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 The latter and the cities remonstrated, and the troops were withdrawn, though the Inquisition continued its fell work.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document, presented a “Request” to the vice-regent, praying that the edicts against heresy and the Inquisition might be withdrawn and the management of affairs restored to the Estates-General.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 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.

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-movement 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, Philip’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 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 borders; 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 learning 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 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 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 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 Holland 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.

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.

CHAPTER III

BEGINNING OF THE NEW

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 cultivation 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 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, distributed 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 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 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 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.

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 distinctively 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, 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 imprisoned 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 beyond 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.

CHAPTER IV

FRANS HALS

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 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 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 unduly 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 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 puissance 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