagar, Disciples at Emmaus, 148
Still-life, Dutch interest in, 31;
Van Heem, Weenix, Kalf, Hondecoeter, 31, 38
Stoffels, Hendrickje, 78
Supper at Emmaus [Rembrandt], 82, 148
Swamp in the Wood [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
Swanenburch, Jacob van, 41;
teacher of Rembrandt, 73
Symbolism, 95, 197, 200
Syndics of the Cloth Guild [Rembrandt], 56

T
Technique, as a motive, 28
Terborch, Gerard, 30;
school, 39;
pupil of Hals, 99;
appreciation, 127;
life, 128;
influence of Hals, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, 128;
portraits, 128;
color, 131;
The Peace of Münster, 127;
The Gallant Soldier, 129;
The Concert, Officer Writing a Letter, Lady Washing her Hands, Old Woman Peeling Apples, 130
Tintoretto, 14
Titian, 14
Tobit and the Angel [Rembrandt], 172
Tulp, Dr., 76
Twelfth Night [Steen], 146

U
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Landscape, Seghers, 169
Union of Utrecht, 23
Utrecht, school of painting:
Scovel, 16;
birthplace of Moreelse, 167;
residence of Scovel, 16;
Moreelse, 167;
Seghers, 170
Uylenborch, Saskia van, 77
{210}
V
Valckenborch, Lucas van, 107;
appreciation, 126
Values, 134
Vanderbilt, W. K., collector, 104
Vegetable Market, The [Metsu], 118
Velasquez, 60;
influenced Rembrandt, 93;
Hals, 97
Velde, Adriaen van de, 31, 43, 178;
appreciation, 183, 196;
Family of Van de Velde, 183
Velde, Esaias van de, 39, 187
Velde, Willem van de, the Elder, 30, 184;
appreciation, 186
Velde, Willem van de, the Younger, 44;
appreciation, 186
Venne, Adriaen van de, 44
Vermeer, Johannes, 31;
school, 41;
life, 132;
appreciation, 132;
comparison with Rembrandt, 133;
plein-air, 170;
The Proposal, 134;
Girl with Water-Jug, 135, 139;
Diana at her Toilet, New Testament, Head of a Girl, Diana and her Nymphs, 135;
Sleeping Girl, View of Delft, 136;
The Cook, 137;
The Letter, Young Woman Reading a Letter, Lady with Pearl Necklace, 138;
Lady with a Lute, Lady Writing, The Lace-Maker, 139;
The Coquette, Lady at a Spinet, The Music Lesson, The Artist in his Studio, 140;
Portrait of a Lady, 141
Veronese, Paolo, 14
Verschuier, Lieve, 185;
Charles II Entering Rotterdam, 186
Veth, Jan, 182
Vienna Art-History Museum, 107;
A Lady and her Doctor, Cavalier in a Shop, Mieris, 124;
Old Woman Peeling Apples, Terborch, 130;
Gray-Bearded Man, Flinck, 152;
The Big Wood, Ruisdael, 199
Vienna Imperial Art Museum:
Moonlight and Winter Landscapes, Van der Neer, 177;
Landscape with Fence, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
View of Arnheim [Van Goyen], 188
View of Delft [Vermeer], 137
View of Dordrecht [Van Goyen], 188
View of Nimwegen [Van Goyen], 188
Visit, The [De Hooch], 138
Visit to the Nursery [Metsu], 119
Vlieger, Simon de, 34, 44;
appreciation, 185
Vondel, Joost van den, Portrait of [Koninck], 173
Vroom, Hendrick Cornelisz, 185

W
Wagner, quotation on art, 4
Wallace Collection:
Winter Scene, Van der Neer, 177;
Landscape with Cattle, Cuyp, 182
Water Mill [Hobbema], 191
Water Mill (Louvre) [Hobbema], 191
Watteau, 5
Weenix, Jan, 31;
school, 38, 43
Westphalia, Treaty of, 46
When the Old Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe [Steen], 146
Whistler, 95
William, Prince of Orange, 8;
resists Spain, 21;
price put on his head, 23;
offered the crown, 24;
death, 25
William III of England, 47
Wine Contract, The [Eeckhout], 160
Witt, Johan de, 46
Woman Taken in Adultery [Eeckhout], 158
Wooded Landscape [Hobbema], 191
Wooded Road [Hobbema], 191
Wouwerman, Philips, 30, 174;
school, 39;
pupil of Hals, 99, 178;
appreciation, 180, 184, 195
Wynants, Jan, 30, 174, 175;
school, 39, 43, 84

Y
Young Bull, The [Potter], 179
Young Card-Players, The [Maes], 114, 116
Young Man and Girl in a Cellar [Dou], 113
Young Mother, The [Dou], 103
Young Woman Reading a Letter [Vermeer], 138

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The author’s indebtedness to Motley in this chapter, as in subsequent ones, should not escape the reader’s notice.

[B] The topic of this book being painting, Rembrandt’s fecundity and genius as an etcher have not been considered.

[C] Compare the reference on page 103 to the series of Biblical subjects, executed in 1633, which are now in the Munich Gallery.

[D] In the Adolf v. Carstanjen Collection, Berlin Gallery.

[E] I allude to the men who are working more or less in sympathy with and along the lines of the French artist, Matisse.

[F] See page 175.

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Man with a Fur Cap	Rembrandt	Frontispiece
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie.
		FACING PAGE
Couple Drinking	Jan Steen	21
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Portrait of the Artist	Gerard Terborch	28
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Landscape with Fence	Jacob van Ruisdael	37
Landscape with Oak	Jan van Goyen	44
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
The Jolly Toper	Frans Hals	54
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Portrait of Nicolaes van der Meer	Frans Hals	59
Reunion of the Officers of St. Andrew	Frans Hals	67
The Syndics of the Cloth Guild	Rembrandt	78
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Sortie of the Banning Cock Company	Rembrandt	81
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Portrait of Elizabeth Bas	Rembrandt	87{x}
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels	Rembrandt	90
The Supper at Emmaus	Rembrandt	96
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie.
Peasants Round a Hearth	Adriaen van Ostade	110
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Old Woman Spinning	Nicolaes Maes	114
Old Woman in Meditation	Gabriel Metsu	116
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Lady at the Clavichord	Caspar Netscher	125
The Despatch	Gerard Terborch	127
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Officer Writing a Letter	Gerard Terborch	129
Girl at the Window	Johannes (Jan) Vermeer	132
Head of a Girl	Johannes (Jan) Vermeer	135
The Cook	Johannes (Jan) Vermeer	138
The Artist in His Studio	Johannes (Jan) Vermeer	141
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
The Inn	Jan Steen	144
Portrait of Paul Potter	Bartholomeus van der Helst	163{xi}
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Family of Admiral Pieter Pietersz	Thomas de Keyser	166
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
The Young Bull	Paul Potter	179
The Avenue, Middelharnis, Holland	Meindert Hobbema	190
View of Haarlem	Jacob van Ruisdael	193
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
Oak-wood	Jacob van Ruisdael	194
The Mill near Wyk-By-Duurstede	Jacob van Ruisdael	199
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
The Jewish Cemetery	Jacob van Ruisdael	200

CHAPTER		PAGE
I	The End of the Old	3
II	The Old Order Changes	19
III	Beginning of the New	35
IV	Frans Hals	49
V	Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn	71
VI	The Influence of Hals and Rembrandt	96
VII	Dutch Genre	107
VIII	Gerard Terborch, Jan Vermeer, and Jan Steen	127
IX	Biblical Subjects and Portraiture	150
X	Landscape	169
XI	Van Goyen and Hobbema	187
XII	Jacob van Ruisdael	193
	Index: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y.	201