Chapter XLIX: J. M. WHISTLER--Lillie in Our Alley 328 (6)

After four months of mourning he was ready to return to Flanders; his sojourn of eight years in Italy had so far influenced him that he might have remained there indefinitely had it not been for the Archduke and the Infanta pressing him to remain at Brussels and attach himself to their Court. Another circumstance may possibly have weighed with him; for within a year we find him married to Elizabeth Brant, the daughter of a magistrate of Antwerp, and it was not at Brussels, but at Antwerp, that he took up his quarters. Here he proceeded to build a wonderful house--said to have cost him 60,000 florins--after designs of his own in the Italian style, which he filled with the treasures he had collected in Italy.

Rubens's first pictures were nearly all of them religious subjects. Before he went to Italy he had painted an _Adoration of the Kings_, a _Holy Trinity_, and the _Dead Christ in the Arms of God the Father_, which was engraved by Bolswert. When Vincenzio sent him to Rome to copy pictures there for him, he found time to execute a commission which he received from the Archduke Albert to paint three pictures for the Church of Santa Croce di Gerusalamme, namely, the _Crowning with Thorns_, the _Crucifixion_, and the _Finding of the Cross_. A year later--after returning from a journey to Madrid--he painted the altar-piece for the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, in which the influence of Paul Veronese is conspicuous. At Genoa, he painted the Circumcision and S. Ignatius for the church of the Jesuits.

One of the first pictures which he painted on his return to Antwerp was an altar-piece for the private chapel of the Archduke Albert, of the Holy Family. This picture was so much admired that the members of the fraternity of S. Ildefonso, at the head of which was the Archduke Albert, commissioned him to paint an altar-piece for the Chapel of the Order of S. James near Brussels. This picture, which is now at Vienna, represents the Virgin enthroned, surrounded by four female saints, putting the Cloak of the Order on the shoulders of S. Ildefonso. On the wings are the portraits of the Archduke and Isabella, with their patron saints.

Thus we find that, like the earliest painters in his own country as well as in Italy, the beginning of Rubens's art was under the influence of the Church. Further, we find that the most celebrated work of his earlier period, the _Descent from the Cross_, in the cathedral at Antwerp, was undertaken in circumstances which abundantly show how thoroughly he was imbued with the principles of the religion he professed. The story is that when preparing the foundations of his new house he had unwittingly trespassed upon a piece of ground belonging to the Company of Arquebusiers at Antwerp. A lawsuit was threatened, and Rubens, with all the vivacity of his nature, prepared measures of resistance. But when his friend Rockox, a lawyer, had proved him that he was in the wrong, he immediately drew back, and offered to paint a picture by way of compensation. The offer was accepted, and the Arquebusiers asked for a representation of their patron, S. Christopher, to be placed in his chapel in the cathedral. In the magnificent spirit which always distinguished the man, he presented to his adversaries not merely the figure of the great Saint, but an elaborate and significant illustration of his name (Christ-bearer). Thus, in the centre, the disciples are lifting the Saviour from the Cross; in the wings the Visitation--S. Simeon with Christ in his arms, S. Christopher with Christ on his shoulders, and an old hermit bearing a light.

Among the earlier examples of secular pictures one of the most famous is the portrait of himself and his bride, which is now in the Munich Gallery. This was painted in 1609, when Rubens was over thirty years old.

In 1627 Rubens went to Madrid on a diplomatic errand, but still as a painter, as we shall see when discussing his relations with Velasquez.

Towards the end of the year 1629 he was sent on another diplomatic mission, this time to England. The choice of an ambassador could not have fallen on anyone better calculated to suit the personal character of Charles I., who was a passionate lover of art and easily captivated by men of cultivated intellect and refined manners. Rubens therefore, in whom the most admirable and attractive qualities were united to the rarest genius as an artist, soon succeeded in winning the attention and regard of the king. At Paris, too, Rubens had made friends with Buckingham, who had purchased his whole collection of statues, paintings, and other works of art for about ten thousand pounds.

It was during his stay in London that he painted the picture now in the National Gallery, called _Peace and War_ (No. 46). This was intended as an allegory representing the blessings of peace and the horrors of war, which he presented to the king as a tangible recommendation of the pacific measures which he had come to propose. After the dispersion of the Royal Collection during the Commonwealth this picture was acquired by the Doria family at Genoa, where it was called, oddly enough, _Rubens's Family_. As a matter of fact the children are those of Balthazar Gerbier. He also painted the _S. George and the Dragon_, which is now at Windsor Castle, and made the sketches for the nine pictures on the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall--now the United Service Institution Museum--in Whitehall. It was on this occasion, too, that he received the honour of knighthood from Charles I., who is said to have presented him with his own sword.

In the following year, 1630, Rubens married his second wife, Helena Fourment, who was only sixteen years old--he was now fifty-two or fifty-three. She belonged to one of the richest and most respectable families in Antwerp, and was by no means unworthy of the compliment of being painted in the character of the Virgin receiving instruction from S. Anne, in the picture which is still at Antwerp.

In 1633 his painting was again interrupted by a diplomatic mission, this time to Holland; and his remaining years were subject to more distressing interruptions, from the gout, to which he finally succumbed in 1640.

When we come to consider the English School of painting we shall see how much of its revival in the middle of the eighteenth century was due to the personality as well as to the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the Netherlands, likewise, it was not merely a great painter that was required to raise the art to life, but a great personality as well; and to the influence of Rubens may be attributed much if not all of the extraordinary fertility of the Flemish and Dutch Schools of the seventeenth century. Making every allowance for the difference in the times in which the Van Eycks and Rubens were working, there is no doubt that the former lived in too rarefied an atmosphere ever to influence their fellows, and with the exception of Hans Memling they left no

PORTRAIT OF HELENE FOURMENT, THE ARTIST'S SECOND WIFE, AND TWO CHILDREN

_Louvre, Paris_]

one worthy to carry on their tradition. Rubens showed his contemporaries that art was a mistress who could be served in many ways that were yet unthought of, and that she did not by any means disdain the tribute of other than religious votaries. Beginning, as we have pointed out, with sacred subjects, Rubens soon turned to the study of the classics, and found in them not so much the classical severity that Mantegna had sought for as the pagan spirit of fulness and freedom. "I am convinced that to reach the highest perfection as a painter," he himself writes "it is necessary, not only to be acquainted with the ancient statues, but we must be inwardly imbued with the thorough comprehension of them. An insight into the laws which pertain to them is necessary before they can be turned to any real account in painting. This will prevent the artist from transferring to the canvas that which in sculpture is dependent on the material employed--marble, for instance. Many inexperienced and indeed experienced painters do not distinguish the material from the form which it expresses--the stone from the figure which is carved in it; that which the artist forces from the dead marble, from the universal laws of art which are independent of it.

"One leading rule may be laid down, that inasmuch as the best statues of antiquity are of great value for the painter, the inferior ones are not only worthless but mischievous: for while beginners fancy they can perform wonders if they can borrow from these statues, and transfer something hard, heavy, with sharp outlines and an exaggerated anatomy to their canvas, this can only be done by outraging the truth of nature, since instead of representing flesh with colours, they do but give colour to marble.

"In studying even the best of the antique statues, the painter must consider and avoid many things which are not connected with the art of the sculptor, but solely with the material in which he worked. I may mention particularly the difference in the shading. In nature, owing to the transparency of the flesh, the skin, and the cartilages, the shading of many parts is moderated, which in sculpture appear hard and abrupt, for the shadows become doubled, as it were, owing to the natural and unavoidable thickness of the stone. To this must be added that certain less important parts which lie on the surface of the human body, as the veins, folds of the skin, etc., which change their appearance with every movement, and which owing to the pliancy of the skin become easily extended or contracted, are not expressed at all in the works of sculptors in general--though it is true that sculptors of high talent have marked them in some degree. The painter, however, must never omit to introduce them--with proper discretion.

"In the manner in which lights fall, too, statues are totally different from nature; for the natural brilliancy of marble, and its own light, throws out the surface far more strongly than in nature, and even dazzles the eye."

I have quoted rather more of this passage (from Mrs Jameson's translation) than I at first intended, because it discloses one of the most important secrets of the successful painting of figures, by other artists besides Rubens himself--George Romney for example. The advantages of a "classical education" at our English public schools and universities are questioned, and there can be no doubt that for the bulk of the pupils they are questionable. But Rubens shows that the case is exactly the same for painters studying classical art as for scholars acquainting themselves with classical literature. A superficial study of the antique, just because it is antique, is of no use at all, but rather a hindrance. But if the study is properly undertaken, there is no surer foundation, in art or literature, on which to build. It makes no difference what is built; the foundation is there, beneath the surface, and whatever is placed upon it will stand for all time.

The remarkable freedom and originality of Rubens's treatment of classical subjects is thus accounted for. Under the surface is his familiarity with the antique, but instead of carrying this above ground, he builds on it a palace in accordance with the times and circumstances in which he lived. The principles of classical art underlie the modern structure. Among his numerous works of classical mythology the picture at Munich of _Castor and Pollux_ carrying off the daughters of Leucippus is worthy of being first mentioned. The Dioscuri mounted on spirited steeds, one of which is wildly rearing, are in the act of capturing the two damsels. The calm expression of strength in the male, and the violent but fruitless resistance of the female figures, form a striking contrast. Although the former are merely represented as two coarse and powerful men, and the women have only common and rather redundant forms and Flemish faces, yet the picture produces as a whole such a striking effect, owing to the admirable manner in which the subject is conceived, the power of imagination which it displays, and the exquisite colouring and tone, that it would never occur to any unprejudiced spectator to regret the absence of antique forms and character.

Two other pictures of this class are singled out for description by Waagen as masterpieces. One is the _Rape of Proserpine_, at Blenheim,--Pluto in his car, drawn by fiery brown steeds, is carrying off the goddess, who is struggling in his arms. The other is the _Battle of the Amazons_, in the Munich Gallery, which was painted by Rubens for Van der Geest. With great judgment he has chosen the moment when the Amazons are driven back by the Greeks over the river Thermodon: the battle takes place upon a bridge, and thus the horror of the scene is carried to the highest pitch.

Both in Flanders and in Italy Rubens had been brought into close contact with all the magnificence and splendour which belonged to those gorgeous times, and he delighted in representing the pomp of worldly state and everything connected with it. Of all sacred subjects none afforded such a rich field for display as the _Adoration of the Kings_; he has painted this subject no less than twelve times, and his fancy appears quite inexhaustible in the invention of the rich offerings of the eastern sages. Among the subjects of a secular character the history of Marie de'Medici, the triumph of the Emperor Charles V., and the Sultan at the head of his Army, gave him abundant opportunities of portraying Oriental and European pageantry, with rich arms and regalia, and all the pomp and circumstance of war. Profusion--pouring forth of abundance, that was one of Rubens's most salient characteristics. Exuberance, plenty, fatness.

As a painter of animals, again, Rubens opened out a new field for the energy of his fellow-countrymen, which was tilled so industriously by Frans Snyders and Jan Fyt, and in a lesser degree by the Dutchmen Jan Weenix, father and son, and Hondecoeter. That the naive instincts, agility, and vivacity of animals must have had a great attraction for Rubens is easily understood. Those which are remarkable for their courage, strength, intelligence, swiftness--as lions, tigers, wild boars, wolves, horses, dogs--particularly interested him. He paid special attention to animals, seized every opportunity of studying them from nature, and attained the most wonderful skill and facility in painting them. It is related that he had a remarkably fine and powerful lion brought to his house in order to study him in every variety of attitude, and that on one occasion observing him yawn, he was so pleased with the action that he wished to paint it. He therefore desired the keeper to tickle the animal under the chin to make him repeatedly open his jaws: at length the lion became savage at this treatment, and cast such furious glances at his keeper, that Rubens attended to his warning and had the beast removed. The keeper is said to have been torn to pieces by the lion shortly afterwards: apparently the animal had never forgotten the affront put upon him.

By such means--though it is to be hoped not always with such lamentable results--Rubens succeeded in seizing and portraying the peculiar character and instinct of animals--their quick movements and manifestations of strength--with such perfect truth and energy that not one among the modern painters has approached him in this respect--certainly not Landseer, as Mrs Jameson would ask us to believe.

The celebrated _Wolf Hunt_, in the collection of Lord Ashburton, was one of the earliest, painted in 1612 for the Spanish General Legranes only three years after Rubens's return from Italy. In this picture, his bold creative fancy and dramatic turn of mind are remarkably conspicuous--even at this early stage in his career. Catherine Brant, his first wife, on a brown horse, with a falcon in her hand, is near her husband; a second huntsman on horseback, three on foot, another old wolf and three young ones, with several dogs, complete the composition, which is most carefully painted in a clear and powerful tone throughout.

Of scenes of peasant life, one of his earliest, and yet the most famous, is the _Kermesse_, which is now in the Louvre. A boisterous, merry party of about seventy persons are assembled in front of a country ale-house; several are wildly dancing in a circle, others are drinking and shouting; others, again, are making love.

_The Garden of Love_, equally famous, was one of Rubens's latest pictures. Of this there are several versions in existence, of which those at Dresden and Madrid may be considered as originals. Several loving couples in familiar conversation are lingering before the entrance of a grotto, the front of which is ornamented with a rustic portico. Amongst them we recognise the portraits of Rubens and his second wife, his pupil Van Dyck, and Simon de Vos.

As Rubens united to such great and various knowledge the disposition to communicate it to others in the most friendly and candid manner, it was natural that young painters of talent who were admitted into his atelier should soon attain a high degree of skill and cultivation.

At "the House in the Wood," not far from the Hague, there is a salon decorated entirely by the pupils of Rubens. The principal picture, which is one of the largest oil paintings in the world, is by Jacob Jordaens, and represents the triumph of Prince Frederick Henry--the object of the whole scheme being the glorification of the House of Orange, in 1649. Most of the other pictures are of Theodore van Thulden, who in these works has emulated his illustrious master in the force and brilliance of his colouring.

But it is not in any particular salon or palace that we must look for the effects of Rubens' influence; it was far wider than to be able to be contained within four walls. In portraiture he gave us Van Dyck; in historical subjects, Jacob Jordaens; in animal painting and still life, Frans Snyders, Jan Fyt, and the brothers Weenix. In pictures of everyday life he gave us Adrian Brouwer and David Teniers; in landscape, Everdingen, Ruisdael and Waterloo. "Thus was the art of painting in the Netherlands remodelled in every department," says Waagen in the concluding sentence of his memoir, "by the energies of a single great and gifted mind. Thus was Rubens the originator of its second great epoch, to which we are indebted for such numerous and masterly performances in every branch of the art."

III

THE PUPILS OF RUBENS

DAVID TENIERS the elder, who was born at Antwerp in 1582, received the first rudiments of his art from Rubens, who soon perceived in him the happy advances towards excelling in his profession that raised him to the head of his school. The prejudice in favour of his son, David Teniers the younger, is so great that the father is generally esteemed but a middling painter; and his pictures not worth the inquiry of a collector. His hand is so little distinguished, however, that the paintings of the father are often taken for those of the son. The father was certainly the inventor of the manner, which the son, who was his pupil, only improved with what little was wanting to perfection.

Rubens was astonished at his early success, and though he followed the manner of Adrian Brouwer, looked on him as his most deserving pupil by the brightness of genius that he showed. He soon saved enough money to undertake the journey to Italy, and when at Rome he established himself with Adam Elsheimer, who was then in great vogue. In Elsheimer's manner he soon became a perfect master, without neglecting at the same time the study of other and greater masters, endeavouring to penetrate into the deepest mysteries of their practice. An abode of ten years in Italy, and the influence of Elsheimer combined with that of Rubens, formed him into what he became.

When he returned to his own country he employed himself entirely in painting small pictures filled with figures of people drinking and merry-making, and numbers of peasants and country women. He displayed so much taste in these that the demand for them was universal. Even Rubens thought them an ornament to his collection.

Teniers drew his own character in his pictures, and in the subjects he usually expressed everything tends to joy and pleasure. Always employed in copying after nature whatsoever presented itself, he taught his two sons, David and Abraham, to follow his example, and accustomed them to paint nothing but from that infallible model, by which means they both became excellent painters. These were his only disciples, and he died at Antwerp in 1649.

The only distinction between his works and those of his son, David Teniers the younger, is that in the latter you discover a finer touch, a fresher brush, a greater choice of attitudes, and a better disposition of the figures. The father, too, retained something of the tone of Italy in his colouring, which was stronger than his son's; but his pictures have less harmony and union--though to tell the truth, when the father took pains to finish his picture, he very nearly resembled his son.

The latter, DAVID TENIERS the younger, was born in 1610. He was nicknamed the Ape of painting, from his powers of imitation. The Archduke Leopold William made him a gentleman of his bedchamber, and he made copies of all his pictures. He came to England to buy several Italian pictures for Count Fuensaldegna, who on his return heaped favours upon him. Don John of Austria and the King of Spain set so great a value upon his pictures that they built a gallery set apart to preserve them--there are no less than fifty-two in the Prado Gallery to-day.

His principal talent was landscape adorned with small figures. He painted men drinking and smoking, alchemists, corps de garde, temptations of S. Anthony, and country fairs and merry-makings. His small pictures are superior to his large ones. His execution displays the greatest ease; the leafing of his trees is light, his skies are admirable: his small figures have an exquisite expression and a most lively touch, and the characters are marked out with the greatest truth. From the thinness of the colours his works seem to have been finished at once; they are generally clear in all their parts, and Teniers had the art, without dark shades, to relieve his lights by other lights, so well managed as to produce the effect he wanted, an art which few besides himself have attained. He died at Antwerp in 1694.

FRANS SNYDERS was born at Antwerp in the year 1587, ten years later, that is to say, than Rubens. He received his first instruction in the art of painting from Henry van Balen. His genius at first displayed itself only in painting fruit. He afterwards attempted animals, in which kind of study he succeeded so well that he surpassed all that had ever excelled before him. He stayed for some time in Italy, and the works he met with there by Castiglione proved a spur to his genius to attempt outdoing him in painting animals. When he returned to Flanders he fixed his ordinary abode at Brussels, where he was made painter to the Archduke and Duchess, and became attached to the house of Spain. Twenty-two of his pictures are in the Prado Gallery.

When Snyders required large figures in his compositions both Rubens and Jordaens took pleasure in assisting him, and Rubens in turn borrowed the assistance of Snyders to paint the ground of his pictures; thus they mutually assisted each other in their labours, while Snyders' manly and vigorous manner was quite able to hold its own even when joined with that of the great master.

ANTHONY VAN DYCK was born at Antwerp in 1599, less than three months before Velasquez at Seville. Both became so famous in their capacity of Court painters that the rest of their achievement is popularly regarded as little more than a bye-product.

In the case of Van Dyck there is the more excuse for the English public, inasmuch as, like Holbein before him, he was exclusively employed while in this country in the production of portraits; and as "his works are so frequent in England," as Horace Walpole observes in the opening sentence of his memoir in the "Anecdotes of Painting," "that the generality of our people can scarce avoid thinking him their countryman," it is easy enough to forget that he only spent the last nine years of his life here.

Again, the insatiable craze of the English and American public for portraits has helped to obscure the extent of Van Dyck's capabilities in other directions, and while the National Gallery contains not a single subject-piece from his hand, more and more thousands are continually spent in the acquisition of more and more portraits. The bewitching _Cupid and Psyche_ in Queen Mary's closet at Hampton Court, painted a year before his death, is scarcely known to exist!

At the same time it would be useless to deny that Van Dyck's principal claim to his place among the greatest masters rests chiefly upon portraiture. The point I wish to make is that portrait painting never yet made a great master, but that none but a great master ever became a great portrait painter; and so long as we are only permitted to see the particular achievement of the artist in our public galleries, so long is it likely that we shall continue to be flooded with mediocre likenesses of fashionable people by painters whose highest or whose only achievement they constitute. Anyone can write a "short story" for the cheaper sort of modern journal; only writers like Hardy, Stevenson, or Kipling can give us a masterpiece in little.

It was said that Rubens advised Van Dyck to devote himself to portraiture out of jealousy: but that is hardly in accordance with what we know of his generous nature. If the advice was given at all we may be sure that it was given in a friendly spirit. But there was something in the temperament of Van Dyck which peculiarly fitted him for the Court, apart from any question as to his excellence in any particular branch of his art, and it is evident that the personality of Rubens, and his connection with the rich and mighty of the earth, influenced him almost as much as did his art. How much he owed to Rubens, and how much Rubens owed to him in painting is a matter that is arguable. He had been several years with Van Balen before he entered the studio of Rubens, when eighteen years old, not as a pupil but as an assistant. Here he not only had the practical task of painting Rubens's compositions for him, in company with numerous others, but had also the advantage of studying the works of Titian and other of the great Italian masters in Rubens's famous collection. If the hand of Van Dyck is traceable in some of the pictures of Rubens at this period, so the spirit of Rubens is very obvious in those of Van Dyck. The chief thing to be remembered is that in these early days he was not painting portraits. His earliest works, in which the influence of Titian is perceptible as well as that of Rubens, are the _Christ bearing the Cross_, in S. Paul's at Antwerp, painted in 1618; the _S. Sebastian_ at Munich, and the _Christ Mocked_, at Berlin. The familiar portrait of _Cornelius van der Geest_ in the National Gallery, is one of his very earliest, probably before 1620. Again, on his first visit to Genoa, in 1621, on the advice of Rubens, his ambition was not to paint portraits, as on his second visit some years later, but to rival Rubens in the composition of great historical pieces. It was not until 1627, when he left behind him in Genoa the superb series of Balbi, Brignole-Sala, Cattaneo, and Lomellini portraits, and returned to Antwerp to undertake those such as the _Le Roys_ at Hertford House, or the _Beatrice de Cusance_ at Windsor, that he had really become a portrait painter. Even then, he was still determined not to yield to Rubens at Antwerp, and painted, amongst other subjects, the _Rinaldo and Armida_ for Charles I. It was only at the solicitation of George Geldorp, a schemer as well as a painter, that he consented at length, in 1632, to come to England; and it was only the welcome afforded to him by Charles that induced him to settle here.

Two considerations of personal vanity may be suggested as actuating Charles to be specially indulgent to Van Dyck--an indulgence of which the results posterity should not omit to credit to the sad account of the martyr--first, that his father had failed to retain the painter in his service, and second, that Velasquez, who had made a sketch of him on his mad visit to Madrid in 1623, was then immortalising Philip. Velasquez being out of the question, why not Van Dyck! An excellent idea! Especially when instead of dwarfs, buffoons, and idiots, the English Court contained some exceedingly fine material besides the royal family for the artist to exercise his talent upon.

After this, Flanders knew Van Dyck no more, save for a year or two's sojourn from 1633-1635 when he painted one or two magnificent portraits, and then returned to England, where he died in 1641. With the death of Rubens the year before, Flemish painting had suffered another eclipse; and though Snyders lived till 1657, and Jordaens and the younger Teniers continued till late in the century, no fresh seedlings appeared, and the soil again became barren. Rubens and Van Dyck were both too big for the little garden--their growth overspread Europe.

_DUTCH SCHOOL_

I

Frans Hals

Meantime we must turn our attention to Holland, where FRANS HALS, who was born only three years later than Rubens, namely in 1580, was the forerunner of Rembrandt, Van der Helst, Bol, Lely, and a host more of greater or less painters, who made their country as famous in the seventeenth century for art as their fathers had made it in the sixteenth for arms. Without going into the complications of the political history of the Netherlands at this period, it is important nevertheless to remember that while the Flemish provinces remained Catholic under Spain, the northern states, after heroic struggles, formed themselves into a Republic; so that while it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between what was Dutch and what was Flemish in estimating the influence of one particular painter upon another, there is no question at all as to vital difference between the conditions which led to the production of the pictures of the two schools. The Flemish pictures were for the Church and for the Court, the Dutch for the house, the Guildhall, or the bourgeoisie. The former were aristocratic, the latter democratic. Rubens and Van Dyck were aristocrats, Hals and Rembrandt democrats. Rubens painted altar-pieces, for the great churches or cathedrals or for the chapels of his patrons. Rembrandt painted Bible stories for whoever would purchase them. Van Dyck painted the portraits of kings and nobles. Hals painted the rough soldiers and sailors, singly, or in the great groups into which they formed themselves as Guilds. For the first time in the history of painting, neither Church nor Court were its patrons.

In any age or under any circumstances Frans Hals would have seemed a remarkable painter, but to measure his extraordinary genius to its full height we must try to realise what those times and those circumstances were. In Florence and Venice, as we have seen, there were great schools of painting, and in Florence especially, the whole city existed in an atmosphere of art. There was no escape from it. In Haarlem, where Hals spent his youth (he was born in Antwerp), there was no such state of affairs. There were no chapels to be decorated, no courtiers to be flattered. The country was seething with the effects of war, and the whole population were ready for it again at a moment's notice. There were plenty of heroes--every man was one--but not of the romantic sort. They were all bluff, hardy fellows, who wanted to get on with their business. Who would have thought that they wanted to have their portraits painted? And who, accordingly, could have induced them to do so except a bluff, roystering genius like Hals, who slashed them down on canvas before they had time to stop him? Once it got wind that Hals was such a good fellow, and that he dashed off a portrait to the life in as little time as it took to pass the time of day with him, he had plenty of business, and from painting single portraits he was commissioned to glorify the Guilds by depicting their banquets, which he did with almost as much speed and considerably more fidelity than the limelight man at a City dinner in these times. His first great group--_The Archers of S. George_, at Haarlem--has all the appearance of being painted instantaneously as the banqueters stood around the table before dispersing.

When we think of the cultured Rubens, brought up in the atmosphere of Courts, and studying for years among the finest paintings and painters in Italy, and compare him with this low, ignorant fellow, who had never been outside the Netherlands, do we not find his genius still more amazing? Nowadays we see a portrait by Hals surrounded with the finest works of the greatest painters in all times and in all lands, and see how well it stands the comparison. But our admiration must be increased a hundredfold, when we know that he was without any of the training or tradition of a great artist, and that it must have been by sheer character and genius alone that he forced his art upon his commercial, though heroic public.

One thing especially it is interesting to notice about the Dutch portraits of the early Republican period, namely, that they are obviously inspired by the pleasure of having a living, speaking likeness rather than by pride and ostentation. Bluff and swaggering as some of Hals's portraits of men appear to be--notably _The Laughing Cavalier_, at Hertford House--that is only because the subjects were bluff and swaggering fellows--swaggering, that is to say, in the consciousness of their ability and their readiness to defend their country and their homes again, if need be, against the tyrant. But these swaggerers are the exception, and the prevailing impression conveyed is that of honest, if determined, bluffness. They are not posing, these jolly Dutchmen, they are sitting or standing, for Hals to paint them just as they would sit or stand to be measured for a suit of clothes. Look at the heads of the man and the woman in the National Gallery. Could anything be more natural and unassuming? Look at the _Laughing Cavalier_, and ask if it is not the man himself, as Hals saw and knew him, not a faked up hero? Hals caught him in his best clothes, that is all. He did not put them on to be painted in--he was out on a jaunt. Look at Hals's women, how pleased they are to be painted, just as they are.

Poor Hals, he was a good, honest fellow, though sadly given to drink and low company. But for sheer genius he has never had an equal. The vast number of his paintings--many of which now only exist in copies--shows that with every predilection to ease and comfort, he could not help painting--it simply welled out of him. It was a natural gift which seems to have needed no labour and no study.

It is certain that this fecundity was a very potent factor in the development of the Dutch School of painting. Had Hals confined his talent to painting the portraits of the highest in the land, which would never have been seen by the public at large, it is improbable that such a business-like community would have produced many painters. But Hals must have popularised painting much more than we generally suppose. An example occurs to me in the picture of _The Rommelpot Player_, of which no less than thirteen versions are enumerated by De Groot, none of which can claim to be the original. One is at Wilton, another in Sir Frederick Cook's gallery at Richmond, and a third at Arthingworth Hall in Northamptonshire.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

_Louvre, Paris_]

The subject is an old beggar man playing in front of the door of a cottage on a ridiculous instrument consisting of an earthen pot covered over like a jampot with a lid of parchment, on which he makes a rude noise with a stick, to the intense delight of a group of children. A picture like this, then, it is evident, instead of hanging in solitary confinement in the house of a great person, was so widely popular that it was copied on all sides, and must have been seen by thousands of people.

Next to Hals, in point of time, was HENDRIK GERRITZ POT, who was born, probably at Haarlem, in 1585. It is to him rather than to Ostade, who was a quarter of a century later, that we must trace the origin of smaller _genre_ pictures of the Dutch School which in later years became its principal product. Pot's works are neither very important nor very numerous, but as a portrait painter he is represented in the Louvre by a portrait of Charles I., which was probably painted when he was in England in 1631 or thereabouts; while at Hampton Court is a beautiful little piece by him which is catalogued under the title of _A Startling Introduction_. This belonged to Charles I., for his cypher is branded on the back of the panel on which it is painted, and it was sold by the Commonwealth as "a souldier making a strange posture to a Dutch lady by Bott." The painter's monogram H.P. appears on the large chimney piece before which the "soldier" is standing.

GERARD HONTHORST, born at Utrecht in 1590, can hardly be said to belong to the Dutch School at all. When he was only twenty he went to Rome, where his devotion to painting effects of candle-light earned him the sobriquet of "Gherardo della Notte." In 1628 he was elected Dean of the Guild of St. Luke at Utrecht, but he was in no sense a national painter, and neither took nor gave anything in the way of national influence. He was in England for a few months in 1628, to which chance we are indebted for the picture of the Duke of Buckingham and his family which is in the National Portrait Gallery, and another group of the Cavendish family which is at Chatsworth. Pictures of the nobility, or of celebrities like Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, were more in his line than those of his republican patriots, and consequently he plays no part in the development of the school we are now considering.

BARTHOLOMEW VAN DER HELST, born in Amsterdam, 1613, died there 1670. He is by far the most renowned of the Dutch portrait-painters of this period. Although nothing is known as regards the master under whom he studied, it is probable that if Hals was not actually his teacher, his works were the models whence Van der Helst formed himself. We see this in the portrait of Vice-Admiral Kortenaar at Amsterdam, where the conception of forms, and the unscumbled character of the strokes of the brush, recall Hals. The same may be observed in two larger pictures with archers in the Town Hall at Haarlem, where the inartistic arrangement and monotony of the otherwise warm flesh tones point to the earlier time of the painter. By about the year 1640 his character was more fully developed. His arrangement of portrait-pieces with numerous figures became very artistic and easy, his tone excellent, and his drawing masterly. This standard of excellence he retained till about 1660. The following are principal pictures of this period:--A scene from the Archery Guild of Amsterdam in 1639, including thirty figures. The celebrated picture inscribed 1648, an Archery Festival commemorating the Peace of Westphalia, and consisting of a party of twenty-four persons, at Amsterdam. The chief charm of this work consists in the strong and truthful individuality of every part, both in form and colour; in the capital drawing, which is especially conspicuous in the hands; in the powerful and clear colouring; and finally, in a kind of execution which observes a happy medium between decision and softness. In 1657 he executed the picture of the Archery Guild known by the name "het Doelenstueck" at Amsterdam Gallery. This work represents three of the overseers of the Guild, with golden prize vases, and a fourth supposed to be the painter himself. It is almost surpassed by a replica on a smaller scale executed in the following year, which is now in the Louvre. At all events, this picture is in better preservation, and offers one of the most typical examples of portrait-painting that the Dutch School produced.

II

REMBRANDT VAN RYN

But the greatest of all the Dutch painters, in some ways the greatest painter that has ever lived, was REMBRANDT VAN RYN (1606-1669). Beside him all the rest seem merely commonplace, and their works the product of this or that demand, according to their different times and circumstances, executed with more or less skill. For Rembrandt there seems no place among them all--he must stand somewhere alone; and there is no standard by which to judge his perfections and imperfections except the man himself.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Rembrandt and any other painter is that he never seems to have tried to please the public, but only painted to please himself. It is for this reason, no doubt, that he was never popular with the public, and is never likely to be; but just as Beethoven is only understandable by the really musical soul, so Rembrandt's appeal is to those who have the feeling for something in painting beyond the mere representation of familiar or heroic scenes and persons on canvas. For the public it is enough that one of his landscapes should be sold for L100,000, and they all flock to see it; but put a fine Rembrandt portrait in a shop-window without a name to it, and there would be little fear of the pavement being blocked.

This failure of Rembrandt to please the public of his own day brings out the truth that the practice of painting had up to then subsisted only so long as it supplied a popular demand; and when we come to consider what that demand was, we find that it is for nothing else but a pleasing representation of natural objects, which may or may not embody some sentimental or historical association, but must first and foremost be a fair representation of more or less familiar things.

The oldest story about pictures is that of Zeuxis and the bunch of grapes, which relates that he painted the fruit so like nature that the birds came and pecked at the painting--some versions, I believe, adding that the fruit itself was there but they preferred the painting. Similar stories with innumerable variations are told of later artists. Rembrandt himself is said to have been deceived by his pupils who, knowing he was careful about collecting money in small quantities, however extravagant he might be in spending it, painted coins on the floor of the studio, and enjoyed the joke of seeing him stoop to pick them up. We have heard, too, of flies painted with surprising skill in conspicuous places to deceive the unwary. But apart from these little pleasantries, one has only to remember how the earlier writers on painting have expressed themselves to see how much importance, consciously or unconsciously, was attached to life-like resemblance to the object painted. Vasari is constantly using phrases in which he extols the painter for having made a figure look like the life, as though that were the real thing to be aimed at. We remember Ben Jonson's lines under Shakespeare's portrait----

"Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature to outdo the life."

And though Ben Jonson was not a critic, and if he had been there was little enough art in his time in England for him to criticize, still he expresses the general feeling of the public for any work of art.

With the Dutch people this was most certainly the case, and the popularity of the painters of scenes of everyday life is a proof of it. That Hals, Brouwer, or Ostade were great painters was not half so important to them, if indeed they thought of it all, as that they were capable of turning out pictures which reflected their everyday life like a mirror.

So long as Rembrandt painted portraits like those of the Pellicornes and their offspring--the two pictures at Hertford House--or a plain straightforward group like Dr Tulp's _Anatomy Lesson_ (though in this he was already getting away from convention), he was tolerated. And it was not so much his freedom in living and his extravagant notions of the pleasures of life that brought about his downfall, as his failure to realize that when he took the money subscribed for the group of Captain Banning Cocq's Company, the subscribers expected something else for their money than a picture (_The Night Watch_) which might be a masterpiece according to the painter's notions, but was certainly not a portrait group of the subscribers.

Here, then, for the first time in the history of painting, we find an artist definitely at issue with the public. I do not say that this was the first time that an artist had failed to please the public, but it is the first occasion on which it was decided that if a painter was to undertake commissions, he must consider the wishes of the patron, or starve. It was something new for a painter of Rembrandt's repute to be told that not he, but the persons who commissioned the work, were to be the judges of whether or not it was satisfactory.

The consequences were important. For Rembrandt, instead of taking the matter as a man of business, devoted the rest of his life to being an artist, and leaving the business of painting to men like Backer, Helst, and others, betook himself seriously to developing his art irrespective of what the public might or might not think of it. As a result, we have in the later work of Rembrandt something that the world--I mean the artistic part of it--would be very sorry to do without. Now the meaning of this is, not that Rembrandt was ill-advised in deserting his patrons, or in suffering them to desert him, but that for the first time in the history of painting an artist had the personality--I will not say the conscious determination--to realize that his art was something quite apart from the affairs of this world, and that what he could express on canvas was _not_ merely a representation of natural objects designed to please his contemporaries, but something more than human, something that would appeal to humanity for all time. That many before him had felt that of their art, to a lesser or greater degree, is unquestionable--but none of them had ever realised it. Duerer, certainly, may be cited as an exception, especially when contrasted with his phlegmatic and business-like compatriot Holbein. But then Duerer, a century before, and in totally different circumstances, was never assured of regular patronage as was Rembrandt.

Rembrandt was the son of a miller named Harmann Geritz, who called himself Van Ryn, from the hamlet on the arm of the Rhine which runs through Leyden. His mother was the daughter of a baker. He was entered as a student at the University of Leyden, his parents being comfortably off; but he showed so little taste for the study of the law, for which they intended him, that he was allowed to follow his own bent of painting, in the studio of a now forgotten painter, Jacob van Swanenburg. Here he studied for about three years, after which he went to Amsterdam and was for a short time with another painter named Lastman, who was a clever but superficial imitator of the Italian School then flourishing in Rome.

Returning to Leyden, Rembrandt set up his easel and remained there painting till 1631, when he went to Amsterdam. His works during this first period are not very well known in this country, but at Windsor and at Edinburgh are portraits of his mother, which must belong to it.

The next decade was the happiest and most prosperous in Rembrandt's career. At Amsterdam he soon found favour with wealthy patrons, and his happiness and success were completed by his marrying Saskia van Ulenburgh, the sister of a wealthy connoisseur and art dealer, with whom Rembrandt had formed an intimate friendship. To this period belong the numerous portraits of himself and Saskia, alone or together, most of which are characterized by a barbaric splendour of costume, utterly different from the profusion of Rubens, but far more intense. Living among the wealthiest Jews in Amsterdam, he seems to have been strongly attracted by their orientalism, and while Rubens gloried in natural abundance of every sort, and painted the bounty of nature in the full sunlight, Rembrandt chose out the treasures of art, and painted costume and jewels gleaming out of the darkness. The portraits of himself in a cap at Hertford House (No. 52), and of the Old Lady in the National Gallery (No. 775), both painted in 1634, are notable examples of this period, though they have none of the orientalism to be seen in the various portraits of Saskia, or in _The Turk_ at Munich. The two double portraits at Hertford House of Jean Pellicorne and his wife with their son and daughter respectively, were among the commissions which he received after he set up at Amsterdam, and are therefore less interesting as self-revelations. Prosperity is not always the best condition under which to produce the highest work, and the temperament of Rembrandt was so peculiar that there is little wonder that the prim Dutchmen were not entirely captivated by his exuberant sensuality, or that we ourselves reserve our admiration principally for the more sombre and mysterious products of his later years after misfortune began to fall upon him.

PORTRAIT OF HENDRICKJE STOFFELS

_Louvre, Paris_]

In 1642 the beloved Saskia died, leaving an only child, Titus, whose features are familiar to us in the portrait at Hertford House. As though this were not affliction enough, Rembrandt had the mortification of offending his patrons over the commission to paint Captain Banning Cocq's Company. From this time onward, as the world and Rembrandt drifted farther and farther apart, his work becomes more and more wonderful.

Dr Muther, in his _History of Painting_, observes that perhaps it is only possible to understand Rembrandt by interpreting his pictures not as paintings but as psychological documents. "A picture by Rembrandt in the Dresden Gallery," he says, "represents _Samson Putting Riddles to the Philistines_; and Rembrandt's entire activity, a riddle to the philistines of his time, has remained puzzling to the present day.... As no other man bore his name, so the artist, too, is something unique, mocks every historical analysis, and remains what he was, a puzzling, intangible, Hamlet nature--Rembrandt." The author's theory of the psychological document is hardly a solution of the admitted puzzle, though it is interesting to follow him in tracing it out in Rembrandt's religious pictures, from the _Samson_ already mentioned to his last dated work, in 1668, the Darmstadt _Crucifixion_. What distinguishes Rembrandt from all painters up to, and considerably later than his time, and in particular from those of his own school, is the mental, as compared with the physical activity that his pictures represent. Perhaps this is only another way of stating Dr Muther's theory of the psychological documents, but it enables us to test that theory by comparing his work with that of others. In technical skill Beruete claims a far higher place for Velasquez, going so far as to say that the _Lesson in Anatomy_ is not a lesson in painting. But the difference between the two is not as great as that in technique, though infinitely wider in the mental process which led to the production of a picture. A reproduction of the _Portrait of an Old Pole_, at S. Petersburg, is in front of me, as it happens, as I am writing; and I see in this no inferiority in firmness and precision, in truth and vigour, to any portrait by Velasquez.