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 PEEL 
 
 COLLECTION 
 
 ANDl)iE 
 DUTtll SCHOOL OF PAINTING 
 
 Sir Walter Armstrong 
 
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THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 AND THE 
 
 DUTCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING 
 
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THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 AND THE 
 
 DUTCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING 
 
 By 
 SIR WALTER ARMSTRONG 
 
 Director of the National Gallery of Ireland 
 
 LONDON 
 SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, GREAT RUSSELL STREET 
 NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON U CO 
 
 1904 
 
^7 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. PAGE 
 
 The Art of Holland . . . . . . i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Painters of Holland . . . . • ^5 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Making of the Peel Collection . . .26 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Dutch Painters of Society . . . • 33 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The Dutch Painters of the People . . '45 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Landscape Painters . . . . . '57 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 City Painters — Sea Painters — Animal Painters — 
 
 Painters of Still Life . . . .68 
 
 M32553 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PLATES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Guitar Lesson. By Gerard Terborch Frontispiece 
 
 The Chateau de Foil. By Rubens . 28 
 
 Court of a Dutch House. By Pieter de Hooghe ...... 42 
 
 The Avenue, Middelharnis. By Meindert Hobbema 66 
 
 OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 A Family Portrait, By Gonzales Coques 16 
 
 The Triumph of Silenus. By Rubens l6 
 
 The Duet. By Gabriel Metsu 16 
 
 The Music Lesson. By Gabriel Metsu 16 
 
 A Lady Feeding a Parrot. By F. Mieris ....... 40 
 
 Blowing Bubbles. By Gaspar Netscher 40 
 
 The Music Master. By Jan Steen 40 
 
 Interior of a Dutch House. By Pieter de Hooghe 40 
 
 The Alchemist. By Adriaen van Ostade 48 
 
 A Village Scene. By Isaak van Ostade 48 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The Surprise. By D. Tenters the younger. 
 
 The Poulterer's Shop. By Gerard Dou 
 
 River Scene with Cattle. By Albert Cuijp 
 
 Ruined Castle in a Lake. By Albert Cuijp 
 
 A Waterfall. By Jakob van Ruisdael 
 
 A Street in Cologne. By Jan van der Heijde 
 
 A Gale. By Willem van de Velde 
 
 Landscape with Cattle. By Paul Potter 
 
 Frost Scene. By Adriaen van de Velde 
 
 The Farm Cottage. By Adriaen van de Velde 
 
 On the Seashore. By P. Wouwerman . 
 
 The Interior of a Stable. By P. Wouwerman 
 
 Landscape with Figures. By Jan Wynants . 
 
 Figures and Animals in a Meadow. By Karel du Jardin 
 
 page 
 48 
 
 48 
 64 
 64 
 64 
 64 
 72 
 
 72 
 72 
 
 ^z 
 76 
 76 
 76 
 76 
 
THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 AND THE 
 
 DUTCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING 
 
 CHAPTER I : i>o^r . 
 
 The Art of Holland ' ':]-Of\i 
 
 The collection of seventy-eight pictures brought together by the second 
 Sir Robert Peel, and purchased for the National Gallery from the 
 third baronet in 1871, consists of fifty-five examples of the Dutch 
 School, twelve of the Flemish and ten of the British. It also in- 
 cludes an Italian picture of no importance, and eighteen drawings by 
 Rubens and Van Dyck. The Flemish dozen includes the famous 
 " Chapeau de Paille," now corrected into " Chapeau de Poil," of 
 Rubens, and another example of the same master in the fine " Triumph 
 of Silenus." In consequence of always being skied, this " Triumph " has 
 never attracted the admiration it deserves. His own portrait repre- 
 sents Van Dyck, and a " Family Group " Gonzales Coques. The 
 seven specimens of David Teniers the younger are good though not 
 superlative examples; they are far inferior, for instance, to the "Players 
 at Tric-Trac " bequeathed by Lord Farnborough. The English, or 
 rather British, pictures include eight Sir Joshuas, one Lawrence and 
 one Wilkie. With the exception of the Rubens pictures and drawings, 
 which deserve a monograph to themselves, none of these touch the 
 high level reached by the Dutch collection. Over this Sir Robert dis- 
 played a solicitude which had scarcely been equalled since the making 
 of that famous Choiseul gallery in which so many of his own treasures 
 had once had a home. He sought the best advice, never hesitated to 
 
 B 
 
2 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 draught an inferior specimen when a better one was to be had, and so 
 gradually brought together in his house in Whitehall Gardens the 
 finest cabinet of Dutch pictures ever collected hj an amateur. Some 
 account of his methods of purchasing will be given in a later chapter. 
 
 In the following pages the title " The Dutch School " will be used 
 somewhat freely, for I shall include several Flemings who were directly 
 affected by Holland, who would not have worked as they did had no 
 painting existed north of the Scheldt. This will allow of a more 
 catholic view than would otherwise be possible. 
 
 A few days after sitting down to write Modern Painters, John Ruskin, 
 then not long out of his teens, composed the following sentences : — 
 ■' Mo&L pirAur^s of the Dutch school, excepting always those of Rubens, 
 Vandyke an^ Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist's 
 |)c5w<er Of 'speecli", the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and senseless 
 words ; while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning 
 messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants. It 
 is not by ranking the former as more than mechanics, or the latter as 
 less than artists, that the taste of the multitude, always awake to the 
 lowest pleasures art can bestow, and blunt to the highest, is to be 
 formed or elevated. It must be the part of the judicious critic care- 
 fully to distinguish what is language, and what is thought, and to rank 
 and praise pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a 
 totally inferior excellence, and one which cannot be compared with, 
 nor weighed against, thought in any way, or in any degree whatsoever. 
 The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however 
 awkwardly expressed, is a greater and better picture than that which 
 has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully ex- 
 pressed. No weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution, can outweigh 
 one grain or fragment of thought. Three pen strokes of RafEaelle are 
 a greater and a better picture than the most finished work that ever 
 Carlo Dolci polished into inanity. A finished work of a great artist is 
 only better than its sketch, if the sources of pleasure belonging to colour 
 and realization — valuable in themselves — are so employed as to in- 
 crease the impressiveness of the thought. But if one atom of thought 
 has vanished, all colours, all finish, all execution, all ornament, are too 
 
DUTCH PAINTING 3 
 
 dearly bought. Nothing but thought can pay for thought, and the 
 instant that the increasing refinement or finish of the picture begins to 
 be paid for by the loss of the faintest shadow of an idea, that instant all 
 refinement or finish is an excrescence and a deformity."^ 
 
 This paragraph so uncompromisingly expresses the idea against which 
 the lovers of the Dutch School still have to fight, that I shall venture 
 to use it in the following pages as a kind of text, in spite of what 
 I believe to be the fact, that its author himself would have greatly 
 modified its terms had he awaited maturity of judgment before 
 publishing the first volume of Modern Painters. 
 
 " Most pictures of the Dutch School, excepting always those of ■ 
 Rubens, Vandyke and Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the 
 artist's power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and 
 senseless words." In other words, " Dutch painting is mere tech-/ 
 nique," as we are so often told to-day. '' 
 
 Is this true in any sense whatever ? 
 
 The best way to answer such an assertion is : (i) to recount the origin 
 of the characteristic Dutch School, (2) to describe the ideals of its best 
 masters, and (3) to consider their success in carrying out those ideals. 
 
 For our present purposes Dutch painting begins with the seven- 
 teenth century. It would not be difficult to prove — indeed, it is now 
 beginning to be generally acknowledged — that the natural gift of the 
 Dutchmen for expression in paint was one of the chief factors in the 
 glory of that early school which extended from Haarlem almost to the 
 gates of Paris. But the seductions of Italy, and that craving for the 
 exotic which has so often been the ruin of art, supervened, and turned 
 the sixteenth century into an interregnum of insincerity ; during 
 which painters were obeying a disastrous fashion, instead of listening 
 to the counsels of their own emotions. It was not entirely bare of 
 great art, of course, for Antonie Mor's career began and ended in it, 
 and towards the close the purifying effect of portrait painting began 
 to dispel the fumes of those poisonous industries for which Cornells 
 van Haarlem, Marten Heemskerck, and others like them, were respon- 
 sible. But on the whole the sixteenth century was a period of hiber- 
 
 ^ Modern Painters, vol. i, p. 9. Edition of 1888. 
 
4 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 nation, during which the faculties which had illuminated the fifteenth 
 were at least asleep ; and it was not until William of Orange had been 
 thirty years in his grave that the sap began to rise in earnest and the 
 tree of art to put forth leaves and flowers. 
 
 Opinions vary as to the immediate origin of the grand epoch. To 
 some, who have noticed that great imaginative developments have 
 often followed periods of storm and danger, Dutch painting in the 
 
 - seventeenth century embodies the reaction from Dutch agony and rage 
 in the sixteenth. To others it seems a natural result of peace and re- 
 
 ■' turning hope, and its form to be determined by the configuration 
 of Holland and the organization of Dutch society. The truth, prob- 
 ably, is that to a combination of these immediate causes with the 
 results upon character of the whole history, so much of it geographical, 
 of Holland, must be ascribed the nature of her art during the genera- 
 tions when it was truly national. The events of the sixteenth century 
 brought matters to a head. The sufferings of the United Provinces 
 under the Spaniards developed an extreme energy of character, while 
 the configuration of the soil and the social arrangements put neither 
 difficulty nor temptation in the artists' way. But these forces did not 
 actually produce great art. Conditions equally favourable in such 
 
 \ respects have existed elsewhere and among peoples naturally artistic, 
 
 ■ without leading to notable achievements. The important difference 
 
 between Holland after her conquest of a practical independence and, 
 
 let us say, France after the fall of the Bastille, lay in the fact that the 
 
 latter nation followed a model while the former did not. 
 
 Many things combined to make the French turn to Greece and 
 ■Rome for an aesthetic lead. They had dethroned a church and 
 sought a substitute in the symbolism which had sufficed for Pericles. 
 They had destroyed a monarchy, and looked for political ideals to the 
 •great republics of the past. They had overturned society and banished 
 its ambitions and emblems. It was almost inevitable, with changes like 
 these and with the sudden elevation of the half-educated to the guid- 
 ance of affairs, that a superficial but plausible idea like the revival of 
 classical perfection should capture their aesthetic imaginations. It 
 was fatal to art. Men of genius contrived, of course, to show their 
 powers in spite of exotic forms, just as Mantegna had done three cen- 
 
DUTCH PAINTING 5 
 
 turies before, but permanent French characteristics and ambitions 
 found no general expression between 1790 and 181 5. 
 
 With Holland it was otherwise. The Dutch character had been 
 formed by centuries of conflict with the forces of nature. The soil of 
 Holland only exists at all because generations of Dutchmen have been 
 patient, sturdy and self-reliant. The incessant war with the sea and 
 the Rhine had, by a slow process of selection, turned the whole popu- 
 lation into men who would not accept a foreign ideal or an exotic 
 scheme of life. They had made their own country, and meant to keep 
 it for themselves. They had expelled the Spaniard and thrown his 
 gewgaws after him. They had determined that their churches and 
 their homes should be Dutch, and that habits of the South should be 
 reversed because they were Southern habits. The peace of Mtlnster 
 was not signed until 1648, sixty- four years after the death of William 
 the Silent ; and the men who signed it had been familiar with the 
 Spanish aggression only at its ebb, which coincided with the flood-tide 
 of their own independence. It is difficult for an Englishman, with his 
 centuries of domestic peace behind him, to realize that the Dutch 
 painters whose names are almost household words, were the sons of men 
 who had lived through the sieges of Leyden and Alkmaar, who re- 
 membered the " Spanish Fury " and the fantastic valour of the Spanish 
 infantry, who had seen Alva and Orange, and had shaken off, like a 
 nightmare, the dread of Philip and his Inquisition. Here and there, 
 no doubt, the troubles of Holland are echoed in her art — a few 
 battle scenes, and scenes of rape and pillage, find their places in most 
 great galleries. The picturesque accoutrements, too, of the seven- 
 teenth century man of war ensure his presence on a goodly number of 
 panels, even by such peaceful creators as Terborch, Metsu, and De 
 Hooghe. But on the whole the preoccupation is with tranquillity, 
 domesticity, and the daily routine of a people providing in security for 
 the evolution of their families and the rotation of their crops. 
 
 To resume, then, ages of industrious conflict with the forces of 
 nature had turned those who tilled the delta of the Rhine into a very 
 strenuous race indeed. A hundred years of struggle with a southern 
 nation and southern ways had fired their imagination and made them 
 ready for artistic and intellectual development on a large scale. Hatred 
 
y 
 
 6 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 of their enemy and Ms ideas had turned them aside from that field of 
 art in which all Europe, including themselves, had once done so much. 
 Here, then, we have conditions which invariably produce great art : 
 on the one hand an awakened and excited intelligence seeking an out- 
 let ; on the other, an entirely new problem pressing for solution. 
 
 The foundation of all good art is sincerity. Art is the expression 
 of emotion, or passion, to use a nobler word, in some medium appealing 
 to the senses. Insincerity is therefore its negation. Nothing done 
 because some one else has done it before, or because it is difficult, or 
 because one thinks it may excite emotion in those who look upon it, or 
 even because it contains some purely intellectual appeal, can preserve 
 any real vitality. True works of art are the things in which we 
 enjoy the real emotions of those who make them. They are the 
 unlying records by which we men of to-day can appreciate the hu- 
 manity of those from whom we descend. They are entirely vitiated 
 by insincerity. An art founded upon the perfections of another age, 
 an art governing itself, not by the genuine preferences of those who 
 practise it, but by the examples of men who burnt with different 
 ambitions, can never be really alive. At best it pleases only as a feat. 
 
 If we accept this idea, we must confess that a clean slate, such as the 
 Dutch painters had before them in 1600, was the first step towards a 
 fresh record in art. It is now difficult, if not impossible, to allot the 
 credit for the new departure. Whether the supply created the demand 
 or the demand the supply, is, however, a petty matter of chro- 
 nology. It is quite certain that if the Dutch mind had not been 
 attuned to the new idea of setting domestic life on the pedestal hitherto 
 occupied by history and theology, the substitution would never have 
 taken place. That it was so attuned, and very thoroughly indeed, we 
 know not only from the popularity of the new art, but also from the 
 comparative neglect in which the supreme genius of the country — 
 whose imagination lingered among the old themes with such pertin- 
 acity that we sometimes whisper to ourselves, " Was Rembrandt a Jew ? " 
 — passed the greater part of his life. The modern tendency is still 
 to credit individuals too much with new developments. Even the 
 peculiar line taken by the genius of Rembrandt has been referred to 
 the example of Elsheimer, although it may fairly be argued that 
 
THE DUTCH IDEAL 7 
 
 a partial and temporary coincidence of taste was all that their works 
 prove. The logical inference from the fact that the new theories as 
 to what art should do were first embodied in the work of second and 
 third rate painters like Adriaen van der Venne, Pieter Codde and Wil- 
 lem Duyster, is that those men were not originators, but scouts ; men 
 sent on ahead by Public Opinion to tater le terrain. But the point 
 is hardly worth discussion, for the only thing that matters is undeni- 
 able, namely, that by the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth 
 century a body of well equipped Dutch painters, with a good, but 
 not too good, technical tradition behind them, were face to face with 
 an ideal which was at once national and new. If we look fairly at any 
 of the great periods of art, we shall find that parallel conditions to 
 these were always present. They can be stated still more simply 
 by saying that an awakened artistic imagination always produces fine 
 work when compelled to be sincere. 
 
 As for the dignity of Dutch ideals, it varied with individual mas- 
 ters, just as that of the Italians varied. Personally, I am unable to see 
 why " the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering 
 lips of infants," should be set on a higher plane than creations of 
 exquisite beauty, born of the union of a profound sense of Nature's 
 universal rightness with an eye for the expressive power of art. Duccio, 
 and Giotto laboured for the church and spent their force on mysteries 
 which neither they nor their patrons understood. Their work has 
 the charm that so often belongs to immature things. Their attitude 
 to the themes on which their brushes were employed was that of a child 
 to history. A child is logical and dramatic, but vague among abstrac- 
 tions. So were Duccio and Giotto. Their " stammering " consisted 
 in turning large ideas into familiar symbols and clothing those with the 
 dramatic force which so often goes with immaturity of knowledge. 
 Forceful naivete is no longer possible to us. We are compelled to treat 
 the dogmas of our faith in an abstract and therefore non-pictorial way. 
 That we cannot use the imagery of extreme youth any more is, how- 
 ever, no justification for confusing it with revelation, or for setting work 
 in which it prevails above consummate things. 
 
 What was the Dutch ideal ? Was it low, as a matter of fact ? 
 Dr. Johnson's flank attack at the Thrale auction occurs to me. " Gen- 
 
8 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 tlemen, we are not here to sell a parcel of old vats and barrels ; we are 
 here to sell the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of 
 avarice ! " So with the Dutch painters ; their subjects were not silk 
 dresses and drunken boors, young women at spinets and old ones gutting 
 fish, cows and pigs, horses full of labour and groups of oaks. Their 
 subjects — or subject, for they had but one — was the beauty of human 
 •^ I life lived under conditions which made it free. Holland at peace, 
 Holland with its men, women and children pursuing the careers to 
 which they were born, was the objective basis of their art. Their idea 
 was that of a healthy Zola. They set themselves to record life as it 
 was, and in so doing to criticize it in the only fair and effective 
 way. The plastic arts cannot dive far beneath the surface. The 
 painter can deal effectively only with what is familiar. He need not 
 expose himself to the danger which besets the literary realist in a 
 misreading of motives. His business is with phenomena, which he must 
 not over-rationalize or overload. The falsity of the conscious mental 
 condition on which Zola embroiders a drama has no parallel in a painted 
 £^ record. The description of a ball at the Tuileries, in La Curee, 
 
 combines a marvellous veracity to externals with a fantastically wrong- 
 headed view of the emotions seething in the breasts of the company. 
 Hogarth sometimes fell into the same error, but the Dutchmen 
 never. They wished above all things to be veracious, and to tell 
 only what they knew. They neither preached nor moralized, but left 
 the facts to do both. Their pictures are the best of chroniclers, for 
 they supply that truth of background which is the greatest difficulty of 
 the historian. By their means the look of Dutch life in the seventeenth 
 century is better known than that of any other country, including 
 our own. 
 
 The field embraced by their ambitions was not wide, but they ex- 
 y/ plored it thoroughly. They confined themselves to the society they 
 knew, but they made their descriptions ample. Their's was the most 
 various of all the older schools. The modern demand for novelty, for 
 I new problems with new solutions, was not yet born. An artist was 
 thought to have done enough in that direction if each of his creations 
 were at peace with itself. He was not expected to avoid repetition, 
 either of his own work or even that of others. The greatest painters 
 
DUTCH FJRIEir 9 
 
 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were often stereotyped, repeat- 
 ing one design again and again with changes involving no thought 
 whatever. It was never so with the Dutchmen. Perhaps the demand 
 for newness was in the air, but I prefer to believe their variety to be 
 -the result of their ideal. When you set out to describe society, you 
 must be various. For the moment I do not want to allude to parti- 
 cular artists any more than I need, but as an example of what I mean 
 by Dutch variety I may take the work of Philips Wouwerman. Wou- 
 werman died at the age of forty-nine, but at least 600 pictures by him 
 are known. No one has been more unjustly treated by those critics 
 who decide, with frank arbitrariness, what a picture ought to be, and 
 then damn or praise accordingly. " Nonsense pictures, a mere assem- 
 blage of things to be imitated, items without a meaning," one especially 
 shallow analyser calls them. What are their real qualities ? In the 
 first place, design. Every picture by Wouwerman embodies a design, 
 a pattern of line and mass which hangs together and explains the reason 
 for its own existence. In one sense there may be little variety in the 
 pattern, but we must remember that any change in a design involves 
 a whole sequence of other changes, just as the introduction of a new 
 cadence in a musical phrase requires the re-arrangement of the 
 whole. Secondly, Wouwerman is a first-rate executant ; he has both 
 the power to say what he wishes and the conscience which ensures the 
 use of that power. Thirdly, he is faithful to the phenomena with 
 which he is concerned. His business is with outdoor life as he saw it 
 in Holland and North-Western Germany in the middle of the seven- 
 teenth century. The sincerity he brought to its illustration is trans- 
 parent. We may not take much interest in the sporadic fighting which 
 then still ruffled the country, or even in the hawkings and horse fairs 
 and sales of fish or cattle, but they all complete our knowledge of how 
 our race lived and thought two centuries and a half ago. Combine 
 what we are told by Wouwerman with what we know from Terborch, 
 Metsu, Jan Steen, Adriaen van Ostade, Teniers, De Hooghe, Ruisdael and 
 Hobbema, and we get the materials for a vision of Dutch life in which ^ 
 we can implicitly believe. 
 
 It cannot be too often asserted that all genuine art is the expression, 
 in a suitable medium^ of emotion sincerely felt by the artist ; and that 
 
lo THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 the test implied in such a description will, in the long run, supersede 
 all others. But granting for a moment that an external test may be 
 used, how would the men I have just mentioned support it ? So far 
 as I know, the external tests you can apply are these : does so-and-so 
 give pleasure ? does he add to our knowledge ? and, does he teach ? 
 Now, it is evident that the first of these questions can be put aside, 
 not because the giving of pleasure is not a worthy aim, but because 
 there is no reason why it should not be combined with the other two. 
 As to teaching, in Ruskin's sense, it amounts to this, that a painter 
 shall also be a prophet, that he shall put forward theories of conduct, 
 assertions about our origin and end, and symbols of mysteries — which 
 nevertheless remain mysteries ; that he shall, in short, drive us along 
 certain paths without being able to show that there only virtue is to 
 be found. We are so strangely made that we are all apt to give pre- 
 cedence to a mind which can cut itself loose from the knowable ; but 
 (unless we are to accept pleasure, after all, as the final and only test), 
 we must resist that impulse, and accept additions to knowledge as the 
 only external objective of the artist. The Dutchmen painted the 
 social history of their country for a century, and in doing so gave 
 us a document which will lose its value only with existence. 
 
 There remains the question of the moral dignity of the Dutch 
 character and therefore of the art in which it is embodied. Granting 
 that truth, objective as well as subjective fidelity, is a pictorial virtue, 
 does the kind of truth told by the Dutch painters strengthen their 
 claim on our sympathies or does it not ? 
 
 Let us look at the panorama they have left us. 
 
 I do not see how any one can be widely familiar with the school 
 without conceiving a deep respect for the life it records. It is 
 significant that the petty sides of human nature, the more heartless 
 dissipations, the more accidental adventures and tendencies, are left 
 to the inferior artists. Holland has always been a frank country. The 
 large families and small flimsy houses have there made impossible 
 silences and privacies which seem to us a part of nature's scheme. 
 Dutch painters were not prevented by prudery, or rather, let me say, 
 by a severe convention, from offering their clients pages appealing to the 
 mere animal instinct. They were restrained by a just sense of art and 
 
DUTCH SAN ITT ii 
 
 by a fine eye for the broad, permanent forces of society. Even Jan 
 Steen, who turns up the seamy side of life oftener than others, never 
 paints degradation with sympathy. He shows how the peasant lived — 
 how he passed the hours left to him after his cows were milked, his 
 dykes secured, and his crops at home. He shirks nothing, but through 
 it all he weaves the thread of generous humanity, carrying its load for 
 one generation and passing it on lighter to the next. The school, as 
 a whole, is free from any tendency to allow the non-aesthetic value of 
 any particular class of incident to give it prominence in their list of 
 subjects. The relations of the sexes, for example, are so interesting 
 in themselves, that art cannot make use of them beyond a certain point 
 without committing suicide. You may paint a love scene, but you 
 must not carry it too far, or curiosity about the fact will supersede 
 interest in its artistic treatment. So with other exciting themes. 
 Jan de Baen painted the mutilated bodies of the De Witts as they 
 hung on the gibbet at the Hague ; Rembrandt painted Dr. Deyman 
 dissecting the brain of a disembowelled corpse, producing a superb 
 page of technique in doing so.^ But such things were not in the pattern 
 of the school. The Dutch painters aimed — whether consciously or 
 not is neither here nor there — at leaving behind them a true picture 
 of an admirable society : which brings us back to our point that it was 
 an admirable society. 
 
 Again, there are the great portraits — the portraits of individual 
 men and women, and the famous groups of archers, regenten, regent- 
 essen, and what not. All these point to one conclusion, and their 
 meaning is unmistakable. The Dutchman of the great century was 
 neither handsome nor elegant, he was neither poet nor dreamer. His 
 imagination was robust and essentially practical. He cheerfully faced 
 the prospect of long years of fighting and hard work, when they 
 promised to rid his country of the southron and to add millions 
 of broad'acres to its surface. He swept out the Spaniard and sup- 
 pressed the Haarlemer Meer just as coolly as he now prepares 
 
 to abolish the Zuider Zee. Compared to the Italian or to the 
 
 » 
 
 ^ In his other anatomy lesson, Rembrandt took measures to prevent the " subject " 
 from attracting the attention due to Tulp, but even there it is difficult to look upon the 
 canvas with eyes for its art alone. 
 
12 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 Elizabethan Englishman, he was dull, massive, narrow, and intolerant. 
 But he took long views. His eyes were clear, and within his own 
 horizon they saw what there was to be seen. His aspect towards 
 those flowery sides of life which mean so much to men of southern 
 blood, was one of apparent indifference. We can find no evidence 
 that woman's beauty appealed to him. Pretty women are rare in 
 Holland, but they are rarer still in Dutch pictures, and none of the 
 national fashions are based on a desire to enhance beauty or to bring 
 out its characteristic lines. The very young Dutchwoman is 
 often a fine animal, tall, well set up, muscular and supple. For 
 years it was my habit, during annual visits to the Hague, to have 
 breakfast at Scheveningen and sit an hour or so on the beach before 
 beginning the day. The crowds of bathers gave one every oppor- 
 tunity for a true estimate of the Dutch physique. I was often 
 reminded of the famous letter in which Lady Mary Wortley 
 describes her visit to the ladies' bath at Adrianople ; for beautiful 
 figures frequently atoned for the plainest of faces. But the Dutch 
 take thought to deny every charm of limb and torso when they dress, 
 and this seems to have been their habit always. A people with such 
 tendencies can have little romantic about it. It cannot be a race of 
 castle-builders, inventing ideals to pursue. The imagination must 
 work by selection from experience, not by projection to unseen fields 
 ahead. The faces immortalized in such pictures as the " Shooter's 
 Feast " of Van der Heist, or the " Syndics " of Rembrandt, or the " St. 
 George's Guild " of Frans Hals, entirely bear out this idea. In every 
 feature they declare capacity for the work on hand, capacity to control 
 and manipulate, to find the line of least resistance or to stand like 
 a wall and defy. And the female groups — the Regents of the Spin- 
 ning-House of Hals, for instance — show similar qualities. All these 
 heads breathe a character diametrically opposed to that of the Celtic 
 races. They are full of intellect, but of an intellect which deliber- 
 ately prefers the most familiar of truths to the most dazzling and 
 romantic of fictions. 
 
 If we turn to those pages from d^ily life which are the staple of the 
 Dutch painters, we find their spirit determined by the character we 
 read in the portraits. The objective aim is to make a true presentment. 
 
NATURE OF ART 13 
 
 The Dutchman does not execute for the sake of execution. He has 
 selected for the sake of truth, and designed for the sake of art, before 
 execution begins. Of any detail in a picture by one of the greater mas- 
 ters you may safely assert that he put it in, that he placed it, shaped 
 it, and coloured it, for the sake of art and truth ; that he painted it as 
 well as he could for the enjoyment of his own virtuosite. The 
 real initial motive of every true artist is, of course, to create beauty ; 
 but putting that question aside for the present as one not raised 
 just now, I repeat that the aim of the Dutchman was to pre- 
 sent the highest truths he knew^ which were those of human life as 
 it was lived by the strenuous men and women of his time and country. 
 It is " the part of the judicious critic carefully to distinguish between 
 what is language and what is thought, and to rank and praise pictures 
 chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a totally inferior 
 excellence, and one which cannot be compared with nor weighed 
 against thought in any way or in any degree whatsoever." Yes : but 
 there are thoughts proper to be declared in words, and thoughts 
 proper to be declared in paint, or in musical sounds, or in building 
 materials, and the true artist will never confound one with the other. 
 A conception of eternity may be a great thought, but plastic art cannot 
 express it. It can be suggested only in a medium which leaves the 
 imagination free, while those of art are essentially concrete and finite. 
 To ignore the thought which goes to the arranging of a picture, and 
 to the harmonizing of everything done upon the chosen surface with 
 that arrangement, is to show that the power of art has not been felt, 
 that its nature and scope have not been understood. The author of 
 Modern Painters always writes as if the only ideas conveyable by paint 
 were associative ideas — ^historical, religious, scientific — and ignores the 
 fact that the true artist works not by association, but by the direct 
 appeal of his medium. The contrast he seeks to establish between the 
 early Italians and the later Dutch is really not one of art at all. It 
 has to do with his own personal opinions as to how an artist should apply 
 his art. Fra Angelico would have painted like Metsu if he could. 
 It may, indeed, be quite safely asserted that he thought more about 
 execution, in the sense in which Ruskin uses the word, than any of 
 the greater Dutchmen. All the better Dutch painters are full of 
 
14 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 thought, of exactly the same kind as that which breathes from " three 
 pen strokes of Raffaelle." No one can seriously assert that the three 
 pen strokes in question could be pregnant with anything more than 
 an aesthetic value ; the poise of a torso, the turn of a limb, the carriage 
 of a head. In Raphael these three lines would be ultimately destined 
 to association with matters we have all been trained to revere, while 
 in a Dutchman their concern would be with familiar things. But 
 that makes no difference to their art. Raphael and Metsu alike are 
 engaged in building up a structure of line, mass and rhythmical lights 
 and shadows, which shall end in unity, and both are employing their 
 thoughts in the same way. That one is the servant of an ancient 
 church and its head, and the other of a sturdy people, determined 
 to get down to the bed rock for the foundation of a new order, is no 
 justification for asserting a difference in kind between their arts. No- 
 thing is more significant than the phrase so often heard : I don't care 
 about this or that class of art. No man has time enough to 
 steep himself deeply in the ideas of all the schools, or to know all the 
 masters as he knows his favourites. But the man who knows one 
 real school, who truly appreciates the qualities on which its greatness 
 depends, will understand and respect all the others. If he can truly 
 taste the art of Michelangelo, he will not jeer at Jan Steen, but will 
 confess that, different in kind and in dignity though their themes 
 may be, their art, their use of the language which knits generation 
 to generation through the ages, is essentially the same. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 The Painters of Holland 
 
 So far I have said nothing about Dutch art in detail. The points 
 discussed have had to do with the uses to which art may be put, rather 
 than with the nature of the thing itself. I have endeavoured to suggest 
 that even if we confine ourselves to the moral or intellectual ideas con- 
 tained in pictures, much more is to be said for the Dutch than we 
 are apt to suppose. The Italian served the Church and the grand 
 seigneur ; the Dutchman, domestic life and the bourgeois ; there we 
 have the origin of the contrast in externals between their respective 
 arts. When we desert externals and make esoteric comparisons, we get 
 on surer ground, but there, again, we find ourselves driven to 
 similar conclusions. The Dutch were not only supreme executants 
 — meaning by that term realizers of conceptions previously formed in 
 the mind — they were first-rate conceivers too. Putting aside such 
 questions as have to do with the moral dignity, historical value, 
 or didactic energy of a subject, and confining ourselves to design, illu- 
 mination, colour, and handling, that is to those elements of a pictorial 
 creation which embody and convey aesthetic emotion, I shall try to 
 show that the Dutch painters were the most universal of all. 
 
 The distinction of a painter is the ability to find a pictorial equi- 
 valent for his own emotions, and therefore for those of other people. 
 His procedure is to select themes because they touch his sympathies 
 in themselves, and then to clothe them in a garment of art which shall 
 be in perfect harmony with, and shall therefore enhance, their sym- 
 pathetic appeal. The man who feels no relation between an emotion 
 and the materials of art is not an artist. His work will be governed 
 by ideas which have no essential connexion with art, ideas of 
 actuality, or archaeology, or science, or ideas belonging to some art 
 
i6 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 other than the one he practises. He may, for instance, believe that 
 a dramatic picture is necessarily a good one, whereas it may be as 
 dramatic as you please, and yet not a work of art within its own four 
 walls at all. The first thing a painter has to do, then, is to select a 
 subject which, given his own idiosyncrasy and that of paint, will lead 
 to aesthetic unity. Subjects dictated seldom lead to good results because 
 dictation is against the spirit of art. When a painter accepts a theme 
 from some one else, he does away with one of the essential, or, at least, 
 desirable, stages in the evolution of a work of art. The first stage in 
 creation is design. Many artists, no doubt — not always the best ones 
 — fuse all the stages into one act of the will. They see their conception 
 at once — design, colour, illumination, handling — all complete in the 
 mind, and each bringing its quota to the final unity. It rises upon 
 them like a vision, and nothing remains but realization. Others build 
 it up gradually, fitting each successive stage to the last, and modifying 
 enormously as a new aesthetic unity has to be won after each addition. 
 Of the first class I imagine Rembrandt to have been the supreme ex- 
 ample ; of the second, perhaps Raphael. But however inextricable 
 the various stages may be in fact, it will be convenient for our present 
 purposes to take them as separable, and to suppose that every painter 
 thinks of his picture as a linear design in the first place, then as an 
 arrangement of shade, shadow and light, then as a colour harmony, and 
 lastly as a piece of significant and vivacious texture built up by handling. 
 
 But before attempting to follow up these several lines, it will be 
 convenient to specify those Dutch painters — all, happily, save two, 
 represented in the Peel Collection — upon whom I shall chiefly have to 
 depend for illustration. They need not be very numerous : — Metsu, Ter- 
 borch, Vermeer, De Hooghe, Jan Steen, Adriaen van Ostade, Willem 
 and Adriaen van de Velde, Wouwerman, Hobbema, Jakob Ruisdael, 
 Albert Cuijp, Philips de Koninck, and Frans Hals. I omit Rembrandt 
 altogether for the present. He, like Shakespeare, belongs neither to 
 a period nor a locality, but has his place in the small group of artists 
 whose imaginations both embraced and looked down upon the con- 
 ditions and ideas to which they were born. 
 
 Restricting ourselves at first to the figure painters, and to those 
 who dealt with the politer sides of society, let us see how Metsu, Ter- 
 
"5^ 
 
 
 Vo 
 
 <5 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 
The Duet. By G. Metsu. From a Photograph by F. Hanfstaengl. 
 
The Music Lesson. By G. Metsu. From a Photograph by F. Haii/staengl. 
 
GABRIEL METSU 17 
 
 borch, De Hooghe and Vermeer understood their relation to art, 
 and first to that initial beauty of painting — a good design. 
 
 Gabriel Metsu, the most consummate of all the Dutchmen, the 
 man in whom the greatest number of subtle beauties met and min- 
 gled in the most delicate proportions, is one of those rare artists in whom 
 a sense of form is an imperious instinct. His pictures vary ingeniously 
 in general aspect, for he never became stereotyped. His execution 
 progressed steadily from the beginning to the end, from the somewhat 
 metallic tightness of his early years to the unrivalled combination of 
 breadth with subtlety, of manipulative with creative elements, which 
 marks his final style. But his manifest delight in execution did 
 not make him forget design. From first to last his pictures are or- 
 ganic things. One line implies another, one mass answers to another. 
 There is a pervading rhythm to be enjoyed in their depth as well as 
 their superficies. Sir Frederic Burton says of him : " His compositions 
 are faultless in arrangement and in balance of parts. In respect of 
 chiaroscuro, if that term be applied, as it often is with us, not merely 
 to the management of light, shadow, and reflex, but to that of lights 
 and darks generally in their mutual relations and values as local colours, 
 Metsu was a master of the first order." Plenty of opportunities for 
 the study of his art are afforded by London, for the National Gallery 
 has three good examples and the Wallace Collection five ; while two 
 more, including perhaps his masterpiece, are in Mr. Alfred Beit's col- 
 lection in Park Lane. Of all these, there is only one in which Metsu's 
 genius for design falters and sinks for the moment to taste in arrange- 
 ment. This is Mr. Beit's " Reading the Letter." Here we have a 
 sort of tableau-vivant carried out in paint. The figures are cut out, 
 without liaison to one Mother or to their background, and no fusing acci- 
 dents of chiaroscuro have been contrived. It is, nevertheless, a deli- 
 cious picture, and its unusual aspect may be accounted for by supposing 
 it the portrait of a place as well as of a person. The companion pic- 
 ture,* the " Letter Writer," shows all Metsu's artistry at its best. The 
 design is perfect. It begins by founding itself on the probabilities, 
 so that untutored eyes may easily suppose veracity to be its only aim. 
 
 ^ They both once belonged to the collection left by the late Mrs, Hope, of Deepdene, 
 to Lord Francis Pelham-Clinton, from which they were acquired by Mr. Beit. 
 
 C 
 
1 8 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 There is a touch more of elegance in the pose than the act of writing 
 leads to, otherwise the rare art of concealing the most elaborate art 
 cannot show a more consummate achievement. The red picture in 
 the Peel Collection known as " The Duet," the " Letter Writer Sur- 
 prised," and .the " Woman Selling Fish," of the Wallace Collection 
 are all faultless in the same way. They each embody a beautiful de- 
 sign, in which the linear pattern, the movement of the light, and the 
 come and go of mass and surface, corroborate each other into a con- 
 vincing unity. Metsu's design is like music, or a live animal. It sup- 
 plies its own finality, which you cannot interfere with or modify, but 
 must enjoy as it is. The architectonic dignity admitted by such themes 
 as those treated by the Italians of the previous two centuries is pre- 
 cluded by his subjects, but otherwise his power to design, to create a 
 whole, is as great as theirs. 
 
 What is here said of Metsu may be applied, with a very slight modi- 
 fication, to Terborch. Metsu seems to me the finer artist, partly through 
 the greater breadth and comprehension of his handling, which does 
 not concern us for the moment ; but also through his deeper sense 
 of unity, and the greater flexibility and elasticity of his imagination. 
 I have seen no Terborch in which the elements of the design are so 
 completely wedded to each other and compelled to work for the common 
 good as they are in the red Metsu of the National Gallery or in Mr. 
 Eeit's " Letter Writer." Compared to Metsu's, Terborch's design is 
 skilful arrangement ; but even so it is above the level of all but the great- 
 est men of other schools. The same kind of power is exhibited by De 
 Hooghe. He, like Terborch, is without the extraordinary unity of vision, 
 in matters of form, of Metsu. His pictures are arranged rather than 
 conceived, just as the earlier Madonnas of Bellini are arranged. The 
 sense of inevitability we feel before those rare designs which appear 
 to have sprung full grown from their creator's brain, is not to be felt 
 before even the best conceptions of De Hooghe — such, for instance, 
 as the one which England lost to America when the Hope Col- 
 lection was dispersed. But if without this last and greatest quality, 
 they are nevertheless monuments of taste in arrangement, and ex- 
 cellent foundations for that other unity brought them by their won- 
 derful sunlight. 
 
DUTCH DESIGN 19 
 
 Jan Vermeer of Delft, who unhappily had not risen above our modern 
 horizons when Sir Robert Peel was collecting his pictures, was another 
 extraordinary master of design, when he chose. He was vastly more 
 unequal than Metsu, rising to heights untouched by any other Dutch- 
 man of his class, one day ; and sinking to little more than common- 
 places the next. In his best designs, such as the " Dairywoman " of 
 the Six Collection ; the " Soldier and the Laughing Girl," belonging to 
 Mrs. Joseph ; the '■' Dutch Lady at a Window " of the New York 
 Museum, the linear pattern is almost as fine as the best of Metsu's But 
 he often fell below this level, becoming at times one of the most formal 
 and recipe-obeying members of his school. In what other man's work 
 will you find such a contrast in essentials as that between the famous 
 " View of Delft," at the Hague, and the " Artist in his Studio " of the 
 Czernin Collection ? The one all warmth, force, and simplicity ; 
 the other all contrivance and elaboration. That by the way, however. 
 My present object is to class Vermeer with Metsu, De Hooghe, and 
 Terborch, and to point out how in matters of design they were governed 
 by ideas of style, dignity and unity only to be distinguished by national 
 character from those of the great Italians. Such a picture as the Garvagh 
 " Madonna " in the National Gallery is to be set apart from Vermeer's 
 " Dairy-woman " or Metsu's " Letter Writer " chiefly by the accident 
 of its external purpose. The Italian demand was for sacred subjects, 
 and such subjects had to be conventionalized. Otherwise Raphael ^ 
 worked in the same spirit as the two Dutchmen. 
 
 It would not serve our immediate purpose to contrast these four 
 Dutchmen as chiaroscurists. Speaking broadly, they are all guided 
 by the same idea in their treatment of light — they are essentially 
 objective. Terborch prefers the discreet illumination of a lady's boudoir ; 
 Metsu ventures on the bolder daylight of the salon ; while Vermeer, 
 and still more De Hooghe, admit the sun into their combinations. 
 In spite of fidelity to effect, however, they never forget their 
 pattern, and no painter has surpassed them in wedding unity to 
 clarity, in preserving contact and liaison and yet avoiding confusion. 
 It is the same with their colour. Vermeer is more personal than 
 the other three, but with him we have to make allowances, for he 
 ^ Or Giulio Romano, as some critics believe. 
 
20 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 seems to have used one pigment, at least — a yellow — which has proved 
 unstable. On the whole they accept colour just as they accept light. 
 The Rembrandtesque, and Titianesque, determination to make a slave 
 of it, is absent ; here, as in chiaroscuro, actuality is the first condition. 
 
 As for our last element, that of texture, or handling, here again 
 our four men are models of taste, sanity and proficiency. Metsu is 
 the finest executant, because the relation between his executive units 
 — his brush strokes — and his scale, shows a finer instinct than those 
 of the other three. The units — the stitches, if I may put it so — of 
 Terborch, are too small, those of Vermeer and De Hooch often too 
 large, for the stuff they are weaving. In saying this, however, I must 
 not forget that Metsu's enamelled period, when brushing was not 
 perceptible at all, lasted a considerable time, and that his handling 
 is only to be seen in perfection in such creations of his maturity as 
 Mr. Beit's " Letter Writer," the National Gallery " Duet " and " Drowsy 
 Landlady," and the Wallace " Fish-seller." Putting aside precedence 
 among themselves, our chosen four all understood the value of an 
 agreeable texture, of a handling which should be at once indicative 
 of the objective qualities of the things represented and in harmony 
 with the idea to be expressed. The notion that what is called their 
 finish was a mere question of labour, that if they could they would 
 have obliterated all traces of the tool, is, of course, absurd. The mere 
 fact that, as time went on and experience grew, they allowed their 
 brushing to become more and more visible shows that they deliberately 
 accepted it as an addition to their means of expression. Only the 
 mediocrities — men like Schalcken — adopted a mechanical finish as part 
 of their aim. The others understood that everything done upon a 
 panel by a painter can help his thought, and were not so foolish as to 
 polish out of existence such an eloquent dialect as that of the handler. 
 
 Mutatis mutandis, most of what I have now been saying of these 
 four men may be applied to the rest of those whose names are quoted 
 on page i6. Jan Steen was seldom quite happy in his scale, in the 
 quantitative relation between his treatment of a subject and his 
 surface. To this, however, the Peel example is an exception. Adriacn and 
 Isaak van Ostade, Wouwerman, Adriaen van de Velde, often fell into 
 the same fault, and produced works which make us feel that no dis- 
 
PICTORIAL FOCUS 21 
 
 tance is the right one from which to enjoy them. AMetsu focusses at 
 once. You never have the slightest hesitation in deciding how far 
 away you should be when you look at it. You take up your place 
 before the red " Duet " as unerringly as before the " Bacchus and 
 Ariadne," or Moroni's " Tailor," or Rembrandt's " Woman Wading." 
 So you do with a Hobbema, and often, though not always, 
 with a Ruisdael. This question of establishing a right quantitative 
 relation between (i) the parts of a picture, and (2) a picture and the 
 spectator, is one of those points which are difficult to prove. We 
 have no doubt whatever that the occupation of the surface we 
 see in De Hooghe's " Interior," in the Peel Collection, is the result of 
 a much better aesthetic judgment than that, let us say, of Wouwer- 
 man's " Stable," in the same collection ; but beyond saying that one 
 focusses, appeals to us as a whole at one point of distance, while the 
 other does not, we can assert nothing. And yet success in this par- 
 ticular is the beginning of all good design. Passing the Dutchmen 
 in review before one's mind's eye, they fall into their places with ex- 
 traordinary promptitude from this standpoint. One requires no 
 thinking to know that our four, and Hobbema, and, of course, Rem- 
 brandt in his maturity, never fail, and that a certain number of others 
 fail but seldom, the whole school standing at a higher level than any 
 other in this aspect of its work. It is not a question of execution. It 
 is a question of the most immaterial and abstract relations between 
 the human imagination and its means of expression. It is, of 
 course, exactly the same question as any piece of design asks us — 
 the decoration of a bookbinding, for instance. " Am I fit ? do I 
 suit the shape, size and texture of the surface on which I exist ? " That 
 is the query, and, obviously, it has to do with decisions come to before 
 execution begins. 
 
 This matter of focus is at the root of the charm exercised by many 
 otherwise slight works of art. English miniatures, for instance, 
 occupy their surface and draw our eyes to it with a curious felicity. 
 Looking at them we feel a satisfaction, an absence of any desire to go 
 farther and fare otherwise, comparable to that felt when an object 
 sails well into the field of an exactly focussed telescope. Cosway, 
 Engleheart, Smart, and the rest of them have an instinctively just 
 
22 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 perception of a quantitative relation between a surface and the objects 
 to be put upon it. And so it was with the finer Dutchmen, so that we 
 are invaded by an active sense of physical repose before their better 
 pictures. 
 
 It may be said that in all this discussion I am but repeating in 
 different words the doctrine of Ruskin quoted at the head of my first 
 chapter, and showing that the Dutch excelled only in matters of exe- 
 cution, while, either from their own inclination or from the absence 
 of demand, they left the higher thoughts of man untouched by their 
 art. If I have made myself understood, the reader will see the answer 
 to any such assertion. A good picture may be divided into three 
 constituents, namely, subject, artistic conception, scientific execution. 
 All experience shows that of these three, subject, by itself, is by far 
 the least important. True art can dignify any subject, can do without 
 a subject altogether, can turn a horrible object into a fine subject, or 
 work any other miracle of a similar kind ; while in the absence of art, 
 no subject, no matter how momentous in itself, can give vitality. It 
 would be easy enough, were it necessary, to name hundreds of pic- 
 tures treating great events and great ideas with vigour from some 
 non-aesthetic standpoint ^ which are nevertheless utterly dumb and 
 uninteresting, simply because their authors have failed to give an 
 aesthetic equivalent for their religious, dramatic, or historical appeal. 
 It is clear that the charm of a true work of art cannot be referred 
 to the presence of some quality which fails to charm in a quasi 
 work of art. If it does not succeed in saving the latter from 
 death, it cannot be the cause of vitality in the former. The 
 truth is that art alone gives vitality to anything which sets out 
 to be a work of art. The early efforts of Giotto are still alive, not 
 because they are " burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the 
 stammering lips of infants," but because, when compared to other 
 messages of their time, the lips do not stammer, but find instead curiously 
 vigorous forms for the conveyance of their message. Giotto was a 
 great potential artist ; through his ignorance and inexperience we 
 can descry the inborn faculty for devising an aesthetic equivalent to 
 
 ^ The pictures of Benjamin Robert Haydon, for example. 
 
IRRELEVANT COMPARISONS 23 
 
 dramatic or religious emotion, and for translating abstract ideas into 
 forms of line and colour. 
 
 From all this it will be seen that in my opinion any attempt to fix 
 the relative dignity of the Dutch and the Italian Schools by a comparison 
 of their themes, is beside the mark. The Italians did not express them- 
 selves in their subjects, but in their treatment of those subjects, that is in 
 their art. The Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were 
 essentially irreligious, pleasure-loving, wedded to the present and free 
 from the spirit of men who suifer for their faith. They followed their 
 religion and the tradition which made it almost the only subject for 
 art ; but the spirit in which they worked was neither devotional nor 
 inquisitive. It was that of men who accepted what they had been 
 told, and made it the basis of an art in which they could find an outlet 
 for their purely aesthetic passion. If we are to compare the Dutch- 
 men with the Italians by their subjects, we shall have to begin by 
 confessing that the former were sincere, while the latter were, for 
 the most part, not. It is an abuse of words to call the sentiment 
 which breathes from the work of Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Peru- 
 gino, PoUajuolo, Signorelli, Ghirlandajo, devotional. Its sincerity 
 is artistic sincerity, the passion really expressed is an aesthetic, and 
 not a religious, passion. The fervour of Duccio, and Angelico, and 
 perhaps Filippino, was rare in the schools to which they belonged, 
 as rare as the inspiration of Dante or Savonarola. That we choose to 
 call the subjects on which Florentine studios were engaged in the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, higher than those facts and ten- 
 dencies of human life on which the Dutchmen of a later age were 
 employed, is no ground for the arguments which have been based upon it. 
 On the other hand, we must not push our own argument too far. 
 The Dutch are undeniably lacking in one artistic quality which must not 
 be left out of the account. It is a quality difficult to define, although 
 we have several names for it. Sometimes we call it idealism, sometimes 
 poetry, sometimes imagination, forcing this last word away from its 
 etymological meaning.^ Idealism, perhaps, is the best word, for the 
 
 ^ If imagination be the faculty for creating a mental imago, then Mr. Rudyard Kipling 
 has more of it than other men. If he were a painter, we could fancy him painting, literally, 
 from an absent model, whose image was still vivid on his retina ! 
 
24 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 quality has its birth in the setting of a higher standard than that of 
 average nature in the imitative elements of a work of art. This was 
 contrary to the Dutch genius. We find no objective idealism in the 
 works of the greater masters of Holland, nothing to answer to the 
 idealism of Giorgione or Titian, or even of Van Dyck. Idealism of this 
 sort is an aesthetic virtue, not because it makes men handsomer and 
 women more beautiful than they are, but because, in doing so, it raises 
 the aesthetic level too, and compels a grander design and a finer colour 
 than we should otherwise be given. The Dutch are good colourists, 
 and their better men put a picture together with consummate felicity. 
 But to justify — to live up to — such design and colour as we see in a 
 great Titian, for instance, you must lift your people correspondingly 
 above the smaller particularities of fact. The whole difference be- 
 tween Italy and Holland in this connexion may be learnt by comparing 
 two pictures which are now together in the National Gallery — I mean 
 the Cobham " Ariosto," ^ so happily rescued from emigration, and the 
 " Rembrandt," by himself (No. 672), which has been one of our 
 National treasures for more than forty years. It is just, as well as easy, 
 to compare these two, for not only do they hang under one roof, they 
 are so conceived that we may feel sure we do no wrong to Rembrandt 
 if we take his conscious intention as identical with that of Titian, or to 
 Titian if we reverse the process. Each man set out to create a work of 
 art in which the best features of humanity should be surrounded with 
 the best accidents, and each set about it in the same way. Each saw 
 
 ^ That the old tradition is right and that here we have a portrait of the author of 
 " Orlando," is my humble opinion. Not only that, I think the picture numbered 636 
 and now ascribed to Palma, is also Ariosto, as it used to be called. The points of identity 
 between those two pictures and the woodcut in the 1640 edition of '' Orlando " are too 
 numerous to be fortuitous. First, as to the two pictures. The features in two readings of 
 one face are consistent with each other. The cut of hair, beard and moustache is the same 
 in both. Both men wear linen shirts cut to the same height, quilted clothes of rich material, 
 and gold chains of identical fashion. They are both about the same age, and that the age 
 of Ariosto when the pictures were painted. Behind one of them appear the bays of the 
 poet. If we turn to the woodcut, we again find identities in decisive matters. Here the 
 poet is older and more worn, but his features, the shape of his head, the fashion of hair and 
 dress, are again consistent with the two earlier portraits. All these similarities and the 
 absence of any intrusive difference requiring to be explained away, seem to show that here, 
 as with the " Ambassadors " of Holbein, tradition is worth listening to. 
 
REMBRANDT AND THIAN 25 
 
 the grandeur of a certain movement, the harmony of a certain pattern, 
 and the opportunity they gave for breadth of colour and illumination/ 
 Nevertheless, the Dutchman and the Italian combined two quite 
 different propensities with their general aim. Rembrandt, consciously 
 or not, worked as many details as he could into his pattern, while Titian 
 gave as few as possible. In the Dutchman's portrait the silhouette is full of 
 accident, like a coast on a map, while the Venetian's lies about the figure 
 in a few simple curves. Within the bounding line, the planes are 
 numerous and elaborately distinguished with Rembrandt, few and 
 broadly fused with Titian. Titian reduces the costume to one magnifi- 
 cent sleeve ; Rembrandt dwells upon all its accidents of form and tex- 
 ture. It is the Germanic spirit on the one hand, transfigured by that 
 aesthetic emotion which appears to come with the proximity of the 
 sea ; and, on the other, the Latin gift for generalization and that eye 
 for the ideal without which it is impossible to generalize. The Dutch- 
 men were not restrained, like Velazquez and his modern disciples, from 
 driving colour to its highest power, by any respect for the sobriety of 
 the actual. They disregarded values and used colour for its own sake 
 often enough. They failed to rival the glow of Titian and Giorgione 
 because idealism was not among their virtues. 
 
 * This design has an interesting pedigree. It passed from Titian — or Giorgione, if we 
 lean towards Mr. Herbert Cook's hypothesis — to Sebastiano del Piombo, who used it 
 for the Sciarra-Colonna " Violonista " (now in Baron Alphonse de Rothschild's collection), 
 and from Sebastiano to Rembrandt, possibly through one of the many painters who afforded 
 links between Rome and Amsterdam at the end of the sixteenth century ; or it may have 
 come direct from Venice. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 The Making of the Peel Collection 
 
 Before the acquisition of the Peel collection the National Gallery was 
 curiously poor in examples of the Dutch school of the seventeenth 
 century. It only contained fifty altogether. They included four 
 Jakob Ruisdaels, two Cuijps, a De Hooghe, a Hobbema, three Van der 
 Neers, three good specimens of Nicholas Maes, and, above all, no less 
 than thirteen Rembrandts. The policy followed seems to have been 
 one of assuming that the English National Gallery would be sure, in 
 time, to reflect the richness of our private collections without any 
 special effort on the part of the purchasing authority. The first director, 
 Sir Charles Eastlake, spent his travelling allowance in Italy and Southern 
 Europe, concentrating his energies on laying the foundation for a fine 
 gathering of pictures from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It 
 was well he did so, for delay in that matter would have left a gallery 
 poor in Italian art face to face with the present law, and impotent to 
 fulfil an important part of its mission. Even in 1871 it was asserted 
 by many that the buying of the Peel pictures was a mistake, as 
 the gallery would be sure to acquire all the Dutch pictures it wanted 
 by gift and bequest. Fortunately, these objections were not listened 
 to. As a matter of fact, the Dutch side of the collection has never 
 been greatly favoured by donors and testators, and without these fifty- 
 five pictures it would still be but poorly furnished. Between 1824 
 and 1 87 1 only seven really fine Dutch pictures found their way into 
 the collection gratis, while in the thirty- three years which have 
 elapsed since the latter date only one has been so acquired, namely, 
 Terborch's " Peace of Miinster." The advent of this picture was 
 dramatic. In 1868 it was sold, at the Demidoff sale in Paris, to the 
 fourth Marquess of Hertford for nearly ^7,000, the Director of the 
 National Gallery being, very fortunately as it turned out, among the 
 
 26 
 
THE MAKING OF THE PEEL COLLECTION 27 
 
 disappointed bidders. Lord Hertford died in 1870, leaving his pic- 
 tures, as every one knows, to his natural brother, afterwards Sir Richard 
 Wallace. Some months later Sir William Boxall was sitting in his 
 room in Trafalgar Square when he was informed that " a gentleman " 
 wished to see him. " He won't give his name. Sir William, but he has 
 a case under his arm which looks like a picture." " Tell him to write ; 
 
 give him a form " But by this time the unknown was in the room, 
 
 and was already beginning to undo the straps which secured the case. 
 *' I have a picture here," he said, " which I want to present to the 
 National Gallery." The director, filled with the idea that the intruder 
 was one of the countless importunate people who wasted so much of 
 his time, was nearly pushing him through the door, when the box 
 opened and disclosed the " Peace of Milnster." " I nearly fainted," 
 said Boxall when he told the story, " at my escape." Terborch painted 
 this picture for his own pleasure ; at least, he did not sell it, and it was 
 still the property of his descendants in the middle of the eighteenth 
 century. From a certain Terborch, who was receiver of government 
 rents at Deventer in 1721, it was bought by Mr. van Leyden, from 
 whom it passed into the Talleyrand collection. It was hanging in the 
 room when the Peace of 1814 was signed in Paris, in Talleyrand's house, 
 now the hotel of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild. It afterwards belonged 
 to the Due de Berri, at whose sale, in 1837, i^ ^^^ bought by Prince A. 
 Demidoif for his famous villa at San Donate. In consequence of a 
 badly worded paragraph in Buchanan's Memoirs of Painting it has some- 
 times been asserted that the Duke of Wellington once owned the pic- 
 ture. The only ground for this statement is that a fine impression of 
 Suyderhoef's plate from it is at Apsley House. 
 
 Revenons a nos moutons ! The Wynn Ellis bequest — such part of 
 it as was accepted by the National Gallery — was useful in filling out 
 the representation of the Dutch School, but no picture of first-rate 
 excellence was included in it. Metsu's " Drowsy Landlady " is a good 
 example of a first-rate master ; W. v. de Velde's " Calm, with vessels 
 saluting," a first-rate example of a good master ; the large Ruisdael is 
 too black and opaque ; while the finest of the Van de Capelles fails to 
 live up to its own sky. I think, therefore, that I am justified in saying 
 that if the National Gallery had trusted to testators and donors, it 
 
28 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 would Still be putting Rembrandt forward as its one and only Dutchman 
 with a proper certificate. 
 
 The Peel collection was offered to the Government in the early 
 months of 187 1. It had been gradually formed by the second baronet 
 during the years which intervened between his Irish secretaryship 
 (18 1 8) and his death. He had gone to work with great judgment. A 
 man of taste, he was in no sense a connoisseur. He had, however, the 
 next best thing to knowledge — the desire to make use of it and the flair 
 for where it lay. He employed various people in searching out good 
 pictures and in negotiating their purchase. Wilkie was one of Peel's 
 advisers. It was through him that the two Drayton Van Dycks, sold 
 in 1 90 1 at Fisher and Robinson's, were acquired. In a letter to 
 Andrew Wilson, another of Sir Robert's agents, Wilkie writes : " He 
 (Peel) said he was willing to give a good price, if a fine picture ; and 
 if it were not, he would not have it at any price." ^ He was there re- 
 ferring to a portrait of Philip III of Spain, by Van Dyck, reported to be 
 in the Durazzo Palace at Genoa ; but in all his purchases Sir Robert 
 went on this principle. Occasionally an inferior picture found its way 
 into his collection, but such things were got rid of at the first oppor- 
 tunity. Sir Robert's chief agents in buying Dutch pictures were two 
 well known dealers, C. J. Nieuwenhuys and John Smith, the author of 
 the famous Catalogue Raisonne. He also bought occasionally from 
 Buchanan and others. 
 
 Of these men Nieuwenhuys was the cleverest. He lived, or at least 
 preserved his activity, too long for his fame. When the collection he 
 left behind him was put up at Christie's, it was seen to be over-cleaned 
 and shining with varnish until you could see yourself in the pictures, 
 to the damage of its owner's reputation as a man of taste. In his 
 younger days, however, Nieuwenhuys was a good and courageous judge, 
 seeing merit in unpopular things, and demerit in not a few of those 
 which were on the crest of the wave of fashion. His book,^ published 
 
 1 Life of Sir David Wilkie, by Allan Cunningham, vol. iii. pp. 272. 
 
 ^ A Review of the Lives and Works of Some of the most Eminent Painters, with Remarks on 
 the Opinions and Statements of Former Writers ; London, 1834. The book contains many 
 independent verdicts which time has confirmed, as well as much very outspoken criticism of 
 his quondam associate, John Smith, and other rival connoisseurs. 
 
ii'UMn.^^imu^Wlf^ CflMXc 
 
 (^/uzJvecuo ae^ cyot^. 
 
THE MAKING OF THE PEEL COLLECTION 29 
 
 as long ago as 1834, ^^ ^^^^^ worth reading. Its style is that of an auc- 
 tioneer's catalogue, but its judgments are generally sound enough, and 
 help to show that people like Van der Werif enjoyed their whilom 
 vogue in spite of the best opinions. He understood the genius of Frans 
 Hals. At page 129 he describes a pair of portraits by Hals, and prices 
 the better of the pair at _^22. These same two portraits were bought by 
 Baron Alphonse de Rothschild some twenty years ago for many thou- 
 sands. The lady is still in his collection, but divorced from her husband, 
 who now hangs in the Antwerp Museum. Nieuwenhuys says of Hals : — 
 " They (the pictures) are not at the present time duly appreciated, for 
 Hals, notwithstanding his defects, was an excellent painter, and, on 
 examining his productions with attention, we shall discern in him the 
 mind of a genius, and the handling of a master, whose choice paintings 
 deserve a better fate, and are worthy of a place in the finest collections." 
 It is now difficult to say exactly which pictures entered the Peel collec- 
 tion immediately from Nieuwenhuys ; but we know the Hobbema 
 " Brederode Castle," the Van der Heijde " Cologne," the Gonzales 
 Coques, the fine " Calm " of Van de Velde, from the Duchesse de 
 Berri's collection, and the " Chapeau de Paille " of Rubens, all passed 
 directly from the ownership of the Anglo-Belgian dealer to that of the 
 English statesman. Nieuwenhuys, however, was not sole owner of the 
 " Chapeau de Paille." It was knocked down to him at the sale of 
 M. Stiers d'Aertselaar, at Antwerp, in 1822, for 35,970 florins, which, 
 with the auction duty, comes to about ^3,000 ; but R. Foster and 
 John Smith had each equal shares in the purchase. Sir Robert Peel 
 bought the picture from Smith, after its pubHc exhibition in Bond 
 Street had earned an extra thousand pounds for its owners. I am told 
 by Smith's descendants that the quarrel which afterwards broke out 
 between him and Nieuwenhuys had to do with this purchase. 
 
 Smith was another of Sir Robert's agents. Besides the Rubens, 
 the " Poulterer's Shop " of Gerard Dou ; the " Watermills," of Hob- 
 bema ; the " Village Scene," of Isaak van Ostade ; a fine Wouwerman 
 and a second-rate Jakob Ruisdael, came directly from him to White- 
 hall Gardens. During the latter years of Smith's life, as I have 
 already hinted, his relations with Nieuwenhuys were strained. Sir 
 Robert had dealings with them both down to the end, but, in 
 
30 . THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 spite of every assistance from Mr. Reginald Smith, I have found 
 it impossible to trace all of these. Nieuwenhuys belonged to an 
 irritable race, and had no slight sense of his own importance. Some 
 of the notes to his volume are bitter indeed, his ire being more 
 especially roused by what he thought the uncalled for estimates of 
 value, given in the Catalogue Raisonne, of pictures with which he, Nieu- 
 wenhuys, had been concerned. " He (Smith) ought not to lead others 
 astray with observations founded on his own imagination," " I have 
 too often seen the pitiful attempts of Mr. Smith to misconstrue facts," 
 are among his digs at his rival. Nieuwenhuys was fond of sprinkling 
 censure about. It was pardonable enough to fall foul of Pilkington for 
 translating kraambezoek (visit to a woman in child-bed) as " A 
 Mercer's Shop," or to be severe on Buchanan for some of the very ignor- 
 ant pronouncements contained in his Memoirs of Painting. But there 
 is no mistaking the animus which disfigures not a few of the Remarks 
 on the Opinions and Statements of Former Writers. The copy in my 
 possession was formerly the property of Mr. Wells, of Redleaf, who has 
 left more than one contradiction on the margins, to show that, even in 
 1835, ^^ was sometimes in advance of the author's knowledge. 
 
 Here I may print two letters from Peel to Smith for the sake of the 
 light they cast on the way in which his collecting was done : — 
 
 LuL WORTH Castle, 
 Private. October 7, 1823. 
 
 Mr. Smith, — 
 
 I shall be much obliged to you to bid for two or three of the pictures 
 at Fonthill for me ; and if you should succeed in purchasing them, I do 
 not wish it to be known that they are bought for me. It may, how- 
 ever, be necessary perhaps to let Mr. Phillips ^ know. I should like to 
 have the Frans Mieris (Lot 200), the Lady feeding a parrot. You may 
 bid two hundred and fifty guineas for this. I am anxious to have the 
 Gerard Dow (Lot 245). You may bid as far as thirteen hundred 
 pounds for this picture, which is quite as much as it is worth. Bid 
 three hundred guineas for the Eglon van der Neer (Lot 280), or three 
 
 1 The auctioneer. 
 
THE MAKING OF THE PEEL COLLECTION 31 
 
 hundred and fifty pounds, provided you do not purchase the Gerard 
 Dow. You may bid for one of the small Teniers (Lot 293), " The 
 Skittle Players," whatever you think the real value of the picture.^ 
 
 Yours etc., 
 
 Rob. Peel, 
 If a few pounds more than the sums I have mentioned would pur- 
 chase any of the pictures, to that extent you may exceed those sums. I 
 have sent a copy of this to Fonthill. 
 
 The second letter is in some ways more significant than the first. It 
 contains an order to the now almost forgotten Dutch painter of marines, 
 Johannes Christianus Schotel, to paint a pair of seascapes ; and 
 arranges for their composition with as much forethought as an Italian 
 patron of the fifteenth century would have shown in the case of an 
 altar-piece. 
 
 Whitehall, 
 
 May 2 (or 4), 1827. 
 Mr. Smith, — 
 
 I shall be obliged to you to inform Mr. Schotel that I am extremely 
 pleased with the picture which he has painted for me — and that I shall 
 place it in my gallery with my Van de Veldes, to which I think it is in 
 no way inferior. I did not think that the modern school could have 
 produced so exquisite a specimen. 
 
 I must entreat Mr. Schotel to paint for me two other pictures. 
 
 One a small one, a companion to the one he has already painted for 
 me. I think it should be a calm. The dimensions are as follows 
 (thesf he forgets to insert). 
 
 The other picture I should wish to have painted by him is as a com- 
 panion to my large Backhuysen. The size of the Backhuysen is as fal- 
 lows (measurements again forgotten!). 
 
 I wish each picture to be a light picture as to colour. The larger 
 one may be a light breeze. 
 
 I say nothing as to the price. I wish them to be most carefully 
 finished and to be the chefdoeuvres {sic) of Mr. Schotel. 
 
 ^ The Mieris and the Dou were acquired, but not the Eglon van der Neer or the 
 Teniers. 
 
32 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 I should wish neither one nor the other to be crowded with vessels. 
 The small one — the "Calm" — may have the shore introduced into it, 
 with figures on the shore — piles, etc., etc. 
 
 In the larger one I should wish to have one large vessel at least, or 
 perhaps two, in the foreground — ^with the interior of the vessel visible. 
 By vessel, I do not mean a ship of war, but a chaloupe or large fishing- 
 boat. 
 
 Yours etc., 
 
 Robert Peel. 
 
 From these letters, which have been most kindly placed at my dis- 
 posal by Mr. Reginald Smith, we may fairly come to two conclusions. 
 In the first place they prove that Sir Robert Peel was not a fine judge 
 of art. He may have been a connoisseur in that narrower sense which 
 confines the meaning of the word to familiarity with works of art and 
 with the opinions of the moment upon them. But his knowledge of 
 art and sympathies with the artist cannot have been profound. Other- 
 wise he could neither have spoken so warmly of Schotel, nor have put 
 such restrictions on his freedom. On the other hand, the two letters, 
 taken together, go far to dispose of the idea that the man who wrote 
 them was entirely guided by his advisers in making his collection. He 
 was probably able to appreciate certain qualities — such as finish — for 
 himself, while, for the rest, he put in force the knowledge of men and 
 capacity to collect and weigh opinions, which stood him in such good 
 stead as a statesman. In any case, he succeeded in becoming the 
 possessor of a very remarkable gathering of pictures, including those 
 at Drayton Manor as well as the collection at 4 Whitehall Gardens.^ 
 
 ^ This house has been recently rebuilt, and is now occupied by the crown agents for the 
 Colonies. It bears a label asserting that here Sir Robert Peel, statesman, died on the 2nd July, 
 1850. The label might have been more explicit. It makes no allusion to the rebuilding. 
 Many of the Drayton pictures were sold at Fisher & Robinson's in 1901, with the sanc- 
 tion of the court ; others had been previously disposed of without such sanction. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 The Dutch Painters of Society 
 
 I HAVE already hinted a confession that the master of my own predi- 
 lection is Gabriel Metsu, who appears to me the completest embodi- 
 ment of the qualities which are distinctively Dutch. He was excelled 
 in this or that direction by others. He could not paint light with de 
 Hooghe or Vermeer, or movement with Jan Steen ; his sense of life was 
 less vivid than Vermeer's, of refinement less complete than Terborch's. 
 But putting all these qualities together, and supplementing them with 
 the further test which lies in unity, he was equal to the best ; while 
 in the fine and rare quality of an expressive but strictly controlled 
 handling he was the master of them all. In their finest works both de 
 Hooghe and Vermeer reach heights unknown to Metsu. When we turn 
 from such pictures as the " Delft," the " Laitiere," and the " Soldier 
 and the Laughing Girl," or those interiors of de Hooghe in which the 
 sun plays on marble floors, among red petticoats and the rafters of 
 timbered roofs, to the finest Metsu, we are conscious of a fall in vitality, 
 in imagination, in ambition. Art, they say, is nature seen through 
 a temperament. Well, with Vermeer and de Hooghe the tempera- 
 ment seems absolutely transparent. The nature seen through it is as 
 vivid and brilliant as the real thing ; the temperament works only to 
 arrange and marshal, not to modify or depress. With Metsu it is not 
 so. He does not venture to look the sun quite in the face. As he 
 recreates nature for our pleasure, he watches her through a smoked 
 glass, through a temperament which prepares for unity by control. 
 But if he never rises to the heights touched now and then by the two 
 great masters of Delft, he seldom sinks below his own level, so 
 that of all the artists of Holland — never failing, of course, to exclude 
 
 33 D 
 
34 I^HE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 Rembrandt — he is the most consistently himself. The exceptions to 
 this last assertion are a few portraits, an allegorical piece or two, and 
 some outdoor scenes on a larger scale than usual. One of these last used 
 to be quoted in bygone handbooks as the painter's masterpiece : I mean 
 the " Marche aux Herbes " in the Louvre. It is a dull performance ; 
 so is the " Admiral Tromp " in the same collection ; still duller is the 
 " Justice protecting the Widow and the Orphan," at the Hague. But 
 nearly all the Dutch " little masters " failed when they tried to drop 
 the " little." Vermeer and a very different man, Aert van der Neer, 
 were the only two who preserved much of their charm when they 
 worked on a larger scale than usual. But even Vermeer failed some- 
 times, for it is impossible to contend that his Czernin picture, or the 
 Dresden " Bei der Kupplerin," or the " Christ in the house of Martha 
 and Mary," which was in Bond Street a year or two ago, have the 
 fascination of his smaller works. So it comes to this, that the com- 
 paratively unimportant Van der Neer alone contrived to expand and 
 yet remain himself ; for of his two large landscapes in the National 
 Gallery, one, at least,^ has all his qualities in complete perfection. 
 
 I know about seventy of Metsu's pictures. The best in their 
 various ways are, I think, the following. I give them in what seems 
 to me their approximate chronological order : — 
 
 " The Letter received " (Mr. Beit's collection). 
 
 "The Musicians" (Hague Museum). 
 
 " An Interior " (Miss Alice de Rothschild's collection). 
 
 "The Family of the Merchant Geelvink " (Berlin Museum). 
 
 " The Intruder " (Lord Northbrook's collection). 
 
 " The Music Lesson " (National Gallery). 
 
 " Old Woman selling Fish " (Wallace collection). 
 
 Five small domestic scenes in the collection of Lord Iveagh (2), in 
 the Wallace collection (i), and in the Louvre (2). 
 
 " The Letter-writer Surprised " (Wallace collection ; there was an old 
 copy of this picture in the Hope collection). 
 
 "The Duet" (National Gallery; Peel collection). 
 
 " Un militaire recevant une jeune dame " (Louvre). 
 
 " Le Billet doux " (Arenberg Gallery, Brussels). 
 
 1 No. 152, bequeathed by Lord Farnborough. It has figures by Albert Cuijp. 
 
GABRIEL METSU 35 
 
 " The Letter Writer " (Beit collection). 
 " The Sick Child " (Steengracht collection, at the Hague). 
 In arranging these, I have gone upon the assumption that the 
 tightly painted pictures, with highly fused, metallic surfaces, come 
 first, and that, like nearly every one else — for the rule is not quite with- 
 out exceptions — Metsu gradually loosened his hand as years brought 
 him experience and knowledge. The rare dates on his pictures support 
 this assumption, but we have to use it with caution, as Metsu's occa- 
 sional surrender to " influence " brings in a disturbing element. The 
 Hague " Musicians," for example, might in some ways almost be a Ter- 
 borch. It is very positively and even unmistakably a Metsu, but the 
 evidence of this, obvious to the eye as it is, cannot be so easily recited in 
 words. So far as intention could do it, Metsu has here turned himself 
 into Terborch. The models are Terborch's models, placed almost as 
 he would have placed them. The design, however, is happier than his. 
 Everything runs spontaneously into the arabesque, with none of the 
 accident and slightly clumsy introduction, of which, as a rule, we find 
 some little symptom in the older man's work ; but still the composition 
 is essentially Terborchian, and it is only when we turn to the brilliant 
 colour, the handling, and the final texture of the surface, that Metsu's 
 authorship stands out clear and incontestable. The picture now at 
 Waddesdon, which used to be in the Van Loon collection, is another 
 fine example of these highly elaborated Metsus. So are the " In- 
 truder," in Lord Northbrook's collection, and — apart from subject 
 and conception — the " Family of the Merchant Geelvink " in the 
 Berlin Museum. 
 
 But, after all, handling is the most fascinating of pictorial qualities, 
 and those later Metsus in which the march of the brush can be seen 
 and enjoyed, are more agreeable than these too closely woven 
 productions. The last five examples on the above list are all 
 masterpieces in this respect. The most consummate, perhaps, is the 
 red picture in the Peel collection. This seems to be the last word 
 of expressive handling, and the design is worthy of the execution. 
 Mr. Beit's " Letter Writer " is a simpler conception, to which the 
 opposition of a dark^figure to a light background gives extraordinary 
 force. But its painting is scarcely so delicate or expressive as that of 
 
36 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 the " Duet." The Wallace picture, in which a lady is surprised, pre- 
 sumably by her husband, in some clandestine use of pen and ink, would 
 be equally fine but for an unusual failure of judgment — perhaps one 
 should say an unlucky experiment — in the use of colour. Orange is not 
 a happy tint for the chief one in a picture. Metsu does not strike a 
 false note with it, but he holds the note down too long. There is too 
 much orange. Much happier in colour is the Louvre " MiHtaire 
 recevant une Jeune Dame." Here his veiled art is again at its finest. 
 The composition is perfect, and yet we feel as if it were not composed 
 at all. The colour is luminous and luxurious, the handling broad, 
 fat, and absolutely assured. Broader and fatter still is the unusual, 
 Vermeerish-looking " Sick Child " in the Steengracht collection, which 
 shows Metsu in a frame of mind we scarcely encounter elsewhere. 
 
 Metsu's handling is to be seen at its best in the red Peel picture. 
 Here we find surfaces modelled, textures and solidities indicated, in a 
 broad, decisive, and yet subtle touch which can be compared to nothing 
 more apt than the march of the sculptor's thumb over the clay. It is 
 a virtue which has practically disappeared from the studios, and been 
 replaced by a dry, systematic procedure which threatens to substitute 
 science for art. The instinct which enabled Metsu to be such a delight- 
 ful composer, to cover his surfaces with so profound a fitness, enabled 
 him also to combine exactly the right degree of knowledge with passion 
 in his manipulation of paint. His superiority to Terborch as a com- 
 poser can be seen from two pictures which hang together in the National 
 Gallery. They are both music lessons, more or less. The Terborch 
 is one of his best works ; the Metsu a fine example of his earlier time. 
 I have included it in the above list, and both are reproduced in these 
 pages. As designs, these two pictures are not " in the same street." 
 The Metsu is a design. It makes a delightful pattern, filling the space 
 agreeably whichever way we measure it — vertically, horizontally, or 
 perpendicularly to its plane. These two people so occupy a room as 
 to bring it into their lives and ours ; at the same time, they afford us 
 aesthetic pleasure by the turn of every limb, by every contour, by the 
 pattern of the facets they offer to the light. The Terborch has no such 
 subtle union of art and reality. The young lady with the guitar has 
 been seen by herself, so has the music-master. So, above all, has the 
 
GERARD TERBORCH 37 
 
 superfluous gentleman in the background, whom Metsu would have 
 left out altogether. The girl is exquisite, combining great refinement 
 with the ineradicable homeliness of her race in a way that was quite 
 beyond any other Dutch painter. The music master, too, with those 
 plump, hot hands which so excited Fromentin's admiration, is a wonder- 
 ful figure. But how about the third member of the societe ? He is so 
 obviously unwanted, so badly fitted in, that he is only to be accounted 
 for either by supposing the whole thing a portrait group rather than 
 a freely conceived picture, or by allowing that Terborch's sense of 
 design was imperfect. There is no reason why both explanations 
 should not be true. 
 
 And yet the Peel Terborch is perhaps his masterpiece so far as his 
 characteristic qualities are concerned. At least, I know no other in 
 which delicacy of manipulation and completeness of presentment are 
 carried quite so far. The music master's foreshortened hand is a 
 miracle of imitation, much finer than the hand of the amorous soldier 
 in the picture which used to hang in the Salon Carre. All the heads 
 are fine, while anything more delicious, in their own particular way, 
 than the girl's arms and hands it would be hard to imagine. The 
 dog is as bad as the dog in Sir Joshua's " Nelly O'Brien." But the silk 
 dress makes up for it. Terborch's hand gloried in that as much as it 
 lost its way in the spaniel's wool. The fine picture now in Mr. 
 Alfred de Rothschild's collection, and another in Buckingham Palace, 
 are richer in tone and better composed, but neither those nor the 
 great " Peace of Mtlnster," display the qualities which distinguish 
 Terborch from the rest of the Dutch School so fully as the panel here 
 reproduced. 
 
 I confess that Terborch's portraits in small leave me cold ; but 
 the " Peace of Mtinster " is a great picture. Nothing in it looks like 
 a sacrifice of veracity to art, and yet it is eminently artistic. Rem- 
 brandt could scarcely have made the arrangement of the light 
 more effective, although he would have forced it. It is curious to 
 pass from this picture to the " Adulteress before Christ," a few 
 yards away, and to feel the suspicion creeping over us that Terborch 
 kept Rembrandt before his mind's eye as a guide through his unaccus- 
 tomed task. The " Lanzas " of Velazquez may be the greatest historical 
 
38 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 picture in the world, but this Terborch is history. The event happened 
 thus, in this room, with all these people, disposed much as the painter, 
 who was there, has arranged them on his panel. Among these sixty- 
 heads, several may be recognized as familiar in other portraits of the 
 time, besides the delegates whose identities are known. The Abbe 
 Scaglia, for instance, who was so often painted by Van Dyck, appears 
 in profile on our right. A very young man, near the centre, has a 
 familiar face, and so with two or three more.^ 
 
 The other painters of Terborch and Metsu subjects may be dis- 
 missed in a very few words. Frans Mieris the eldest could draw fairly 
 well, which his son William could not. The father's best work is 
 probably Mr. Steinkopf's " Amorous Cavalier," which is at least 
 dramatic and well composed. Willem, the son, and Frans, the grand- 
 son, to say nothing of Jan, " practised what they called painting," * when 
 they ought to have been making boots — probably bad boots ! 
 Netscher has nothing particular to say to any one who cares for art, 
 while Schalcken's glassy polish is, as a rule, highly disagreeable. Now 
 and then, however, he paints a picture so well arranged that we 
 almost forgive his superhuman patience. There is nothing of his, 
 however, in the Peel collection. Neither does it include a Slinge- 
 landt, who sometimes painted ' society.' On the other hand, it 
 includes one of those rare pictures by Jan Steen, which seem to have 
 been painted in emulation of Metsu and Terborch. 
 
 If we judged him solely by his finest works, we should have to put 
 Jan Steen at the very head of the Dutch school — again excepting Rem- 
 brandt.^ In his best pictures we find a combination of qualities that no 
 other master can approach. His dramatic gifts, his sense of movement, 
 character, and even of beauty, are unrivalled. He is a good colourist, 
 a fine draughtsman, a magnificent handler, and he can design a picture. 
 
 * The city of Miinster owns two pictures signed by Terborch which deal with the same 
 event. One is a view of Miinster, with the arrival of the Dutch envoy, Adriaen Pauw 
 van Hemstede, for the congress. The figures only are by Terborch. The other is a first 
 idea for the National Gallery panel. It contains fewer figures than our picture, but 
 includes the recumbent statue of the Archbishop of Cambrai, one of the Spanish envoys, 
 who died during the deliberations. 
 
 ^ The phrase is Sir Frederic Burton's. 
 
 ^ It may be well to say, once for all, that all my superlatives are used with this reservation. 
 
JAN STEEN 39 
 
 Unhappily, it is only at rare moments that he puts all these gifts into 
 action. He has left a large number of pictures, but only a small per- 
 centage, one in ten perhaps, show him at his best, or anywhere near it. 
 The great majority are hasty, almost perfunctory, productions in which 
 some unhappy dislocation goes far to destroy our pleasure. Terborch 
 is apt to set his characters in a room too small to hold them. Steen 
 does the reverse, and surrounds his mannikins with spaces in which they 
 are lost. His pictures have consequently no focus. There is no point 
 of distance at which they can be taken in and enjoyed as a whole. Of 
 this, the famous " Human Life," at the Hague, is a striking example. 
 There the action takes place in a room as large as a railway station. The 
 little figures are spotted over the floor until the conviction is brought 
 home to us that the painter's state of mind as he worked was that of 
 Sterne when he wrote Tristram Shandy. Unity — the unity of pic- 
 torial art — was forgotten, or only provided for by the ominous purple 
 curtain which broods over the front of the scene, ready to slip down and 
 blot out the humanity behind. You may say that here want of unity 
 was inherent in his subject : if so, it was a bad subject for a picture. But 
 I fear that Jan did not care for unity ; that he did not understand its 
 charm as Rembrandt, and Metsu, and Vermeer understood it. His 
 compositions are seldom focussed. To this, however, the Peel picture 
 is an exception. In general aspect it is quite unusual, and seems to have 
 been painted under some impulse of rivalry with Metsu or Terborch. 
 A small picture in the Six collection at Amsterdam, and another in the 
 Hermitage at Petersburg, show the same desire for an elaborate finish 
 and the same over-careful arrangement. In seeking after unaccustomed 
 charms he let go of a more characteristic virtue, for these three 
 pictures are without his expressive and masterly handling. 
 
 Steen is one of those painters who provoke comparisons. He has 
 been compared to Hogarth, to Moliere, to Morland, to Raphael, and 
 all the comparisons seem just. If we may venture on such a deduction 
 from pictures, he was probably the most gifted, mentally, of all the 
 Dutch painters. In his conceptions we find evidence of all sorts of 
 sympathies and understandings. He laughs with and at human nature, 
 sitting often on the heights himself and looking sardonically down. He 
 is often as coarse as Rabelais, but can be as delicate and subtle as Mr. 
 
40 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 Henry James. His execution is masterly, his touch brilliant or broad 
 as occasion requires, his sense of movement complete and profound. If 
 nature had endowed him with concentration and more ambition, he 
 would have contested the crown of Dutch painting with Rembrandt 
 himself. 
 
 He has still to be studied abroad. Our museums and private 
 galleries are not as rich in his better works as they might be. His 
 own portrait, in Lord North brook's collection, is famous. The Duke of 
 Wellington is rich in his pictures. Mr. Heseltine has a remarkable female 
 portrait ; Lord Dartrey, one of the best of his large pictures ; Mrs. Joseph 
 a wonderful little panel from the VoUenhoven collection, in which both 
 his executive genius and his humour are at their best. The finest, per- 
 haps, of his intensely dramatic biblical pictures was acquired about ten 
 years ago by the little visited museum of Cologne. It represents the 
 betrayal of Samson to the Philistines, by DeHlah. In vital energy, 
 combined with nearly all pictorial virtues — drawing, colour, handling — 
 it scarcely has its equal elsewhere in the Dutch School. 
 
 Pieter de Hooghe and Jan Vermeer differ from the men we have been 
 discussing in one radical particular. Metsu, Terborch and Jan Steen 
 were essentially observers who instinctively concealed the art which 
 gives such value to their pictures. They concealed it by making it con- 
 summate, by making it so intensely appropriate that it looks inevitable, 
 that it seems to be an unavoidable consequence of their method of 
 vision. With de Hooghe and Vermeer it was not so. They were so 
 frankly interested in the chief pictorial motive of each of their works, 
 that they made sacrifices and allowed it to become obvious and 
 controlling, just as Albert Cuijp does in a landscape. Vermeer went 
 boldly to his end, shrinking from no expedient to get the effect he 
 wanted. In the " Soldier and the Laughing Girl," for instance, he 
 puts the spectator's eye close to the soldier's back, forcing the perspec- 
 tive and enabling the huge dark circle of the man's hat to be opposed 
 in a startling way to the sunny expanse beyond. In nearly aU 
 Vermeer's better works we find a trick, if I may call it so, of some kind, 
 some expedient by which the ruling idea is raised to its highest power. 
 It is the same with de Hooghe. His range, however, is far narrower 
 
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The Music Master. By Jan Steen. From a Pholog)-aph by F. Hanfstaengl. 
 
Interior of a Dutch House. By Fieler de Hooghe. From a Photograph by Morelli. 
 
PIETER DE HOOGHE 41 
 
 than Vermeer's. His interest is always absorbed by the one problem, 
 that of capturing and bottling the sunlight. From his earliest pictures 
 to his latest, his real ambition never varies. In youth he likes the 
 broadest daylight, whereas with advancing years he prefers merely to 
 suggest the outside sun, as it creeps down tiled passages, through 
 red curtains and half-open shutters. He begins by getting his effects 
 in the simplest way, in the way of Rubens. He keeps his shadows 
 transparent and his lights solid, lightly glazing the latter as a finish. 
 " White is poison in a shadow," said Rubens, and de Hooghe acts on 
 the precept. In his middle period he develops and complicates the 
 process enormously — building up his pictures by a marvellous succes- 
 sion of glazings, scumblings, and re-glazings. In his last and least 
 satisfactory manner he makes the unhappy discovery that a dark 
 ground will afford a short cut, and enable him to get his results more 
 rapidly and surely. He did not understand that with the passage of 
 time the dark would come through and falsify his conclusions. 
 
 The first mutterings of de Hooghe's genius are to be studied 
 in few public galleries. Dr. Hofstede de Groot showed me a 
 picture which is probably the earliest yet discovered. It is of no great 
 merit, and has, moreover, suffered a good deal ; but it helps to prove 
 that such pictures as the " Interior " at Petersburg, the " Players at 
 Trie Trac " in the National Gallery of Ireland, and the " Interior of a 
 Stable " in Mr. Fleischmann's collection, are the earliest things in which 
 the master's genius began to show itself. For these four pictures must 
 have been painted within a year or two of each other. They all contain 
 the same models, and, in execution, differ only in the growing certainty 
 with which effects are won. The method is that described above as 
 marking his first period. The shadows are all quite transparent, veiled 
 only, when they are veiled, by the superposition of transparent on trans- 
 parent colour. The lights are solid and brilliant, and have been painted 
 originally in a higher key than necessary, to leave room for a finishing 
 glaze, which brings them down to their right value and leaves the whole 
 picture glowing like a stained glass window. 
 
 The extreme rarity of examples belonging to this period of de Hooghe 
 shows that it was soon over, and that but little preparation was required 
 before he blossomed into the manner which distinguishes his greatest 
 
42 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 works. This manner is richly illustrated in all three of the National 
 Gallery examples. It is most clearly to be followed, however, in the 
 *' Interior " of the Peel collection, which I propose to analyse. Scores 
 of times have I seen this picture being attacked by clever copyists, who 
 tried to get its colour straight away, as if they had a David or a Knaus 
 before them. Nothing, of course, would have enabled them to repro- 
 duce de Hooghe ; but if they had taken the trouble to examine his tex- 
 ture before they began, they might have avoided the worst feature of 
 their libels. Practically the whole colour, as we see it, is the result of 
 elaborately calculated alternations of opaque or semi-opaque and trans- 
 parent tints. Many of the shadowed parts are painted in transparent 
 pigment over an orange ground. In some parts this is allowed to show 
 strongly, in others we only divine its existence by its effect on the colour 
 above it. The same orange is used as a ground in many of the high 
 lights. The sleeve of the man seated in the foreground, for instance, 
 is painted over it in semi-opaque colour, the device resulting in a 
 beautiful opalescence very difficult to obtain by solid painting. A 
 similar process is to be traced in nearly every part of the panel. The 
 brilliant skirt of the woman on our left is modelled by glazing over 
 vermilion. The other woman — a pentimento — ^is painted so thinly 
 that the tiles now show through her petticoat as if she were a ghost. 
 Another ghost, imperfectly laid, is that of a burly man, in cloak 
 and steeple hat, who once stood between us and the chimney-piece. 
 The table under the window, another afterthought, introduced to add 
 to the sense of depth, is so thin and transparent that we might almost 
 call it the ghost of a table. Probably de Hooghe did not understand how 
 a single coat of oil paint loses its opacity with time, especially when free 
 from white ; and so some of his happiest notes have lost their voice. 
 The right hand of the seated man, for instance, once reflected the sun- 
 light from its upper surface, and the same light, warmed by the crim- 
 son feather, from its palm. The paint is now so thin that the man's ruffle 
 shows strongly through, and the hand has joined the other ghosts. All 
 this process is made use of to get as near as possible to illusion in the 
 painting of sunlight. De Hooghe was not content, like Rubens, to 
 confine transparency to his shadows, and to have his high lights soHd, 
 reflexive, and cool. His whole surface had to be glowing with inner 
 
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 5/^ GotcrC of a. LJ(2>us€^ 
 
PIETER DE HOOGHE 43 
 
 lights, like a gem, so that the difference between deep shadow, light 
 breaking through a veil — the sun shining through a red curtain, for 
 instance — and light reflected from surfaces fully exposed to it, is one 
 not of kind, but of degree. I know no other de Hooghe in which all this 
 is so easy to follow as in the Peel " Interior," but the same method is 
 used, more or less, in all the works of this middle period. Number 794 
 in the National Gallery, a somewhat earlier picture, probably — it is 
 dated 1665 — is much more solid in execution, but the system is there. So, 
 too, in the very similar picture in the Vienna Academy (in which Burger 
 thought he recognized the hand of his " Sphinx," Jan Vermeer), and 
 in the ever-to-be-regretted picture which left the Hope collection for 
 America. I might add to this list the two pictures in Buckingham Palace ; 
 the " Interior," belonging to Lord Bute ; various pictures at Amsterdam, 
 especially the little one of a Dutch mother attending to her child's hair, 
 the earlier of the two Wallace pictures, a picture now, or recently, in 
 the possession of Messrs. Lawrie & Co.,^ the two examples in the Louvre, 
 and in fact everything he did during the fifteen or twenty years which 
 formed his middle and greatest period.^ 
 
 Speaking roughly, the characteristics of de Hooghe's last and least 
 satisfactory period are the greater size and elaboration of his pictures, 
 and his use of a dark ground. So little is known of his career that it is 
 only guessing if we suppose that the change was brought about by an 
 increased demand for his work. The desertion of simple interiors, 
 peopled by the comparatively humble, for luxurious rooms inhabited by 
 ladies in rich costumes, certainly points to a rise in his clientele, and to a ^ 
 
 ^ This carried us into the same courtyard as that shown in the National Gallery, No. 
 784. It was the yard of the painter's house at Delft. It occurs in many of his pictures, 
 sometimes with the flight of steps and little arbour at the back, sometimes with the steeple 
 of the Nieuwe Kerk rising above the wall. A corner of it is used in the Peel picture, No. 835, 
 with a concocted and quite unstable piece of architecture foisted in on the left. It — the 
 yard — appears in the picture of the Viennese Academy, which has more of the air of fidelity 
 to fact than the others. Here the arbour and steps are on our right, the steeple, which 
 marks the resting place of William the Silent, in the centre of the background. 
 
 ^ De Hooghe's dates are not certainly known. He was born in 1630 and died in or after 
 1677 ; at least, that date is the latest which occurs on any known work of his. It appears 
 on a picture in the Steengracht collection, which evidently belongs to his latest time. If 
 we suppose that he lived till 1680, that only gives him some thirty years of activity alto- 
 gether. 
 
44 7HE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 (^ change from pictures painted to sell to those made on commission. 
 This would also help to account for his adoption of a dark ground, for 
 the one recommendation of that device is that it saves time. It was 
 fatal to the greatest of de Hooghe's charms — his sincerity. The best of 
 his late pictures have an alloy of affectation about them. He has found 
 out a way of obtaining his effects easily, and his conceptions become, 
 as it were, machine made. Light is opposed to dark in a mechanical 
 way, and we find this sometimes carried so far that a canvas will be all 
 shadow at one end and all light at the other. I know one picture which 
 might be cut in half down the middle, and turned into a dark picture 
 and a light one, each complete in itself. This would not matter much 
 if the old determination to be true survived, and if the sunlight were 
 still worshipped with the sincerity of 165 5- 1670. But it is not wor- 
 shipped at all. It is looked upon as an easy road to effect, and many of 
 the cleverest pictures so contrived leave us cold and unmoved. One 
 of the best is in Apsley House ; another is the Steengracht picture 
 already alluded to ; the Duke of Arenberg has one ; another is in 
 the Wallace collection ; further good examples belong to Sir Frederick 
 Cook, Mrs. Joseph, Mr. Crews and others. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 The Dutch Painters of the People 
 
 It is curious that Dutch painting succeeds better, on the whole, with 
 the upper classes than with the proletariate. The five names to which 
 most of our attention has so far been given are the five greatest in Dutch 
 art, after that of Rembrandt ; and four at least of the quintette do 
 best when they are dealing with the refinements of life. Terborch 
 seldom strays into the lower couches sociales, Metsu deteriorates when 
 he does so ; the best pictures of Vermeer deal with the gentle classes ; 
 de Hooghe seldom cares to look far below them. Jan Steen alone is 
 equally at home with all, doing best, perhaps, when he has contrived 
 a mixture of gentility with unbridled nature. In most countries and 
 at most periods the painting of manners loses its salt as it mounts in the 
 social scale. It is easier to make a picture out of a cottage than a castle, 
 or out of an old cart mare than a racehorse ; for the same reason, the 
 free manners of the farmhouse lend themselves with more facility to 
 manipulation of the artist than the etiquettes of the chateau. But, 
 in spite of this general truth, the Dutchmen contrived to preserve 
 the natural superiority of the educated man or woman even in their 
 pictures. There is nothing insipid in a Metsu or a Terborch, even 
 when its dramatis fcrsorue are in silk and satin. Human nature is 
 breathing in it, and we miss little that we find in the best work of such 
 men as Adriaen van Ostade or Teniers. Brouwer, no doubt, dives more 
 deeply into character, providing a Flemish parallel to the best concep- 
 tions of Jan Steen. Putting him aside, it would be difficult to name 
 a painter who adds anything essential to the life we see in the polite 
 pictures of our last chapter. 
 
 This best of all painters of low life — I mean, of course, Brouwer 
 
 — was born at Oudenarde in 1605 or 1606. But, if Flemish by birth, 
 
 45 
 
46 7HE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 he was Dutch by training. He worked under Hals at Haarlem and 
 under some unidentified Hollander at Amsterdam. Between 1626, 
 when he was about twenty, and 163 1, when he settled in Antwerp, he 
 seems to have been continuously in Holland, so that his art, if not his 
 extraction, may fairly be credited to the Dutch. In his short life of 
 about thirty-three years he seems to have painted some fifty or sixty 
 pictures, eighteen of which are now in the Munich gallery. Very few 
 of his better works are in the United Kingdom, and to know him 
 thoroughly it is necessary to compare the pictures at Amsterdam, 
 Munich, Dresden, the Hague (Steengracht collection), Petersburg and 
 Madrid with two in London, one at Apsley House, the other in the 
 lonides collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 
 
 Brouwer does not date his pictures, although he usually leaves his 
 little monogram on them somewhere. We have therefore to determine 
 his chronology entirely by our reading of the probabilities. Con- 
 sidering that his activity did not cover more than perhaps fifteen years, 
 his productions show unusual variety. The changes through which 
 they passed correspond roughly to those which mark the work 
 of Adriaen van Ostade. The latter was a youth of eighteen, at Haarlem, 
 while Brouwer was there working in the studio of Hals. The elder 
 man clearly had a decisive influence on the younger. Two pictures in 
 the Rijks-museum are examples of the first manner of Brouwer. They 
 represent the Dutch boor in his glory, drinking, quarrelling, and generally 
 misbehaving himself. They are soundly painted in over-red tones, 
 and suffer from the common fault of young painters in being too crowded, 
 restless, and vociferous. The hardness and exaggerated bustle of these 
 early works was soon left behind, and we find them superseded by the 
 simplicity in violence and the breadth of handling of the Munich " Card 
 Players Quarrelling in an Inn," which is a masterpiece in its way. Com- 
 pare a picture like this with the famous " Rixe " of Meissonier, in which 
 the French artist attempts an identical subject, and you will see 
 how much the more spontaneous and intelligent of the two the Dutch 
 master was. Compared to those of Meissonier, the figures are quiet, 
 and yet how they excel the others in energy, in sincerity, in the power 
 with which they drive conviction into us who look on. Those two 
 fellows in " La Rixe " : they will stand so for a month, making mouths 
 
ADRIAEN BROUWER 47 
 
 but never striking, their weight upheld, cantilever-wise, hj the 
 counterpoise of their judicious friends. Now, in the Brouwer, the 
 only doubt you have is as to the efficiency of the jug ! If that is solid 
 and heavy enough, the cheat's skull will crack in half a second like an 
 Qgg. All the movement is sincere, it is all directed to its ostensible 
 aim in a natural way ; and yet it makes a capital pattern. The handling 
 is still a little heavy, and in parts the panel bears too much paint. These 
 defects have passed away when we come to No. 888 in the same gallery, 
 " Peasants at Cards." Here the painting is broader and more fluid, 
 the colour warmer and more transparent, the technique generally more 
 skilful and more nicely adapted to its end. Another step in advance 
 carries Brouwer to such art as we see in the picture of the lonides 
 collection. His grip on character is still firmer ; his avoidance of 
 the least excess either in action, characterization, or manipulative 
 dexterity, still more unerring. The picture looks as if it were painted 
 for the subject and for the story to be told, and yet its art is con- 
 summate. There is no hint of effort, no superfluous touch, and nothing 
 wanting. The technique is as broad, light, and free as that of water- 
 colour, and the resulting surface as sound as enamel. 
 
 Brouwer's latest manner is shown in the picture at Apsley House 
 and in the very similar one in the Steengracht collection. Bitten, 
 perhaps, by recollections of Frans Hals, he deserts the solid preparations 
 and broad glazes of his middle period for a method in which form is 
 built up by frankly left strokes of the brush. It is all done with great 
 dexterity ; but somehow we feel it was not so natural to its doer as 
 the quieter method it superseded. When we reach these two pictures, 
 and the extraordinary " Smoker " of the La Cage collection, in the 
 Louvre, we cannot help perceiving that we have left a Brouwer who 
 had no rival for one who was a clever echo of Hals. 
 
 Brouwer's pictures are almost too good. The art in them is so 
 consummate, from both the conceptive and executive points of view 
 that it almost eludes recognition, so that we are left face to face with 
 the vigorous but low-lived drama, and nearly shamed out of our admira- 
 tion. It would require some hardihood to uphold a portrayer of 
 pothouse brawls if his " portraictures " were simply reproductions of 
 the fact. We should have to follow the Grand Monarque, call them 
 
■<< 
 
 48 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 maggots, and be done with them. In spite of their veracity, however, 
 they are by no means merely true. If their subjects are so wanting in 
 dignity that at the first blush it seems absurd to speak of them in the 
 same breath as Titians, or Rembrandts, or Gainsboroughs, we must 
 fall back on our principles, and remember that Brouwer clothes his 
 coarse pages from the life of the people in exactly the same vivifying 
 garment of art as that which has preserved the glory of those three 
 men. The difference between Titian's " Magdalen " and that of Guido 
 is entirely one of art. Put aside colour, handling, and the texture of 
 the paint, and there is nothing to choose between them. It is upon 
 those purely pictorial qualities that one has floated down through 
 the centuries, while their absence has left the other to sink and be 
 forgotten. The most readily accessible Brouwer in London is the fine 
 one in the lonides collection. It is a miracle of executive expression. Its 
 methods have much in common with those of de Hooghe, as described 
 in the last chapter. Very little of the pigment is opaque. Transparent 
 and semi-transparent tones, used with a nice alternation, build up its 
 luminous substance, and leave us at last before a panel in which nothing 
 is scamped and nothing overdone, in which knowledge and feeling for 
 what is required to at once express the author's personality and satisfy 
 the spectator, amount to inspiration. 
 
 Considering the number of his pictures and a vogue which had lasted 
 for more than two centuries and a half, it is strange that the career of 
 David Teniers is still but obscurely known. He was born at Antwerp 
 in 1610, and flourished, in every sense of the word, for eighty years. 
 He was keeper of the Archduke Leopold William's pictures, bought 
 himself a chateau at Perck, where he received the cream of the Flemish 
 nobility and some of their Spanish masters, died at Brussels, and 
 was buried at Perck, full of honour, in 1690. He married two wives 
 successively, the first being a daughter of Velvet Brueghel. Those 
 facts are known. He is also believed to have been the pupil of his father, 
 David Teniers the Elder, and of Rubens. As to these two statements 
 doubts are permissible. The whole question of the elder and 
 younger Teniers has yet to be cleared up. Most of the pictures 
 ascribed to the father are obviously by the son. They are in a style 
 not to be distinguished from that of the son at his maturity, al- 
 

 s 
 
A Village Sckne. J^f I. Vaii Ostade. From a Photograph by F. Haiifstactigl '** * ' ' ' ' 
 
 lO 
 

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 II 
 
The roui.TERKRS Shop. By Gerard Don. From a Photograpit by F. Haitfstaengl. 
 
 12 
 
BROUWER AND TENIERS 49 
 
 though this style had been preceded by one essentially different. If the 
 younger Teniers had begun life as his father's pupil, we should have 
 found signs of the affiliation in his first manner, rather than in his second. 
 This question has often been discussed, but has never been entirely 
 cleared up.* Judging from internal evidence, which is, after all, 
 the safest ground, Teniers the younger painted most of the pictures 
 ascribed to his father, and that not in his first, but in his second period, 
 when he had settled down into his own permanently distinctive style. 
 This style had been preceded by one obviously based on Brouwer ; that 
 is to say, it was like Brouwer in choice of subject, in method of execution, 
 and in its idea of how a picture should look. As Brouwer was the only 
 source, so far as we know, from which Teniers could have derived these 
 qualities, I think " obviously " is not too strong an adverb. These early 
 pictures are not very numerous. They are distinguished by a fat, fused 
 touch, by rich colour, and by an absence — complete at first, only par- 
 tial later — of that sparkling, staccato touch which afterwards became 
 the painter's hall-mark. In the public collections of the United King- 
 dom, the only specimens I know are in the National Galleries of Scot- 
 land and Ireland, in the Glasgow Gallery, and in the Gallery at Dulwich. 
 Ten years ago a very fine one was sold at Christie's, where it excited some 
 scepticism by its lack of the " characteristic " handling of Teniers. 
 
 If I am not greatly mistaken, a piece of evidence exists which is 
 decisive as to a close connexion between Teniers and Brouwer. In the 
 Duke of Westminster's collection, at Grosvenor House, there is a land- 
 scape by Brouwer with figures by Teniers. It is ascribed to Rem- 
 brandt ; but how could Teniers have painted figures in a Rembrandt ? 
 And yet the figures are certainly his. The subject is a gloomy landscape 
 under a setting, or a rising, sun. The foreground is occupied by a pond, 
 which fishermen are dragging. The execution of the landscape is 
 entirely in Brouwer's later manner, and it would be difficult to ascribe 
 it to any one else. It bears no real likeness to a Rembrandt. 
 
 Brouwer settled in Antwerp in 163 1, when Teniers was just twenty- 
 one. If we suppose that the latter had acquired the bare rudiments 
 from his father, and succumbed to the semi-Dutchman's example as 
 
 * See Dr. Bode's Studien der Geschichte der Holldndischen Mderei (Brunswick, 1883), 
 p. 318, for a note on Teniers the elder. 
 
/ 
 
 so THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 soon as it was seen, we shall account for his early style. It is easy to 
 account for his second. Brouwer died in 1638, and Teniers came under 
 the influence of Rubens and his entourage. Of this we have plenty of 
 evidence besides that of style. He collaborated with the collaborators 
 of Rubens, and changed his methods to suit theirs, just as even Rubens 
 himself did. The " Garden of Eden," at the Hague, to name but one 
 instance, shows how far the great painter was ready to go to meet such 
 an artist as Brueghel. Teniers now followed the precepts of Rubens 
 implicitly. His system was to build up by solid lights on a ground of 
 transparent shadow, keeping his touch as crisp and unbroken as possible. 
 At his best time, which was probably not long after he first came under 
 the new influence, he combined this excellent recipe with breadth 
 ■of conception and a fine eye for what used to be called " keeping." 
 In his later years his pictures were apt to be divisible into high, spotty 
 lights, and hot though still transparent shadows. Intellectually Teniers 
 (\ liad none of the serious gravity of the Dutchmen. He looked at 
 his world in a superficial way, the Hollander's faculty for suggesting 
 the presence of real men and women, with complex cares and respon- 
 sibilities, within their roistering mannikins, was quite beyond him. His 
 eyes only saw outsides, he was content with acts, and troubled neither 
 about motives nor the depths of character. 
 
 The best picture by Teniers in the National Gallery is the " Players 
 at Tric-trac," bequeathed by Lord Farnborough, In style it belongs 
 to the early years of his middle period, while the memory of Brouwer, 
 with his breadth of effect and interest in character, still persisted. The 
 Peel specimens are not so good, the best, perhaps, being the one here 
 reproduced, in which an old reprobate is making advances to a young 
 woman. It is a shallow production ; its one merit is the expressive 
 dexterity of its handling. 
 
 No Dutchman equalled Brouwer in his own line, although Brouwer's 
 art is entirely Dutch. Adriaen van Ostade, who came nearest, lagged 
 a long way behind. In Ostade's best work, no doubt, we find a sense 
 of movement and clumsy peasant vitality which is almost unrivalled. 
 " A Peasant Dance," which used to belong to Mr. Foster of Clewer, 
 was a remarkable instance of this. It had almost a cinematographic 
 effect, so cleverly had the painter suggested the moment before and 
 
ADRIAEN AND ISAAK FAN OSTADE 51 
 
 the moment after the actual instant chosen. But Ostade is without 
 the fine design, the tragic intensity, and the unequalled adaptation of 
 means to ends, in execution, of Brouwer. Compared with the 
 Fleming he had no sense of balance and unity. His pictures seldom 
 focus. The relation between his figures and accessories and the space 
 they occupy is seldom good. His best gift is sincerity. He does as well 
 as he can, and hopes it will be found sufficient to provide him with 
 bread and butter. He had some versatility. A picture at the Hague 
 shows him as the painter of a group of portraits, men and women sitting 
 stiffly in their own parlour, which charms by downright honesty and 
 by good colour. The single Ostade in the National Gallery came with 
 the Peel collection. It is not entirely characteristic. It looks as if it 
 might have been painted when his pockets were emptier than usual, 
 and he had to be content with one model. Its merit lies in its agreeable 
 tone and in the skill with which the scanty light is carried about the 
 long room in which the alchemist plays with his retorts at one end 
 while his wife does her chores at the other. It is the fashion now 
 to speak of Isaak Ostade as if he were a better artist than Adriaen- 
 He had more courage, and sets out on a difficult task with a light- 
 heartedness never shown by his brother, but his grip on nature was less 
 firm and he was apt to become artificial. Some of his large composi- 
 tions look as if they had been studied from scenes on the stage. His 
 two pictures in the Peel collection are among his best works, especially 
 the less famous of the pair, the frost scene. Of his larger compo- 
 sitions the two best I know belong to Mr. Alfred de Rothschild. 
 Lower down in the same class comes Jan Miense Molenaer. He 
 occasionally painted very well, and also deserves to be remembered as 
 the husband of the mysterious Judith Leyster, whose best pictures equal 
 the better ones of her husband. Molenaer, when he liked, was almost 
 a first-rate painter. I do not know any very 'good example of his 
 work in this country. The specimen in the National Gallery is 
 only second rate ; another of similar merit is in the Irish National 
 Collection. The best picture by him I ever saw is in the possession 
 of Geheimer Kommerzienrat St. Michel, at Mayence, where it 
 is ascribed to Esaias Boursse, on the strength of a doctored signature. 
 It is a large picture, comparatively, and represents three generations 
 
52 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 of the middle -class family we see in so many of his compositions. 
 They are merrily occupied in various ways, some of the figures 
 being extraordinarily full of life and movement. The handling is 
 worthy of Hals or Steen almost at their best, and little is wanted but 
 more unity to make the picture a masterpiece. But Molenaer never 
 digested his conceptions. He threw them on the canvas as they oc- 
 \ curred to him, and so it is only in a few small and very simple designs 
 that he touches the skirts of creation. In this matter the little picture 
 in the Staedel Institute, of a woman at a spinet, is as good as anything 
 v he did. His wife, Judith Leyster, who first peeped over modern hori- 
 
 zons some eight or ten years ago, combines the influence of Hals and 
 Molenaer. The best things I have seen by her are the portrait in the 
 Rijks-museum at Amsterdam, and a picture which used to be at Audley 
 End, over which the lawsuit was fought which led to the rediscovery of 
 WV'v^"H"<^ her name and fame. She had plenty of manipulative ability, but, like 
 W ''. r: .. ''^ ' nearly all women, was overshadowed by those artists of the other sex with 
 whom she came in contact. Molenaer was a mistake as a husband for 
 her, I mean from the artistic standpoint. She adopted his manner, 
 and with it, apparently, his irresponsible way of regarding his art. 
 Zorgh, who apparently modelled himself on Brouwer but passed 
 most of his life at Rotterdam, and various painters whose works are not 
 often seen outside their native Holland, belong to the same class. 
 On these men and such others as Pape, Brekelenkam, De Bloot, etc., etc., 
 it is not necessary to dwell. Good artists in their way, they are essen- 
 tially followers, men who would have filled respectably any minor place 
 in any civilization. If they had lived now they would have painted 
 modest echoes of Israels, or Mauve, or James Maris ; if they had 
 flourished eighty years ago, they would have left us hard and painty 
 pasticci on Adrien van Ostade or William van de Velde. A rather 
 different man, a man, indeed, with an individuality of his own, was 
 Cornells Pietersz Bega. He was a pupil of Adriaen van Ostade, but his 
 pictures bear but superficial traces of his master's influence. At bottom 
 he was what we should call a stylist. His subjects did not differ greatly 
 from those of Ostade, but his preoccupation was not with dramatic quali- 
 ties, character and movement, but with line, with the fall of draperies, 
 and the agreeable occupation of a surface. As a rule his pictures have 
 
NICOLAS MAES 53 
 
 darkened so much that little pleasure is now to be had from them, 
 but as designs they are often very good indeed, and his high finish seems 
 more in place than that of many others. As might be guessed from his 
 pictures," his studies and drawings are among the best of the Dutch 
 school. The Bega in the National Gallery, a very good one, is dated 
 1663, the year before his death. 
 
 Better than any of these, as good, indeed, as any of the Dutchmen 
 when he himself was at his best, was Nicolas Maes, the pupil of Rem- 
 brandt, who began in glory and ended in a chilly fog. Born at 
 Dordrecht in 1632, he moved to Amsterdam and worked under 
 Rembrandt during the years when the great man's art was at its richest 
 and freest. He was attracted by Rembrandt's chiaroscuro, but not 
 sufficiently to induce him to use it with the vigorous irresponsibility 
 of his master. His early pictures show that he thought, as it were, in 
 light and shadow, but that he shrank from losing hi? hold on the simple 
 nature before him. Rembrandt was his own law. His chiaroscuro is 
 a personal dialect, consistent with itself, but not hanging to the skirts of 
 fact. He is quite ready to set a brilliantly lighted figure in a landscape 
 all mystery and gloom, and to carry sunbeams about his canvas with 
 the arbitrariness of the limelight man at the Adelphi. Maes had no 
 nerve for that. He would use the sun, but required authority. His 
 best work, perhaps, is the small panel in the National Gallery, called 
 " The Dutch Housewife." It is a masterpiece of simplicity and con- 
 centration. The woman minds her business and the little girl looks 
 on with absorbed attention, as if the future of the world depended on 
 the scraping of that parsnip, as some one has said. The light is allowed 
 to stream into the room from one small window, to fall upon the 
 two figures and to die away quietly into the glooms beyond. Maes 
 feels obliged to let you see where it comes from, and to control its 
 action with the most literal regard for fact. Rembrandt would have 
 dragooned it as he chose, and left the spectator to find the explanation, 
 far-fetched as it might be. " The Dutch Housewife " was painted in 
 1655, when Maes was twenty- three. The whole remainder of his 
 life, nearly forty years, seems to have been one long deterioration 
 from the man we see here. The downhill progress was slow, and 
 occasionally he brought in some new quality to suggest that he was 
 
54 "THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 again on the up grade. But those qualities are never strictly pictorial, 
 and I think it is not too much to say that as a 'painter he was at his best 
 in early youth, and that all the changes between 1655 ^^^ ^^^ death in 
 1693 were changes for the worse, so far as art, pure and simple, was 
 concerned. The best pictures I know of his fine time, besides the 
 National Gallery " Housewife," are " A Woman Suckling a Child," in 
 Mrs. Joseph's collection, and a small girl minding a cradled baby in 
 the collection of Lord Lansdowne. In one way the Bowood picture 
 is even better than the " Dutch Housewife," for its handling is freer 
 and more expressive. In this respect the National Gallery picture is 
 strictly the work of a young man. The impasto is rich and solid, but 
 the march of the brush is governed entirely by the desire to imitate. 
 It has not yet become alive to its own esoteric capacity for personal 
 expression. 
 
 The actual stages through which Maes retrogressed are difficult to 
 describe. As a colourist he began with almost complete sanity. The 
 " Dutch Housewife " is delightfully balanced. Looking at it in the 
 light of what we know of his later years, we can detect a slight tendency 
 to the red, and a still slighter one to the black, propensity. Each of 
 these in turn was afterwards to throw him off his balance, and, in his 
 last years, to unite in making his numerous portraits into combinations 
 of cold red and black, so wanting in true feeling that some very good 
 judges even now refuse to believe that the Maes of 1654 ^^^ ^-^^ 
 Maes of 1690 are one and the same man. The evidence against them 
 is unhappily too strong. Maes can be traced in unbroken stages from 
 the delicious works of his youth down to the coldest and most per- 
 functory productions of his fashionable old age. Even in the National 
 Gallery, with its four pictures,^ the direction and rapidity of his pro- 
 gress downwards can be traced. The " Dutch Housewife " and the 
 " Idle Servant " are dated 1655 ; the " Child with a Cradle," 1656 ; 
 while the man's portrait, given by Sir Theodore Martin, in which 
 his black and red tendency has become strong, his impasto poor, and 
 
 ^ According to the catalogue there are five. But I fail to recognize any unmistakable 
 characteristics of Maes in the large " Card Players," from Gatton Park. It may be by him, 
 but if so, it is strange that he should have made his way through such a large and elaborate 
 composition without leaving any decisive witness to his authorship in any part of it. 
 
/ 
 
 GERARD DOU 55 
 
 his tone cold, belongs to the year 1680. Maes, unhappily, must be set 
 among the disappointers, among those men whose aesthetic gifts have 
 not been supported by the right sort of character. 
 
 One small group of Dutch painters of the lower bourgeoisie remains' 
 to be noticed. It is not an interesting group from the aesthetic point -nn 
 
 of view, but for those who love to consider art as the servant of J 
 
 morality it ought to have a strong fascination. To preach morality 
 "by your art is futile. If the pictures in which you do so are good 
 pictures, like those of Hogarth, they will come to be considered solely 
 as works of art ; if they are not good pictures, if they are like the 
 " Dili-gent and Dissipated Maids " of Northcote, they will be thrown 
 away and forgotten. But some moral virtues may be upheld by the 
 way in which you paint. Patience is one of them, and surely no 
 man ever had more of it than Dou, Slingelandt, and Schalcken, 
 If conscience and the determination to do your very best are to be 
 considered in our estimates of pictures, how are we to refuse a very 
 high place to the painter of the " Femme Hydropique " of the Louvre, 
 and the " Poulterer's Shop " of the Peel collection ? It would be 
 difficult to name many human productions in which the determina- 
 tion to be thorough, to make the completest use of such gifts as nature 
 has vouchsafed, is more richly shown than in these two pictures. 
 They are elaborately thought out, and painted until paint has 
 little left to do. As examples of industry, of duty fulfilled, of 
 single-minded conscientiousness, they have few superiors. But no one 
 who can enjoy the creative powers of art cares to look at them twice, 
 except as curiosities. Their careful arrangement does not amount to 
 a design ; their tints do not amount to colour ; their handling is strictly 
 imitative ; and they show no gift for aesthetic selection. In 
 short, they are monuments of an irrelevant virtue, and before them we 
 have to say, not " See what patience can do," but " See how 
 patience may be misused." One of the best of Schalcken's pictures 
 is in the National Gallery of Ireland. Its subject is the restoration of 
 a daughter by gipsies who had stolen her as a child. The girl sits 
 among her recovered parents and bares her bosom to show the ortho- 
 dox strawberry mark on her left breast. The said bosom, and the 
 costumes of the parents, and a marble cistern in the foreground with 
 
r 
 
 56 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 roses in it and a snail, shell laden, crawling on its brim, are painted 
 
 with such minute fidelity that we are tempted to put them under the 
 
 microscope and carry analysis beyond the point to which our eyes 
 
 can reach. This kind of finish is pushed farthest by Schalcken, but 
 
 occasionally Slingelandt runs him very close. Now and then, too, 
 
 Slingelandt shows a glimmering of some more aesthetic virtue, and 
 
 suggests that under better auspices he might have been a truer artist. 
 
 I must not forget to confess that Dou sometimes deviates into art also. 
 
 The pictures on which his fame was built up are mostly bores, but we 
 
 can take real pleasure in such a thing as his own portrait in the National 
 
 Gallery, or in the miniature supposed — I know not on what authority 
 
 — to represent his wife, which hangs beside it. In both of these, but 
 
 especially in his own portrait, good design is combined with expressive 
 
 handling of the Hals-Teniers kind, and with colour which is at 
 
 least not actively disagreeable. Dou was the pupil of Rembrandt ; 
 
 in his earlier pictures the tendency to a somewhat forced chiaroscuro 
 
 and to monotonous brownness of tone, betray the small man who has 
 
 grown up under the shadow of a great one, whom he feels bound to 
 
 worship but cannot understand. The National Gallery portrait shows, 
 
 however, that by the time he was thirty or thereabouts he had become 
 
 acquainted with the wonderful portraits-in-little of Hals, and had tried 
 
 to do something of the same kind before the mirror in his studio. In 
 
 this instance he did not succeed too badly. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 The Landscape Painters 
 
 It is difficult to say whether the most remarkable thing in Dutch 
 landscape painting is regard for nature or neglect of it. From one 
 point of view the better masters of the school were more consistently- 
 faithful to natural facts and less apt to divagate into the byways of 
 fancy, than those who have since followed in their footsteps. Their - 
 conscious endeavour was to paint the constituents of landscape as they 
 saw them. They arranged them, no doubt, into scenes not to be found 
 in Holland, with occasional ornaments, such as Cuijp's mountains, not 
 to be found anywhere. But on the whole they respected nature 
 and made her their guide. On the other hand, few Dutch land- a 
 scapes produce a natural impression. Not only was deliberate realism ' 
 foreign to the Dutch genius, it resented, or at least neglected, those 
 particular phenomena on which the unity of nature chiefly depends. 
 The better artists painted trees more or less as they saw them, and 
 sky, and water ; but in their desire to win a perfect arabesque, they 
 neglected atmosphere and the power it gives of bringing earth and sky 
 into unity. If we except certain Cuijps and the miraculous " Delft " \ 
 of Vermeer, no Dutch landscape seeks illusion. I do not mean to say /' 
 that the creation of a trom-pe Vceil is among the duties of a landscape 
 painter. If such a thing could be produced, it would not be a work of 
 art at all. It is nevertheless strange that a body of painters which in- 
 cluded De Hooghe and Vermeer, and watched fact, on the whole, with 
 such curious eyes, should seldom have so dealt with landscape that we 
 can enjoy their pictures from the two standpoints of art and nature 
 simultaneously. Before a fine Constable we get the double pleasure — 
 we can either look at it for its truth to an aspect of nature, or for the 
 
 genius which brings all this truth into aesthetic unity, and avoids mere 
 
 w 
 
58 7 HE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 realism. There is a certain Hampstead Heath by the Suffolk artist in 
 the Victoria and Albert Museum. You can stand before it and fancy 
 yourself looking through a window at the place itself. If you do, you 
 will think the old white horse in the foreground a queer sort of beast, 
 but otherwise you will get no shock. The eye adapts itself to the short 
 scale of tones which is all that paint can give, and then travels out to 
 Harrow, over the gorse, and sand, and shiny water, and rolling woods, 
 as easily, and almost as gradually, as over the actual face of Middlesex. 
 y The Dutchmen give you none of this pleasure. Even Philips de Kon- 
 \ inck, who deals in wide champaigns, has no reality. He leads your eye 
 away to distant horizons, but does it by a kind of studio staircase of con- 
 ventional planes. His pictures are as airless as the moon, although they 
 often have fine skies. It is difficult to find a word or a phrase to describe 
 Dutch landscape. We cannot call it conventional, like the backgrounds 
 of the early schools, or decorative, like the landscapes of Titian, or 
 realistic. In short, no objective formula will fit it, and we are reduced 
 to describing it as entirely subjective in aim and partially realistic in 
 method. The Dutchman conceived a landscape as a carver conceives 
 a bench-end, and he carried it out by accepting all the relevant 
 facts except those veils of air which have now become the main pre- 
 occupation of the artist. To this the one conspicuous exception was 
 Albert Cuijp, who stands to modern landscape in much the same 
 relation as Velazquez does to our figure painting. Cuijp, Jakob 
 Ruisdael, and Hobbema were the three first-rate men produced by the 
 school, with a potential fourth in Jan van Goijen. These four men 
 seem to me the only landscapists of their race, in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, who demand anything like elaborate study. 
 
 Jan Josefsz van Goijen was a sort of Dutch Georges Michel. He 
 was the forerunner, and in some sort the creator, of later developments. 
 His gifts were entirely right in kind, although they failed in quantity. 
 Ambition, vigour, copiousness, courage were denied him, but what he 
 saw was true and his aims were artistic. His best work, for what it is, 
 could scarcely be improved. The late Mr. Roupell, of the Albany, 
 had a collection of his smaller pictures and drawings which produced a 
 remarkable impression when seen together. They showed Van Goijen 
 to be a master of composition, of tone, of atmospheric effect, of drawing, 
 
JAN VAN GOIJEN 59 
 
 of handling.^ To his want of a robust ambition we may ascribe his 
 comparative failure in large compositions and the frequency of dully 
 mechanical pictures, over-brown in tone. His inspiration did not per- 
 sist long enough for complete success on a large surface, and he often 
 turned out small panels with no sincere feeling in them at all. The 
 eclipse from which his reputation has only emerged within the last few 
 years was due to the number of these perfunctory works. Even 
 now he is but ill represented in public collections. The large " Winter 
 Scene " in the National Gallery, agreeable as it is in many ways, fails to 
 show that perfect unity and pictorial repose which marks so many of his 
 smaller works. Van Goijen was born as early as 1596. His real master 
 was Esaias van de Velde, with whom, however, he did not place himself 
 until he was twenty-one. His life was passed at Leyden and the Hague, 
 and the subjects he loved are nearly all to be found within a short dis- 
 tance of these two centres. Jan Steen was his son-in-law, so we may 
 fairly conclude that his influence had easy access to the multiplying 
 studios of South Holland. 
 
 One of these studios was that of the great master of Dordrecht, 
 Albert Cuijp. There is no record, so far as I know, of Cuijp having 
 studied under Van Goijen, but a glance at his earliest pictures is enough 
 to show that he was at least his humble follower. Cuijp began by 
 working in a style scarcely to be distinguished from that of the older 
 man. One of his earliest pictures is in the collection of Mr. Van Alen, 
 and was shown at the Old Masters some two years ago. Had it not been 
 signed with an obviously genuine signature it would most likely have 
 passed as a Van Goijen ; although, it must be confessed, it showed 
 differences which might have caused some uneasiness in those making 
 the ascription. It was not composed like a Van Goijen, its colour ten- 
 dency was towards yellow instead of towards a cool brown, and its 
 handling, although obviously based on its model, was not identical with 
 it. Out of this manner Cuijp grew steadily, but slowly. If we could 
 collect all his pictures, we should probably find that each embodied an 
 advance towards his own distinctive manner — ^which, unhappily, was 
 again to yield, at the end of his life, to a borrowed style. The best 
 
 ^ The gems of this collection are now to be found in the possession of Mr. J. P. Heseltine, Mrs. 
 Joseph, and, I believe, Mr. van Alen, who also has a fine marine from the Burrell Collection. 
 
6o THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 picture known to me of his early period is the large landscape, with cows 
 being milked, in Bridgewater House. Here we still find the extreme 
 restraint in colour, the small stringy touch, the preoccupation with tone ; 
 in composition, however, it far excels anything done on a similar scale 
 by Van Goijen/ 
 
 The portrait of a man in the National Gallery, which is dated 1649, 
 probably marks the point, so far as it was a point, where Cuijp's first 
 style began to lose itself in his second. In colour and in the details of 
 handling we can still recognize the Van Goijen stage, but the whole is 
 seen with a new breadth, so that conception and execution are now at 
 peace with each other.^ The transition was soon passed, for the num- 
 ber of pictures in which both first and second styles are to be traced is 
 comparatively small. Knowing what we do of Cuijp's docility, we may 
 suspect that the adoption of the great style of his maturity was not 
 entirely his own doing. It is quite possible that some picture by 
 De Hooghe, with whose early manner his own second style has a striking 
 affinity, may have applied the match. For a man who could exploit 
 Van Goijen, in his youth, and Wouwerman in his old age, as Cuijp 
 most assuredly did, it would be easy to seize upon the sunlight of a 
 master ten years his junior, and determine to do for the wide landscapes 
 of the Maas what De Hooghe was doing for the gardens and parlours 
 of Delft. That, however, by the way : it is only a guess. What we 
 know is that when Cuijp was from about thirty to thirty-five years of 
 age he began to concentrate his powers on the problem of sunlight in 
 the open air, and that for a quarter of a century, perhaps, he gave it his 
 undivided attention. His fame rests on the pictures produced during 
 these five-and- twenty years. They are curiously faithful to the one 
 ideal. It is, of course, possible to trace their chronology, for no man is 
 stationary. But within his periods Cuijp moved less obviously than 
 most. His three manners are quite distinct and the transitions from one 
 to the other more abrupt than usual. But there is affiliation ; and if all 
 
 ^ The same group of cows and milkmaid is used in a smaller picture in the National 
 Gallery of Ireland, and in another, if I may trust my memory, in the Hermitage. 
 
 ^ IJam aware that some connoisseurs are unable to see Cuijp in this portrait at all, but to 
 me scepticism seems out of place. The picture is unique, no doubt, but its colour is enough 
 to show its origin, and the signature is unattackable. 
 
ALBERT CUIJP 6i 
 
 his works could be brought together, it would not be difficult, I think, 
 to arrange them approximately in order of production. 
 
 The middle period alone is well represented in our National Collec- 
 tions. All the pictures in the National Gallery, with the exception of 
 the portrait already mentioned, belong to it. Three of them show 
 him at his best. These are the large " Landscape, with Cattle and 
 Figures," formerly in the Angerstein Collection, the " River Scene with 
 Cattle," and the " Ruined Castle on a Lake," both in the Peel collection. 
 The two pictures of Dordrecht, the " Large Dort " and the " Small 
 Dort," bequeathed by Mr. Wynn Ellis, are more famous, but in quality 
 they are scarcely so fine as the others. In all of these the real preoccu- 
 pation of the artist has been with light in its most agreeable form, the 
 golden light of a summer afternoon. Being essentially an artist, with 
 good traditions all about him, he paints simply, directly, without effort 
 or pretension, but his thoughts are fixed on atmospheric effect and 
 its successful rendering. Now and then he makes an unhappy colour 
 experiment — or time has made it for him. In one, at least, of the 
 Dulwich pictures a metallic green has made away with " keeping," and 
 turned what was meant for a specially fresh and dewy picture into a hard 
 and gaudy one. 
 
 The most covetable of all the National Gallery Cuijps, according to 
 my taste, is the little " Castle in a Lake." It probably shows how his 
 work looked when new better than any of the others. It is apparently 
 simple, almost naif, in composition, but most effective, the only doubtful 
 notes being struck by the little figures and cows on the farther side of 
 the lake. Nothing could be finer than the golden glow over this little 
 panel. The gradation of the haze is perfect, and makes us wish we had 
 a Cuijp living here in London, to do justice to the wonderful atmo- 
 sphere we have on what we call a clear day in September. 
 
 Cuijp's last and worst style is but little represented in our English 
 collections. It seems to have been brought about by the influence of 
 Philips Wouwerman. The two men were practically of the same age. 
 Wouwerman is said to have spent the whole of his life at Haarlem, but 
 no great distance separated that city from Dordrecht even in the seven- 
 teenth century, and it can scarcely be doubted that the two men were 
 known to each other, at least in their works. In any case it is impossible 
 
62 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 to ignore the connexion between the later battle and hunting pieces 
 of the Haarlem master and similar things signed A. C, the form of sig- 
 nature adopted by Cuijp in his old age. They are alike in conception 
 and in technical methods. They are painted, for instance, on dark 
 grounds, which are responsible for their unpleasant lowness of tone. 
 All the changes from the manner of the " Castle in the Lake " are to- 
 wards Wouwerman, and away from anything he had done before. If it 
 were not for the comparatively broad handling, some "A.C." Cuijps might 
 almost be mistaken for the work of Wouwerman. It is one of the most 
 curious things in the whole history of art, that a man of genius, who had 
 endowed the world with such brilliant pages of nature as the pictures 
 at Dulwich, at Bridgwater House, in the National Gallery, at Dor- 
 chester House, and in the Louvre, should have enrolled himself in his 
 old age among the imitators of a man of talent. 
 
 The second of our three great and original Dutchmen, Jakob Ruis- 
 dael, or Ruijsdael,^ was eight or nine years younger than Cuijp. The 
 facts of his life are still involved in very great obscurity. He is said to 
 have been the pupil of his father, Isaak, to whom many pictures are 
 ascribed which are clearly youthful productions of the son. At the 
 same time we are told that this same father intended him for the medical 
 profession, and that a degree was actually taken, or at least assumed, for 
 he was called " Dr." Judging from his works alone, we should say that 
 he was at first the pupil of his uncle, Solomon Ruisdael, who had become 
 a member of the Haarlem Guild in 1623 ; and that he was influenced 
 in later years by AUaert van Everdingen, who had brought a breath of 
 Norway, with its pines and tumbling waters, into the flats of Holland. 
 The story of his life, so far as we know it, is short and simple. Born at 
 Haarlem about 1628, he lived there until 1659, when he moved to 
 Amsterdam. His life was one long struggle with poverty, and he died 
 in an almshouse in 1682. 
 
 As a painter the most obvious thing about him is the decision with 
 which he knew his own mind. From first to last he changes less, per- 
 haps, than any other great artist. The student can tell easily enough 
 whether he is looking at an early or a late Ruisdael, but the differences 
 
 ^ It is curious that these two ways of spelling the name should have been used indiffer- 
 ently by its owner, for they involve, strictly speaking, two different pronunciations. 
 
JAKOB RUISDAEL 63 
 
 are matters of detail. In his youth he painted tightly, a little stolidly, 
 with over-much care for the accidental fact. His skies are deprived of 
 their depth by torn flakes of sometimes woolly cloud. His composition 
 is often crowded, and his colour has tendencies — tendencies to brown, to 
 green, to blue. As the years pass, his conceptions become simpler, 
 more easily taken in at a glance. His skies deepen, and the clouds hang 
 in them in true perspective and in three dimensions. He never loses 
 his greenness or even brownness, but our desire to call them tendencies 
 disappears. They are part of his individuality, which we begin to accept 
 with gratitude. The charm of light creeps over him, and although he 
 never learns to use the real sun, he brings in gleams to decompose and 
 deepen the solemnity of his shadow. Last of all he lifts his eyes higher 
 above the horizon, and paints those delicious pictures in which a great 
 sky, a sort of cloud forest, hangs over the plain of Haarlem, one beam 
 from the sun falling, like benevolent lightning, on the great church, on 
 the red roofs of the city, on some bleaching ground in the suburbs. Here 
 we have none of Cuijp's vacillation. The grave mind of Ruisdael 
 understands from the beginning what it means to make with nature. He 
 knows what aspects please him, and as soon as he has felt his way through 
 the initial difficulties of his metier, he sets to work to convey his message. 
 It was not his fault if his fellow-countrymen declined to receive it. 
 
 He has been reproached with his want of variety ; but very great 
 artists are never really various. Objective variety, of course, is easy. 
 Sir Joshua found no difficulty in avoiding the stereotyped in pose and 
 colour, but his essential message is always the same. So is that of 
 Gainsborough, who seldom troubled much over even objective variety. 
 Rembrandt is not various. Constable is not various, Corot is not 
 various. Turner had more variety than any one else of the first rank, 
 and that is one of the signs of the objectivity, the desire to illustrate 
 rather than to make, on which I have insisted elsewhere.^ The kind 
 of monotony of which people complain in Ruisdael is neither more 
 nor less than the domination of his personality. He could not play 
 monkey tricks with landscape. The passion with which it inspired him 
 was the passion he meant to express. It would not be denied. It was so 
 profound, and grave, and sane, that it coloured his world, and made 
 
 * Turner. Agnews, 1902. 
 
64 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 his pictures richer in character, deeper in feeling, more tense in 
 expression than those of any other landscape painter. 
 
 To turn from considerations like these to purely technical matters 
 feels like a bathos, but a word has to be said on a proceeding of Ruisdael's 
 which must, in the long run, diminish the charm of some of his most 
 delightful pictures. This, of course, was his habit of painting on 
 a dark ground. This time-saving process came into great favour in 
 Holland in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. It is respon- 
 sible for the want of light in so many of the pictures painted after about 
 1660, De Hooghes, Cuijps, Wouwermans, Ruisdaels, etc. Ruisdael 
 took to a dark ground and thinned his impasto at the same time, so that 
 occasionally we find in his later pictures no real light anywhere but on 
 the clouds (cumuli), which, being painted in almost solid white, have 
 alone resisted the invading darkness. Sometimes, however, pictures 
 painted on a light ground have darkened too. 
 
 The National Gallery owns thirteen Ruisdaels. Fourteen are 
 enumerated in the catalogue, but one. No. 628, is a copy. The best 
 perhaps, in quality, are the " Waterfall," No. 737, bequeathed by Mr. 
 Oppenheim ; the " Landscape with Waterfall " (No. 627), the " Water- 
 fall " (No. 855), in the Peel Collection, and the small picture of " An Old 
 Oak " (No. 988) in the Wynn Ellis collection. The large Wynn Ellis 
 picture of the country round Haarlem (990) was probably a masterpiece 
 when new, but is now disagreeably black and dead. 
 
 Hobbema is one of the many Dutch painters whom the English were 
 the first to appreciate. As in the cases of Cuijp and De Hooghe, the 
 great majority of his pictures were in this country down to some seventy 
 years ago. Even now, when so many have returned to the continent 
 or crossed the' Atlantic, we probably still possess more than half his 
 production. Down to the publication of Modern Painters, he was 
 widely accepted as the greatest artist who ever touched landscape, 
 with the exception of Claude. Between 1850 and 1880 or there- 
 abouts, his fame was under some little eclipse, but with the growth of 
 truer ideas as to what constitutes a fine work of art, it has again risen, 
 and now stands almost where it did before Ruskin wrote. If we accept 
 the theory that the aim, as well as the method, of landscape painting is 
 
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THE LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 6$ 
 
 the telling of as much truth as possible about nature, then indeed we are 
 forced to depose Hobbema. We cannot deny that Ruskin's strictures 
 are true as matters of fact, and that the Dutchman's rendering of 
 natural beauty has neither the frankness of Constable nor the ambition 
 of Turner. But then we do not accept this theory of a landscape 
 painter's aim. He, like all other artists, sets out to create beauty, not to 
 imitate it. He uses natural appearances as his medium, he does not 
 adopt them as his end. He sits down before a scene in nature not to 
 transfer as much of it as possible to canvas, but to select from it those 
 elements which will assist him in producing a new creation, a page in 
 which the dominating factor is his own passion and his own conception of 
 aesthetic unity. Ruisdael wins this unity by impressing his own gravity 
 and nobility of spirit on nature. Hobbema does it by arranging his into 
 an almost sculpturesque concentration of pattern, by clothing her in a 
 visible garment of satisfaction with things as they are, by enhancing her 
 sense of repose. To show that Hobbema's leaves are greenless, that his 
 twigs shoot from their stems at unholy angles, that his trunks taper 
 wrongly, and that his earth would be unclassifiable by the geologist, is 
 irrelevant labour. Hobbema's object was not to instruct us on matters 
 like these. His object was to create, in paint, an object which should be 
 beautiful for the same reason — not in the same way — as a natural object, 
 say a fine horse. He set out in fact to make something in which the 
 intrinsic harmony of the parts should result in an organic whole. Being 
 an artist, he thought always of the picture, and of nature only so far as 
 his choice of her as a medium made such thinking necessary. Ruskin 
 describes a great artist as one who always thinks of nature, never of his 
 picture. In one sense, no doubt, he is right. The art of a great artist 
 is instinctive. He does not require to think deliberately about it. It 
 rises in him like the water in a well. All he does is under its compulsion, 
 and all his selections are made by its guidance. His conscious thinking 
 is directed to his model, whether that be a landscape, or a human being, 
 or a vase of flowers. But in the sense in which Ruskin used the phrase 
 it is the reverse of the truth. We may say without any hesitation what- 
 ever that the true artist always thinks first of what he is making, and 
 secondly of the natural objects he is pressing into the service. Every 
 Art which works through imitation is full of sacrifice, but the sacrifice 
 
ee THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 must always be made by the thing imitated. The man who would 
 sacrifice either the unity or the personality of his art to the mere natural 
 fact has nothing to say with paint. He will, of course, select his sub- 
 jects so that sacrifice may be reduced to a minimum, but the inevitable 
 tribute must be paid on the imitative, and not on the creative side, 
 Hobbema's pictures are beautiful things not because they are like nature, 
 but because they obey the laws which make nature beautiful too. 
 
 In writing about them, or, indeed, about any picture, it is difficult 
 to avoid an apparent ambiguity, for if a painter's art is mostly spon- 
 taneous, it is for the same reason difficult to analyse in words, and dis- 
 cussion is apt to direct itself towards those imitative features which are 
 embellishments of art rather than its essence. As an artist Hobbema 
 is nearly always at his own high level. His design seldom fails either in 
 grace or unity. Even when he takes a subject ugly in itself, like the 
 road to Middelharnis, he contrives to clothe it in linear charm by the 
 just choice of a point of view, and by the design of the one free element 
 in the composition, the sky. The judgment which governs all this is re- 
 peated in the minor details of execution, in the handling, especially of the 
 ground, in the modification of the natural colour, and in the aerial per- 
 spective. Compare this " Avenue " with Cuijp's treatment of an al- 
 most identical subject in the Wallace collection, and you will see how 
 infinitely greater in design the younger master was. So good, in short, 
 are nearly all his conceptions in their quiet way, that comparisons of one 
 with another have perforce to be based on those imitative qualities 
 which are the accidents rather than the essentials of art. Of the five true 
 Hobbemas in the National Gallery, it is difficult to say that one is any 
 better than another, as a design. The " Avenue " is the most original, 
 and overcomes difficulties which most painters would shirk, but the unity 
 arrived at is no finer than that of the three Peel pictures. One of these, in- 
 deed, suffers from the interference of a poultry painter in the foreground,^ 
 whose ducks are neither good nor wanted. Otherwise they are all ex- 
 cellent designs. Something, it is difficult to say what, has happened to 
 the sky of No. 685, the first Hobbema to enter the gallery ; while of the 
 
 ^ These birds are not by Wijntranck, to whom the catalogue ascribes them. His 
 woolly touch, once seen, is quite unmistakeable. A signed picture by him — the only one 
 I ever saw, is at Powerscourt. 
 
^ 
 
 ^ 
 ^ 
 
t:he landscape painters 67 
 
 two bequeathed oy Mr. Wynn Ellis, one has darkened disagreeably and 
 the other is unimportant. The finest Hobbema I know belongs 
 to Lord Feversham, and hangs at Buncombe Park, in Yorkshire. As 
 good in conception as anything he ever did, it excels in atmospheric 
 truth, and in a certain dewy freshness which is the rarest quality in an 
 old master— or new one either, for that matter. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 City Painters — Sea Painters — Animal Painters — 
 Painters o f Still Life 
 
 Some of the Dutchmen who painted the insides and outsides of 
 buildings were artists of little less than the first rank. Emmanuel de 
 Witte, Geeraert Hoekgheest, and Jan van der Heijde, have left pictures 
 behind them worthy to hang beside those of Ruisdael or Hobbema* 
 Unfortunately, they are all three very unequal, and rise but seldom to 
 their own highest level. Neither van der Heijde nor De Witte are 
 at their best in the National Gallery, while Hoekgheest is not there at 
 all. The Van der Heijde in the Peel collection, which we reproduce, is 
 well though rather formally composed, but it 5 handling is dry and its 
 colour wanting in the depth and flow of his best works. The finest I 
 know are the " View in Amsterdam," in the collection of Mr. A. J. 
 Robarts, and " An Amsterdam Canal," in the Duke of Arenberg's 
 gallery at Brussels. These are both well composed — a compara- 
 tively rare virtue with Van der Heijde — and delightful in colour, 
 the impression of sunlight being almost as vivid as in a fine De 
 Hooghe. Another good example, the " Roosengracht " in the Wallace 
 collection, is but little inferior to these two. 
 
 A better picture-inventor than Van der Heijde was the Haarlem 
 master, Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheijde, whose design — so far as the 
 selection of a point of view and the occupation of a panel can be called 
 design — was nearly always good. His pictures of the Haarlem market- 
 place, and of the Dam at Amsterdam, are full of breadth and dignity. 
 As a colourist, however, he is far inferior to Van der Heijde, while as 
 an executant he is rather dry and thin. The two pictures by him in 
 the National Gallery show him at his best. Van der Heijde and 
 Berckheijde started a school which persisted down almost to our own 
 
ARCHHECTURAL PAINTERS 69 
 
 day, without, however, producing any considerable artist until the days 
 of Bosboom and Mathew Maris. 
 
 The painters of interiors had their freedom even more closely cur- 
 tailed than the painters of streets. The inside of a church gives less 
 opportunity for personal expression than a group of buildings, and so 
 the few artists who have contrived to impress their individuality on 
 such things deserve all the more honour. Best of them all, at his best, 
 is Emmanuel de Witte. He saw the inside of a church as Ruisdael 
 saw a landscape. His tendency was to deepen its solemnity, to enhance 
 the shadows and reduce the points of light, and to strike grave notes in 
 his colour. His better works, such as the two in Lord Northbrook's 
 collection and a large interior of a drawing-room, which was sold at 
 Christie's as a De Hooghe some eight or nine years ago, have a perfect 
 unity in their grave repose. The one De Witte in the National Gallery 
 shows him to no advantage. Very different was the system of Geeraert 
 van Hoekgheest, who set himself to render a church as a sun-trap with 
 all the vigour he could muster. Like De Witte, he was most unequal, 
 but his better pictures have scarcely been excelled in the force with 
 which they present the fact. Two interiors of the Nieuwe Kerk of 
 Delft, in the Mauritshuis and the Rijks-museum respectively, startle 
 one by their veracity. And yet they are works of art, for such personal 
 expression as the subject allows is there. It is easy to go wrong, even 
 over such an apparently self- justifying theme as the inside of a church. 
 A mistaken standpoint, an hour of the day when the light and shadow 
 are unhappily divided, figures badly placed, too much floor or too 
 much wall ; pitfalls are plentiful, and the painter who avoids them all 
 on his way to unity is an artist. It is a pity we have no Hoekgheest in 
 Trafalgar Square ; but they are rare things, and when the Messchaert 
 van VoUenhoven picture was allowed to go into the Rijks-museum, the 
 only opportunity for getting a fine example which has occurred within 
 my recollection was lost. It is true that the Dutchmen paid what was 
 then an enormous price for it. 
 
 Another painter of church interiors who had a modest individuality 
 of his own was Anton Delorme, whose name is frequent enough in 
 catalogues, although his works are rare. For some reason not easy to 
 discover,''^many pictures by the De Neefs, and others by VanBassen, pass 
 
7° THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 under his name. As a matter of fact, his style is peculiarly easy of 
 recognition, and his subject is nearly always the interior of the Groote 
 Kerk of Rotterdam or one of its sateUites. He is quite free from the 
 brownness of the Flemish painters of interiors. His tones are generally 
 high, he loves air and space, he never shirks an ugly detail, but depends 
 on his own controlling power to keep it in order. His work is to be 
 found in very few galleries. A very good example is in the National 
 Gallery of Ireland, but he is absent from Trafalgar Square. The 
 remaining painters of architectural interiors are not of much interest. 
 Sanredam, indeed, had feeling, but Hendrik van der Vliet was little 
 more than a mechanic, in spite of his un-Dutch versatility. 
 
 The sea painters of Holland have suffered more than any one else 
 from the strictures of Ruskin, and, on the whole, it is difficult to say 
 that he treated them unfairly. If the imitation of nature be not the 
 aim of the landscape painter, it is undeniably his means, and he should 
 so use natural facts that we may pass through them contentedly to 
 enjoy his art. It is not the final aim of a novelist to make his people 
 talk as they would in real life, but unless he does so with a reasonable 
 fidelity, one cannot enjoy the story he has to tell. So with a picture. 
 Unless it is professedly and entirely conventional, we demand sufficient 
 truth to give us confidence in the artist's power of observation before 
 we can abandon ourselves to the enjoyment of his personal gloss. The 
 great landscape painters submit to this necessity. Before a Cuijp, a 
 Ruisdael, or a Hobbema, we feel that the artist knows what he is doing. 
 His omissions are obviously deliberate, his selections governed by judg- 
 ment. We do not feel this with the sea painters. The idea they too 
 often suggest is that the sea is neither familiar nor welcome. " Your 
 Grace is too difficult for me ! " said Gainsborough before the Duchess 
 of Devonshire, and we can hear the Dutchmen using the same phrase 
 to the sea. They may have painted in open boats at the risk of 
 their lives, but they never lighted on a formula — to put it so low — 
 for the wetness, or the mass, or the indifference, or the'chill, or the 
 obedience to moon and wind, of the sea. Their sea pieces are not all 
 bad by any means, but so far as they depend on the sea itself, they are 
 never good. Willem van de Velde, Jan van de Capelle, Simon de 
 
SEJ PAINTERS 71 
 
 Vlieger, Hendrik Dubbels, and one or two more, have left us many nice 
 pictures in which the sea supplies a sort of floor. But the goodness is 
 always in the sky, or the atmosphere, or the pattern and movement of 
 the ships. The man who took the most trouble of them all, if we 
 beheve tradition — I mean Ruskin's " Back-something," Ludolf 
 Backhuijzen — did the most unhappy work. Taking them all round, 
 we find more truth, more sympathy with nature, in the best pictures of 
 De Vlieger, than in any of the others. Unfortunately, he was not often 
 at his best ; still more unfortunately, his fine things are not seldom 
 filched from him and given to men with greater names. Jakob 
 Ruisdael's marines seem to have been usually studied from the 
 Haarlemer Meer. His tempests snarl, they do not threaten to over- 
 whelm; his coasts are shores, with no hint of tides. As for Willem 
 van de Velde, his work charms in proportion to the success with which 
 he suppresses the sea, as sea. His dead calms, with a vaporous air 
 beneath a high dome of sky, with ships lazily swinging to their anchors 
 as they fire a promiscuous gun, with boats putting off from the land 
 and the heavy Dutch ensigns trailing in their wake : in things like 
 these we can take a sober pleasure. A very good one is " Dutch 
 Shipping, Vessels Saluting " (No. 978), in the National Gallery. It 
 belongs to 'the Wynn Ellis collection. Those in the Peel collection 
 are not so good. The one here reproduced shows him at his best 
 however, when attempting to deal with a stormy sea. 
 
 With the animal painters we rise again to a higher plane. Not that 
 the gift for art discernible in De Witte or Van der Heijde is small, but 
 that architecture is too confining a theme for freedom in expression. 
 The man who paints monuments paints in fetters. His design has to 
 sink to the level of draughtsmanship, his composition to become arrange- 
 ment, his colour to substitute restraint for the free expression of feeling. 
 It is all a matter of degree, of course. So long as painting involves repro- 
 duction of objects it can never be entirely its own law, like music. But 
 one set of themes allows more freedom than another, and, assuming 
 an equal gift, the painter of free objects will express himself more 
 completely than the man who paints unchangeable things. 
 
 The most famous of the Dutch animaliers was, no doubt, Paul Potter. 
 
72 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 His name has become a kind of symbol for the art he practised, just as 
 that of Raphael has for the illustration of religion. But the finest animal 
 painter of Holland was not Potter, but Cuijp. A man's powers must 
 be judged by his best work. Now Albert Cuijp has left us a few pic- 
 tures of cows, of horses, of poultry, which are painted in a way that has 
 seldom been equalled. Gericault used to say that he could not sleep o' 
 nights for thinking of Cuijp's horses. Sprinkled about European galleries 
 there is a certain population of cows and horses, and cocks and hens, signed 
 sometimes A. Cuijp, sometimes A. C, which, looked at merely as ex- 
 amples of what a paint-brush can do, need fear comparison with nothing 
 that ever came out of a studio. The most accessible to the English 
 lover of pictures are two at Dulwich, a byre and a stable. If we think 
 only of rendering, and of such immediately expressive qualities as good 
 arrangement and colour, we have to confess that these little pictures fill 
 every demand we can make on a painter. The subjects are humble, 
 calling for neither learning, nor imagination, nor idealism. But these, and 
 other things like them, prove that at the time when Cuijp was about to 
 desert his splendid second manner for his disastrous third, he was at the 
 summit of his powers and was a more consummate master of his material 
 than any other Dutchman, with the exceptions of Metsu, Vermeer, and 
 Jan Steen. This manner of Cuijp is not represented in the National 
 Gallery at all, for the little picture lent by the Victoria and Albert 
 Museum cannot be accepted as his.^ 
 
 The fame of Paul Potter is mostly a survival from the days when 
 Gerard Dou and Frans Mieris were two of the most fashionable masters 
 of the school. Many of his pictures, including the notorious " Bull," 
 are scarcely works of art at all. They are monuments of patience, of 
 skill, of judgment in selection. Unhappily his selection is not strictly 
 that of the artist. He selects for the sake of imitation, not for that of 
 aesthetic unity. He cannot hope to paint every hair on a cow's back, so 
 he elaborates a touch to suggest them. But the touch has no charm in 
 itself — ^it expresses hair, but not Paul Potter, which means that Potter 
 had nothing but hair to express. The interest of his pictures is always 
 objective. We enjoy them, so far as we enjoy them at all, for the 
 
 ^ Hung as it is, this picture does not confess its authorship very clearly, but it seems to 
 be the work of Pieter Potter, the father of Paul, 
 
'§. 
 
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Landscape wnn Catile. By Paul Potter, from a Photograph by F. Hanfitaeitgl. 
 
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ANIMAL PAINTERS 73 
 
 pale reflection they give of what we may still see from a train in Hol- 
 land. Take the famous " Vache qui se mire," at the Hague. It might 
 be called " Le paysage qui se mire — tres mal." We might get some- 
 thing like it if we held up a steel mirror to a Dutch meadow. It shows 
 no human personality. It is the work of one who patiently pursued 
 the fact, but had nothing to say with it when caught. It is the same 
 with nearly all Potter's pictures. The series at Petersburg ^ has a 
 great reputation, possibly because so few people have seen it. But it 
 does nothing to raise his character above the level shown by his work 
 nearer home. In fact it seems to me that he touches as high a level of 
 art in the picture we owe to Sir Robert Peel as in anything else he 
 did. It is well composed, for a Potter, warm in colour and not devoid 
 of atmosphere, while the beasts are wonderfully drawn. 
 
 Inferior as a draughtsman to Potter, Adriaen van de Velde excelled 
 him in other things. Without being in any sense a great artist, he 
 always contrived to breathe a little of the true spirit into his work. His 
 pictures are not exciting. They awake no strong emotion, they do not 
 stir us to the painful covetousness we feel before a fine Vermeer or De 
 Hooghe. But they satisfy our judgment and soothe our feelings, so 
 far as they go. Six of the National Gallery pictures represent him fairly 
 well. The " Farm Cottage " and the " Frost Scene," both in the Peel 
 collection, are perhaps the best. A seventh picture, a " Landscape with 
 Cattle," bequeathed by Wynn Ellis, is of less interest. Adriaen's taste 
 was never better shown than in the figures with which he enriched the 
 landscapes of other men. Sometimes these are of quite extraordinary 
 felicity. In the " Roosengracht " Van der Heijde, for instance, 
 already mentioned, he has introduced a little group of people walking out 
 of the picture, close to the frame. It required a very exact perception 
 of the note struck by his colleague to venture on such a device. 
 Scarcely less happy are the figures in the " Cologne" Van der Heijde, 
 of the Peel collection. 
 
 Philips Wouwerman has already been discussed at such length that 
 little further need be said about him. The history of art contains few 
 things more surprising than the tale of his industry. During a life of 
 
 1 The Hermitage possesses nine pictures by Paul Potter. 
 
74 "J^HE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 less than fifty years he painted 600 pictures, at the lowest computation. 
 Whatever we may think of their art, we can deny to none of these the 
 praise which belongs to a task conscientiously carried out. He did mis- 
 taken things — when he painted, for instance, on a dark ground — but he 
 never failed to put conscience into his work, or to give to his clients what 
 they had a right to look for. You may say that such praise is irrelevant, 
 and so, of course, it is ; but after all it is difficult for any man to have 
 some quality in a supreme degree without having a touch of others be- 
 sides. And although Wouwerman was not a great artist, he had some 
 artistic gifts. The picture called " On the Sea-shore " (880), in the Peel 
 Collection, is well composed, and quite wonderfully painted from the 
 standpoint of what Mr. Berenson calls " tactile values." The fore- 
 shortening of the white horse is a marvel. You can measure his length, 
 from the root of his tail to the tip of his nose. Wouwerman was also 
 a good composer, of the arranging sort, and for the most part a pleasant 
 colourist. His best pupil — I am calling him so entirely on internal evi- 
 dence — was Jan Wynants, whose landscapes he occasionally provided 
 with a population. 
 
 Karel Dujardin was a colder and more academical person than Wou- 
 werman, and should, perhaps, have been mentioned in connexion with 
 Paul Potter. Not that they had anything to do with each other, but 
 simply because their view of what constitutes a picture had a good deal 
 in common. Some Dujardins are only to be distinguished from Potters 
 by the greater breadth of their handling, and by a tendency to the 
 blocky rather than the spidery in the forms of animals. The picture in 
 the Peel collection, here reproduced, is practically in the manner of 
 Potter, but is better composed, warmer in tone, and less petty in execu- 
 tion than things like the " Vache qui se mire." Karel frequently painted 
 on a large scale, but, like nearly all his fellow-countrymen, he lost his 
 charm when he did so.^ 
 
 A section of the Dutch school which is very ill represented in the 
 public collections of the United Kingdom is that of the flower and still- 
 
 1 A picture with life-size figures is at Bear Wood, in the collection of Mr. Walter. 
 The half-length portrait ascribed to Karel in the National Gallery does not appear to 
 me to be a Dutch picture. 
 
PAINTERS OF STILL LIFE 75 
 
 life painters. Many of these were men of skill and taste, but nothing 
 more. Others, however, contrived to show fine artistic gifts in their 
 treatment of the day's dessert, or of a few objects from the sideboard. 
 The flower painters all belonged to the former class. Not one of them 
 ever produced a flower piece which could be set beside those of Fantin- 
 Latour, of Diaz, or even of James Holland, as a work of art. 
 
 The two De Heems, Abraham Mignon, Rachel Ruysch, the Van 
 Huysums, and Jan van Os, were all born too late, except the De Heems. 
 By the time they came into the world a high finish had become the one 
 popular quality in Dutch painting. Their notion of a picture was to 
 arrange a crowd of flowers into a group of bold and not seldom discordant 
 colour contrasts, and then to imitate for their lives. The earlier men 
 preferred other things to flowers. Pieter Claesz, the father of Berchem, 
 Willem Claesz Heda, Abraham van Beijeren, Willem Kalf, Jan van de 
 Velde, all these were true artists, who selected their objects for pictorial 
 reasons, and so treated them as to produce vivid pages of aesthetic unity. 
 Pieter Claesz and Willem Heda were to the later men what Van Goijen 
 was to Cuijp. Their art is strictly restrained, dealing little in elaborate 
 composition or positive colour. But to those who can see beyond a " sub- 
 ject," the better works of Pieter Claesz, especially, are most attractive 
 through their fine tone and frank simplicity of execution. The best I 
 know belongs to Dr. Holscher, at Miihleim, near Cologne. It is dated 
 1645. 
 
 To those who insist on believing that art is the reproduction of 
 natural beauty, no more useful object lesson could be given, perhaps, 
 than the putting side by side of a gorgeous flower group by Van Huysum 
 and a quiet still life by Pieter Claesz. In the one case you would see 
 some of the most beautiful objects in nature reproduced with extra- 
 ordinary fidelity ; in the other, a battered mug, a fruit knife, a few slices 
 of ham, a roll, a napkin, and perhaps a few leaves, translated into vehicles 
 for light and shadow, and for that garment of uniting tone which is part 
 of his aim. And yet between the two we don't hesitate for a moment. 
 Van Huysum is a bore, while Pieter creeps modestly into a permanent 
 place in our affections. 
 
 Jan van de Velde should be mentioned with Claesz and Heda. 
 He was born in 1622, and so belonged to the earlier flush of still-life 
 
76 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 painters. He was probably an amateur. His works are very rare and 
 very modest, but thoroughly artistic so far as they go. He and Heda 
 are the only members of this group of whom the National Gallery pos- 
 sesses examples. Van Beijeren and Kalf were two of the finest painters 
 of the Dutch school. The decorative splendour they get out of a few 
 glass and china dishes, bunches of grapes, crimped cod-fish, and so on, is 
 extraordinary. Kalf's rare interiors are far inferior to his pictures of 
 still-life. 
 
 The remaining painters involved in a study of the " Peel Collection 
 and the Dutch School of Painting" must be reserved for another oppor- 
 tunity. They include Rembrandt as well as Rubens, Van Dyck, and 
 the interesting although comparatively unimportant Gonzales Coques. 
 
 Before bringing this present essay to a conclusion, I may perhaps be 
 allowed to summarize its argument. What I have endeavoured to 
 suggest has been, broadly, that the works of the great Italians and those 
 of the best Dutchmen depend on the same virtues for their immor- 
 tality. Qualities are to be found in the Italians which the Dutchmen 
 are without, but with one exception they are not of a kind to affect the 
 definitive reputation of a painter. Putting aside the gift of objective 
 idealism, the qualities on which all works of art have to be judged, 
 whether they be books, pictures, statues, or anything else, are as richly 
 present in the Dutch school as in any other. Condensed into a phrase, 
 these qualities are appropriate emotion and its sincere expression 
 The artist is he who has feelings and ideas expressible in one of the 
 materials of art, and expresses them sincerely in that material. It would 
 be arbitrary for any man to assert, off his own bat, that such expression 
 takes precedence of all considerations based on the value of the objective 
 ideas pressed into its service. But the world at large has decided that 
 question. It has decided that the antecedent condition of immor- 
 tality for a work of art is that it shall he a work of art. 
 
 We all know cultivated people who have no artistic sense outside 
 literature, and we all know the kind of thing which appeals to them. I 
 do not intend to name their favourite artists, for these, by the nature of 
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THE LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 77 
 
 poet or a bishop. Their works are tableaux vivants, to use a phrase 
 which, if taken literally, would be curiously beside the mark. They 
 do not know that passion can be expressed in line, colour, texture, 
 and so they get a model to suggest it by his features and contradict him 
 by what they do on the rest of the canvas. The result is what 
 an intelligent actor can give you at the end of a drawing-room. 
 Such a thing may be a masterpiece as a tableau vivant^ but translation 
 to canvas does not turn it into a, tableau. Curiously enough, people 
 trained in letters, when they have to deal with an art they understand, 
 adopt, as a matter of course, the very principles on which they turn 
 their backs in a different connexion. A poem must be poetry first, 
 and as full as you like of ideas afterwards. A description of manners 
 must begin by being well written, and may then go on to truth. Even 
 the historian can gather no fame if he cannot write. The mildest con- 
 ceits, well used, have an immortality missed by stupendous thoughts 
 clumsily expressed. It is precisely so with a picture. A girl at a spinet, 
 well painted, by which I don't mean realized to death or even painted 
 with skill in the favoured style of the moment, but so painted as to con- 
 vey real aesthetic emotion from artist to observer, may be compared to 
 a song of Herrick, while such a machine, for instance, as the " Mother 
 of Pity " of Bouguereau, which is so popular in the print shops, may 
 be called a parallel to " London," or the " Vanity of Human Wishes," 
 or any other poem by any one who was not a poet. 
 
 But, you may say, art plus grand ideas is better than art plus small 
 ideas. That, of course, is undeniable, but it does not express the con- 
 tention of those who belittle the Dutch school. The comparison they 
 make is not one of degree, but of kind. Italian painting, we are told, 
 is thought, Dutch painting, language. The suggestion of such a contrast 
 springs, of course, from blank ignorance on the part of those who make 
 it that the materials of art have power to convey thought. Would 
 any one call Beethoven thoughtless ? And yet he does nothing but 
 arrange his material. Was Wren thoughtless, or Inigo Jones ? or, for 
 that matter. Mile. Camargo ? Fine Art deserves the supreme position 
 it holds among human activities, precisely because it alone can express 
 that union of intellect and passion which is the highest quality of man, 
 it alone can produce a creation in which intellect and emotion are so 
 
78 THE PEEL COLLECTION 
 
 blended that we cannot tell where the one begins and the other ends. 
 Passion is the creative element, intellect the manipulative. Through pas- 
 sion the forces rise, through intellect they are controlled. Such a work of 
 art as a picture allows the artist to show that passion is alight in him, 
 but that judgment, the perception of all fitnesses and appropriate rela- 
 tions, is there too to direct its action. Within the narrow boundaries 
 of his work he can declare his gift for following in the footsteps of 
 nature, and creating an organic thing, a thing in which all the parts are 
 inexorably related to each other and to that vital emotion which gives 
 life to the whole. 
 
 But this result can only be reached when powers are focussed on the 
 work in hand. A painter must select for the sake of his picture, he must 
 manipulate for the sake of his picture, he must be free to modify and 
 translate for the sake of his picture. It is nature that he must use as a 
 language, taking from her the words he requires and leaving the rest. The 
 word "language" in the sense in which it is used in the extract with 
 which I began this essay, can only be applied to those transcripts of exter- 
 nal fact which Ruskin seems at times to have considered the highest art 
 Such a thing as the elaborate transcription of the west front of St. Mark's, 
 which hangs in the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield, is language, if you like. 
 It bears the same relation to art as an index does to a book. It is a col- 
 lection of dead, or at least inanimate, material, saying absolutely nothing 
 tothe seeker for art. A fine Dutch picture, like Hobbema's "Avenue " 
 treats nature with profound respect, because she is the mother, the 
 provider of material, the storehouse in which syllables and words must be 
 sought ; but it retains its own independence, its own right to decide 
 what shall be taken and what left, its own power to choose the end to be 
 aimed at, and the particular note which shall turn it from a work of 
 imitation to a work of art. Upon the vigour of the passion by which 
 these decisions are gathered into aesthetic unity will depend its power 
 to satisfy those who look for art. 
 
 And this brings me back to where I began. My aim has been to 
 suggest that the Dutch painters were as elemental artists as those of 
 any other country, speaking the same language as the great Italians 
 of the sixteenth century, or the great Athenians of twenty centuries 
 before ; and that their indifference, so far as it existed, to ideas 
 
THE LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 79 
 
 outside their art, should not, and, as a matter of fact, does not, affect 
 their fame. The nature they chose to illustrate was inferior in beauty 
 to that on which Titian and Giorgione embroidered their gorgeous 
 decorations, but no art has ever yet been condemned for the humble- 
 ness of its materials. As artists they will be judged, and as artists 
 their one weak point is their incapacity to improve on those realities 
 of external Nature among which they sought their medium of expres- 
 sion. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Angelico, Fra, 13, 23 
 Apsley House, 40, 44, 47 
 
 Backhuijzen, Ludolf, 31, 71 
 
 Baen, Jan de, 1 1 
 
 Bassen, Van, 69 
 
 Bega, Cornelis Pietersz, 52 
 
 Beijeren, Abraham van, 75, "](} 
 
 Beit, Mr, Alfred, Collection of, 17, 20, 35 
 
 Berckheijde, Gerrit Adriaensz, 68 
 
 Berlin Museum, 34, 35 
 
 Bloot, De, 52 
 
 Boursse, Esaias, 51 
 
 Boxall, Sir William, 27 
 
 Brekelenkam, Quiryn, 52 
 
 Bridgewater House, 60 
 
 Brouwer, Adriaen, 45, 48 
 
 Brueghel, Velvet, 48, 50 
 
 Buckingham Palace, 43 
 
 Burton, Sir Frederick, 17 
 
 Bute, Lord, Collection of, 43 
 
 Capelle, Jan van de, 27, 70 
 
 Choiseul Collection, i 
 
 Claesz, Pieter, 75 
 
 Codde, Pieter, 7 
 
 Cologne Museum, 40 
 
 Coques, Gonzales, i, 29, 76 
 
 Cuijp, Albert, 16, 40, 57, 58, 59, 62, 66, 72 
 
 Czernin Collection, 19, 34 
 
 Delorme, Anton, 69 
 Dou, Gerard, 55, 56, 72 
 Drayton Collection, 28, 32 
 Dubbels, Hendrik, 25, 70 
 Duccio, 7, 23 
 Dujardin, Karel, 74 
 Dulv?ich Gallery, 49, 61 
 Duyster, Willem, 7 
 
 Eastlake, Sir Charles, 26 
 Elsheimer, Adam, 6 
 Everdingen, Albert van, 62 
 
 Feversham, Lord, Collection of, (}^ 
 
 Giorgione, 24, 25, 79 
 
 Giotto, 7, 22 
 
 Goijen, Jan van, 58, 59, 75 
 
 Haarlem, Cornelis van, 3 
 
 Hague Museum, 24 
 
 Hals, Frans, 12, 16, 29, 46 
 
 Heda, Willem Claesz, 75 
 
 Heems, the De, 75 
 
 Heemskerck, Marten, 3 
 
 Heijde, Jan van der, 26, 68, 71, 73 
 
 Heist, Bartholomeus van der, 12 
 
 Hermitage Gallery, 39, 60, 73 
 
 Hertford, Marquess of, 26 
 
 Heseltine, Mr., Collection of, 40, 59 
 
 Hobbema, Mtindert, 9, 16, 21, 58, 64-7, 78 
 
 Hoekgheest, Geeraert van, 68, 69 
 
 Hooghe, Pieter de, 5, 9, 16, 18, 19, 21, 33, 
 
 40-44 
 Hope Collection, 17, 18 
 Huysum, Jan van, 75 
 
 lonides Collection, 45, 47 
 
 Joseph, Mrs., Collection of, 19, 40, 54, 59 
 
 Kalf, Willem, 76 
 Koninck, Philips de, 16, 58 
 
 Leyster, Judith, 51, 52 
 Louvre, The, 36, 47 
 
 Maes, Nicholas, 53, 55 
 
 Metsu, Gabriel, 5, 9, 13, 16, 17-21, 27, 
 
 33-37 
 Mieris, Frans van, 38, 72 
 Mieris, Willem van, 38 
 Mignon, Abraham, 75 
 Molenaer, Jan Miense, 51 
 Mor, Antonie, 3 
 Munich Gallery, 46 
 
 81 
 
82 
 
 INDEX 
 
 National Gallery of Ireland, 41, 55, 60, 70 
 
 National Gallery of Scotland, 49 
 
 Neefs, De, 69 
 
 Neer, Aert van der, 34 
 
 Netscher, Gaspar, 38 
 
 New York Museum, 19 
 
 Nieuwenhuys, C. J., 28 
 
 Os, Jan van, 75 
 
 Ostade, Adriaen van, 9, 16-20, 46, 50, 52 
 
 Ostade, Isaak van, 20, 51 
 
 Pape, Abraham de, 52 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 2, 19, 28-32 
 Potter, Paul, 71-3 
 Potter, Pieter, 73 
 
 Raphael, 14, 16, 19 
 
 Rembrandt, 6, 11, 12, 16, 21, 24, 34, 37, 53 
 
 Rijks-museum, 46, 52, 69 
 
 Rothschild, Mr. Alfred de, Collection of, 
 
 37, 51 
 Rothschild, Miss Alice de. Collection of, 34 
 Rothschild, Baron Alphonse de. Collection 
 
 of, 25, 27, 29 
 Roupell, Mr., Collection of, 58 
 Rubens, Peter Paul, 41, 50 
 Ruisdael, Isaak, 62 
 
 Ruisdael, Jakob, 9, 16, 21, 58, 62, 64, 65, 71 
 Ruisdael, Solomon, 62, 71 
 Ruskin, John, 2, 10, 13, 64, 78 
 Ruysch, Rachel, 75 
 
 Sanredam, 70 
 
 Schalcken, Godfried, 20, 38, 53, 55, 56 
 
 Schotel, J. C, 31 
 
 Six Collection, 39 
 
 Slingelandt, Pieter van, 38, 55, 56 
 
 Smith, John, Agent for Sir Robert Peel, 29 
 
 Steen, Jan, 9, 11, 14, 16, 33, 38, 39, 59, 72 
 
 Steengracht Collection, 36, 43-47 
 
 Teniers, David, the Elder, i, 16, 49 
 Teniers, David, the Younger, 48 
 Terborch, Gerard, 5, 9, 16, 18, 19, 27-36, 40 
 Titian, 24, 25, 79 
 
 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, i, 24, 28 
 
 Velde, Adriaen van de, 16, 20, 73 
 
 Velde, Esaias van de, 59 
 
 Velde, Jan van de, 75 
 
 Velde, Willem van de, 16, 27, 70 
 
 Vleeger, Simon de, 70 
 
 Vliet, Hendrik van der, 70 
 
 Wallace Collection, 17, 18, 20, 27, 43, 44, 
 
 66,68 
 Walter, Mr., Collection of, 74 (Note) 
 Werff, Adriaen van der, 29 
 Westminster, Duke of. Collection of, 49 
 Wijntranck, 66 (Note) 
 Wilkie, Sir David, 28 
 Witte, Emmanuel de, 68, 71 
 Wouwerman, Philips, 9, 16, 20, 61, 73 
 Wynants, Jan, 74 
 
 Zorgh, Hendrik Martenz, 52 
 
 Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. 
 
In large ^to, price Five Guineas net, in cloth 
 
 THE 
 
 ETCHINGS 
 
 OF 
 
 REMBRANDT 
 
 BT 
 
 P. G. HAMERTON 
 
 WHH FIFTT FACSIMILES IN PHOTOGRAVURE 
 and 
 AN ANNOTATED CATALOGUE OF REMBRANDTS ETCHINGS 
 
 by 
 
 CAMPBELL DODGSON 
 
 Of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. 
 
 " I have been studying," said Mr. Hamerton in 1894, " the works of Rem- 
 brandt's immediate predecessors and contemporaries in etching, with a view to 
 understand his relative position more accurately. The result has only been to 
 deepen my sense of the master's incomparable greatness, of his sterling originality, 
 and especially of that wonderful quality in him by which he does not belong to the 
 seventeenth century, but quite as much to the closing years of the nineteenth. 
 In like manner, when it comes, he will be at home in the twentieth century, and 
 in many another after it." 
 
 Much has been done, since those words were written, to spread the great 
 etcher's fame through the many reproductions of his plates that have been pub- 
 lished. The art of reproduction, however, is a very modern one, and has only 
 recently attained perfection. The plates here offered have been pronounced by 
 experts to be superior to any hitherto produced. 
 
 The selection has been made with the view of showing Rembrandt's work in 
 its rich variety, and it includes several of his most important and largest subjects. 
 
 Mr. Hamerton was specially qualified to write on the subject from his intimate 
 practical knowledge of the technicalities of etching. His valuable essay was highly 
 appreciated at the time of its appearance ; and Mr. Campbell Dodgson has now 
 added to it a complete annotated catalogue of all Rembrandt's etchings, embody- 
 ing the latest conclusions of the best critics 
 
 The edition is limited to 250 copies, of which only 225 are for sale. Each copy 
 will be numbered. 
 
 [Far List of Plates see next page. 
 
Continued from previous page.] 
 
 LIST OF THE FIFTY PLATES 
 
 1 Rembrandt's Mother, Head and Bust 29 Six's Bridge 
 
 2 Rembrandt's Mother Seated AT a Table 30 View of Omval 
 
 3 The Rat Killer 
 
 4 The (large) Raising of Lazarus 
 
 5 Angel Appearing to the Shepherds 
 
 6 Rembrandt with Raised Sabre 
 
 7 Jan Uytenbogaert 
 
 8 Rembrandt and His Wife Saskia 
 
 31 Ephraim Bonus, Jewish Physician 
 
 32 Jan Six, Burgomaster of Amsterdam 
 
 33 Beggars at the Door of a House 
 
 34 Christ Healing the Sick. "The 
 
 Hundred Guilder Print" 
 
 35 Landscape with a Square Tower 
 9 Bearded Man wearing a Velvet Cap ^^ Landscape with Three Gabled Cot- 
 
 tages 
 
 37 The Blindness of Tobit 
 
 38 The Flight into Egypt. A Night 
 
 Piece 
 
 39 Clement de Jonghe, Printseller and 
 
 Artist 
 
 WITH A Jewel Clasp 
 
 10 Young Man in Velvet Cap 
 
 11 Three Heads of Women 
 
 12 Study of Saskia as St. Catherine 
 
 " The Little Jewish Bride " 
 
 13 Joseph Telling His Dreams 
 
 14 Death Appearing to a Wedded Couple ^^ Christ Preaching 
 
 15 Uytenbogaert, Receiver General. ^^ jy^ Faustus in his Study Watching a 
 
 " The Goldweigher " ^^^^^ Dis^ 
 
 16 Rembrandt, Richly Dressed, Leaning ^^ Titus, Rembrandt's Son 
 
 ON A Stone Sill _, _ 
 
 43 Presentation in the Iemple, in the 
 
 17 Old Man with a Divided Fur Cap Dark Manner 
 
 44 Christ Taken Down from the Cross, 
 BY Torchlight 
 
 18 View of Amsterdam 
 
 19 CoRNELis Claesz Anslo, Preacher 
 
 20 The Angel Departing from the Family 45 Christ at Emmaus 
 
 46 Abraham's Sacrifice 
 
 OF Tobias 
 
 21 Landscape with Windmill 
 
 22 Reading Woman in Spectacles 
 
 23 Man in an Arbour 
 
 24 Cottage with a White Paling 
 
 25 The Hog 
 
 26 The Three Trees 
 
 27 Christ Carried to the Tomb 
 
 28 Abraham and Isaac 
 
 47 Thomas Jacobsz Haaring, Auctioneer 
 
 " The Young Haaring " 
 
 48 Portrait of Arnold Tholinx 
 
 49 Jan Lxjtma (the Elder), Goldsmith 
 
 AND Sculptor 
 
 50 The Phcenix, or the Statue Over- 
 
 thrown. " Le Tombeau Allegori- 
 que" 
 
 London : SEELEY & CO., LIMITED, 38 Great Russell Street. 
 
PICTURES IN THE 
 TATE GALLERY 
 
 By C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY 
 
 Author oj ^^ A Record of Spanish Painting'^ etc. 
 
 Illustrated with beautiful reproductions of Twenty of the most remarkable Pictures 
 
 Demy 4/0, lis. 6d. net. 
 
 A limited edition de luxe y numbered i to 100, is also issued, only 65 of which 
 are for sale in this country. 
 
 On Dutch hand-made paper, with an extra plate on Japanese Paper. 
 Bound in buckram, with paper label, 2§s. net. 
 
 The Tate Gallery is the popular name of the collection of pictures 
 and sculpture at Millbank which is officially called the National Gallery 
 of British Art. It contains, besides the sixty-six pictures given by Sir 
 Henry Tate, the collection formed by the Council of the Royal Academy 
 under the Chantrey bequest, many important pictures by the late Mr. 
 G. F. Watts, presented by the artist, and a number of works painted 
 since the year 1790 and removed from Trafalgar Square. 
 
 It is certainly one of the most popular exhibitions in London, and 
 already contains a large number of pictures of high interest and value. 
 It is likely to grow in importance every year, as the gaps in the collection 
 are gradually filled up, and its list of works by leading artists of the 
 contemporary British School becomes more complete. 
 
 The following pictures have been selected for reproduction in the 
 
 present volume ; the text of which supplies an account of the formation 
 
 of the Gallery, and of the chief artistic movements in this country since 
 
 the early part of the nineteenth century. 
 
 [For List of Plates see next page.. 
 
Continued from previous page.] 
 
 Pictures in the Tate Gallery 
 
 BY 
 
 By C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY 
 
 LIST OF PLATES 
 
 1 Ophelia. Sir J. E. Millais, p.r.a, 
 
 2 Blossoms. Albert Moore 
 
 3 The Bath of Psyche. Lord LeigHton, p.r.a. 
 
 4 Returning to the Fold. H. W. B. Davis, r.a. 
 
 5 Christ Washing St. Peter's Feet. Ford Madox Brown 
 
 6 The Vigil. John Pettie, r.a. 
 
 7 The Harbour of Refuge. Frederic Wajlker, a.r.a, 
 
 8 The Vagrants. Frederic Walker, a.r.a. 
 
 9 The Pool of London. G. Vicat Cole, r.a. 
 ID The Cast Shoe. G. H. Mason, a.r.a. 
 
 11 Rosa Triplex. D. G. Rossetti 
 
 12 The August Moon. Cecil G. Lawson 
 
 13 Wind on the Wold. G. H. Mason, a.r.a. 
 
 14 The Annunciation. D. G. Rossetti 
 
 15 August Blue. Henry S. Tuke, a.r.a. 
 
 16 The Vale of Rest. Sir J. E. Millais, p.r.a. 
 
 17 Catspaws off the Land. Henry Moore, r.a. 
 
 18 Love and Life. G. F. Watts, r.a. 
 
 19 The Miracle of the Gadarene Swine. Briton Riviere, r.a. 
 
 20 June in the Austrian Tyrol. J. MacWhirter, r.a. 
 
 Extra plate in the edition de luxe 
 
 21 " For he had Great Possessions." G. F. Watts, r.a. 
 LONDON : SEELEY & COMPANY, LIMITED, 38 Great Russell Street. 
 
Reissue in altered format 
 
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