Chapter I

While landscape thus occupied the talent of so many Dutch painters, a certain number struck out a branch apart, choosing subjects that may briefly be called pastoral. For these men the foreground of cattle, the goatherd or the shepherd with his flock, was of greater interest than the background of often quite conventional scenery. Sometimes two or more painters collaborated, and one painted the landscape while another put in the animals.

And as in painting, so in etching. A certain group of men etched nothing but animals, with now and then a landscape. Of these the chief are Paul Potter, Claes Berchem, Adriaen van de Velde, Karel du Jardin.

This love of the domestic animals for their own sake in art seems native and almost peculiar to Holland.

Many painters before this time had shown a remarkable love of animals. From Benozzo Gozzoli to Bassano, individuals among the Italian masters had introduced their favourites, wherever opportunity offered, into sacred and historical compositions. And among the elder contemporaries of the Dutchmen, Rubens, Snyders, and Velasquez had painted dogs and horses as only they could paint them. But it is mainly in hunting pieces, as servants or companions of man, that these painters introduce animals; cattle and sheep do not interest them.

It is the same with the great engravers who preceded the seventeenth-century etchers. Dürer was undoubtedly very fond of animals and engraved them frequently. And that singular master of the fifteenth century, whose name we do not know, but who is generally called the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet from the fact that by far the fullest collection of his prints is at Amsterdam, engraved dogs and horses with a freedom and a vivacity which Dürer never attained, and which were in that period of Northern art unique. This master was long thought a Dutchman, but the type of his faces, among other considerations, marks him as a Swabian artist.

Yet in none of these men appears anything like the peculiar feeling which in Potter, for instance, strikes so strong a note. The glory and

excitement of the chase, so magnificently put on canvas by Rubens, the relish of the boar’s savage fury as the hounds hurl themselves at him, are absolutely alien to that brooding intentness, as alert to catch every curve in the attitude of cattle rising or lying down, as subtle to penetrate to their mysterious non-human existence, so distant and aloof, pervading the Dutchman’s art. It is a mood which fuses the mind into the life it watches, till the delight of cool running water to the cattle, as they plunge in from the hot fields, is as intimately felt as the joy of battle in their charging hounds, which is merely reflected human feeling, is felt by the painters of the hunt.

Thus, while in Flanders painters and etchers like Jan Fyt carried on in their animal pieces the tradition of Rubens and Snyders, a totally different mode of animal painting and etching was springing up in Holland.

“Pastoral,” it is most convenient to call it; but it is not pastoral in the same sense that the word has come to have, as applied to certain types of poetry, whether the _Idylls_ of Theocritus or the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. There, as with the early painters of animals, the human interest is the preoccupying interest; and the poet sings of the peasant’s life in the fields, his industries, his pleasures, his loves and quarrels, either from native love and knowledge of that life, or in a desire no less genuine, if expressed through forms of more or less artificial colouring and outline, for the real simplicity of the country. It is the herdsman, not his herd, that is the pastoral poet’s theme.

Now, for the first time, the artist disengages himself from the point of view of man, and effaces himself before the dumb life he contemplates.

Already, in the engravings of Lucas van Leyden, who, by his early maturity and his early death, his gentle nature and his exquisite skill, seems to stand as a prototype of Paul Potter--a kind of foreshadowing of this attitude appears. But not till the seventeenth century does the vein begin to be developed. Then, by rapid degrees, not through any single influence, but communicated imperceptibly as if “in the air,” the tradition grows.