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 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 Rembrandt’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 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 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 Impressionism 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 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 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.

CHAPTER VI

THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT

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 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 suggested. 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 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 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, 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 familiar 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 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 motive 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 nevertheless 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.

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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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