to the healthy freshness of the Dutch physiognomy, apt to preserve its youthfulness of aspect far beyond the period of life usual with other peoples. This mixed expression charmed the eyes of Isaac van Ostade, who had painted his portrait at one of those skating parties, with his plume and squirrel's tail and fur muff, in all the modest pleasantness of boyhood" (Imaginary Portraits, p. 92). 204. DUTCH SHIPPING. Bakhuizen (Dutch: 1631-1708). See under 223, p. 214. 66. A LANDSCAPE: AUTUMN MORNING. Rubens (Flemish: 1577-1640). See under 38, p. 220. Rubens "perhaps furnishes us with the first instances of complete, unconventional, unaffected landscape. His treatment is healthy, manly, and rational, not very affectionate, yet often condescending to minute and multitudinous detail; always, as far as it goes, pure, forcible, and refreshing, consummate in composition, and marvellous in colour" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 15). Notice especially the sky. "The whole field of ancient landscape art affords, as far as we remember, but one instance of any effort whatever to represent the character of the upper cloud region. That one instance is the landscape of Rubens in our own Gallery, in which the mottled or fleecy sky is given with perfect truth and exquisite beauty" (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. ii. § 9). Rubens's skill in landscape was partly due to fondness for the scenery he depicted. This picture was painted when he was at Genoa, but it is a purely Flemish scene-a broad stretch of his own lowlands, with the castle of Stein, it is said, which was afterwards his residence, near Mechlin, in the background, with Flemish waggon and horses fording a brook, and with a sportsman in the immediate foreground, carrying an old-fashioned firelock, intent on a covey of partridges. "The Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields and pollards; Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of pollards and willows, a distant spire, a Dutch house with a moat about it, a windmill, and a ditch (ibid., vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xiii. § 20). The Dutch painters agreed, in fact, with the Lincolnshire farmer in Kingsley's Alton Locke, whom Mr. Ruskin goes on to quote: none o' this here darned ups and downs o' hills, to shake a body's victuals out of his inwards," but "all so vlat as a barn's vloor, for vorty mile on end— there's the country to live in!" 6 This picture is one of four "seasons." (Spring is in Sir R. Wallace's collection, Summer and Winter are in the Royal collection at Windsor.) It was presented to the nation by Sir George Beaumont. The painter Haydon, describing a visit to Sir George at Coleorton, writes: "We dined with the Claude and Rembrandt before us, breakfasted with the Rubens landscape, and did nothing morning, noon, or night but think of painting, dream of painting, and wake to paint again." The picture is referred to also by Wordsworth in a very interesting passage. "I heard the other day," he writes to Sir George Beaumont, "of two artists, who thus expressed themselves upon the subject of a scene among our lakes: Plague upon those vile enclosures!' said one; they spoil everything.'-'Oh,' said the other, 'I never see them.' Glover was the name of this last. Now, for my part, I should not wish to be either of these gentlemen, but to have in my own mind the power of turning to advantage, wherever it is possible, every object of Art and Nature as they appear before me. What a noble instance, as you have pointed out to me, has Rubens given of this in that picture in your possession, where he has brought, as it were, a whole county into one landscape, and made the most formal partitions of cultivation, hedgerows of pollard willows, conduct the eye into the depths and distances of his picture: and thus, more than by any other means, has given it that appearance of immensity which is so striking" (Memorials of Coleorton, ii. 135). 948. A LANDSCAPE: A SKETCH. Rubens (Flemish: 1577-1640). See under 38, p. 220. There 47. THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS. Rembrandt (Dutch: 1607-1669). See under 672, p. 223. A characteristic piece of "Bible by candle-light." is, however, something spiritually instructive, as well as technically skilful, in the way in which such light there is all proceeds from him who came to be the light of the world: compared with this divine light that in the lantern of the shepherds pales and is ineffectual. The picture is dated 1646. Roelandt Savery (Dutch: 1576-1639). A not very poetical rendering-by a Dutch painter who lived long at the court of the Emperor Rudolph II. at Prague —of the poetical legend of the power of music : 289. You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, By the sweet power of music: therefore, the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods; But music for the time doth change his nature. Merchant of Venice, Act v. Sc. 1. "THE NIGHT WATCH." Rembrandt (Dutch: 1607-1669). See under 672, p. 223. A small copy of a large picture now at Amsterdam, which, though it represents a daylight scene, has so darkened that it is called the "Night Watch." The subject is a piece of everyday life of the time-a group of the citizen guards, the volunteers of the town, just returning, apparently from a shooting match. The principal figures are all portraits, and the names are written on the back of the picture. The captain was Franz Banning Cock, hence the picture is sometimes called the "Banning Cock Company." 238. DEAD GAME. Jan Weenix (Dutch: 1644-1719). Jan Weenix, the younger, was born at Amsterdam-the son of another painter of "still life," Jan Baptista Weenix, and is usually considered the best of all Dutch artists in this style. He was much employed by John William, elector of the Palatinate, and the money value of his pictures has steadily increased. A stag, a couple of hares (a speciality with this artist), a heron, and a fowling piece. 207. THE IDLE SERVANT. Nicolas Maas (Dutch: 1632-1693). Maas (as he is generally called, although he signed his name Maes) was a pupil of Rembrandt, and is distinguished from most of the Dutch genre painters by his richer colouring. In the later years of his life he seems to have become chiefly a portrait painter. He died at Amsterdam, where he had settled in 1678, and where he was employed by most of the distinguished personages of his time. In the background is the family at dinner. The waitingmaid comes to the kitchen to serve the next course-the duckling, perhaps, which a cat is stealing-and finds the cook of Sancho Panza's philosophy: "Blessings on him who invented sleep, . . . the food that appeases hunger, the drink that quenches thirst, . . . the balance that equals the simple with the wise." 794 A DUTCH COURTYARD. Pieter de Hooch (Dutch: 1632-1681). De Hooch (or De Hooghe) " one of the glories of the Dutch School, is also one of the glories of England," for it was here that his great merits were first discovered,1 and that threefourths of his pictures are now preserved. "There are," says Mr. Ruskin (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. viii. § 11), whilst tracing the general insensitiveness of the Dutch School, "deeper elements in De Hooghe, sometimes expressed with superb quiet painting." The present picture is a case in point. The whole picture, in its cheerful colour and dainty neatness, seems to reflect the light of a peaceful and happy home, in which everything is done decently and in order. They are no rolling stones, these Dutch burghers, but stay-at-home folk, whose pride is in the trimness of their surroundings. Every day, one thinks, the good housewife will thus look to see that the dinner is duly prepared; every day the husband will thus walk along the garden, sure of her happy greeting. 72. LANDSCAPE WITH TOBIAS AND THE ANGEL. Rembrandt (Dutch: 1607-1669). See under 672, p. 223. For the story of Tobias see under I. 781, 685. SHOWERY WEATHER. p. 17. Meindert Hobbema (Dutch: 1638-1708). Hobbema, who disputes with Ruysdael the place of best Dutch landscape painter, was his pupil. Ruysdael was an intimate friend of Hobbema, and the works of the two are sometimes remarkably alike. Like Ruysdael, too, Hobbema was a painter without honour in his own country, and nine-tenths of his known works are in England, where he was first appreciated. Even a hundred years ago his pictures were not much sought after; recently one of them sold for 1 In his own country, a fine picture by him sold so late as 1765 for only 450 florins. In 1817 it fetched 4000 florins, whilst in 1876 the Berlin Gallery paid £6000 for one of his pictures. as much as £4000. He lived in Amsterdam, and died in poverty in the same street as Rembrandt. In spite, however, of the resemblance to Ruysdael above noted, Hobbema's best and most characteristic works (see especially XII. 830, p. 289, one of the very best of them all) are quite distinct. Ruysdael is the painter of the solitude of nature, of rocks and waterfalls; Hobbema of the Dutch "fields with dwellings sprinkled o'er." The pervading tone of Ruysdael is dark and sombre; that of Hobbema is drowsy and still. A second characteristic of Hobbema is his fondness for oak foliage, and a certain "nigglingness" in his execution of it. See e.g. XII. 832, 833, pp. 291, 287. “They (Hobbema and Both) can paint oak leafage faithfully, but do not know where to stop, and by doing too much, lose the truth of all, lose the very truth of detail at which they aim, for all their minute work only gives two leaves to nature's twenty. They are evidently incapable of even thinking of a tree, much more of drawing it, except leaf by leaf; they have no notion nor sense of simplicity, mass, or obscurity, and when they come to distance, where it is totally impossible that leaves should be separately seen, being incapable of conceiving or rendering the grand and quiet forms of truth, they are reduced to paint their bushes with dots and touches expressive of leaves three feet broad each." "No word," Mr. Ruskin elsewhere adds, "has been more harmfully misused than that ugly one of 'niggling.' I should be glad if it were entirely banished from service and record. The only essential question about drawing is whether it be right or wrong; that it be small or large, swift or slow, is a matter of convenience only. But so far as the word may be legitimately used at all, it belongs especially to such execution as this of Hobbema's-execution which substitutes, on whatever scale, a mechanical trick or habit of hand for true drawing of known or intended forms." A second objection to Hobbema's method may be mentioned besides its "trickiness." His "niggling" touch is extended from the foreground to objects farther off, and thus "a middle distance of Hobbema involves a contradiction in terms; it states a distance by perspective, which it contradicts by distinctness of detail" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 17, sec. vi. ch. i. § 22; vol. v. pt. vi. ch. v. § 6). 989. WATERMILLS, WITH BLEACHERS. 628. A WATERFALL. Ruysdael (Dutch: 1625-1682). The works of Jacob van Ruysdael, who is usually accounted the greatest of the Dutch landscape painters, are remarkable for two specialities. First his painting of falling water (the name Ruysdael appropriately signifies foaming water). 'Ordinary running or falling water may be sufficiently rendered, by observing careful curves of |