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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #64570 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64570)
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century, by
-Laurence Binyon
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century
-
-Author: Laurence Binyon
-
-Release Date: February 16, 2021 [eBook #64570]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
- http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
- available at The Internet Archive)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH
-CENTURY ***
-
-
- [Illustration]
-
-
-
-
- DUTCH ETCHERS
-
- _OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_
-
- _By_
-
- LAURENCE BINYON
-
- _Of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum_
-
- [Illustration]
-
- LONDON
- SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND
- NEW YORK, MACMILLAN AND CO.
- 1895
-
-
-
-
-LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
-
-
-_PLATES_
-
- PAGE
-
-The Two Plough Horses.
-From the etching by Paul Potter. B. 12 _Frontispiece_
-
-The Wife Spinning.
-From the etching by A. Van Ostade. B. 31 _to face_28
-
-Sea Piece.
-From the etching by L. Backhuysen. B. 4 ” ” 52
-
-Ox and Sheep.
-From the etching by A. Van de Velde. B. 12 ” ” 74
-
-
-_ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT_
-
-FIG.
-
-1. The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29 8
-
-2. Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3 10
-
-3. Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade. British Museum 12
-
-4. The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16 14
-
-5. Man and Woman Conversing. By Ostade. B. 37 16
-
-6. The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23 19
-
-7. The Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44 22
-
-8. Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B. 42 25
-
-9. Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34 27
-
-10. The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26 29
-
-11. The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32 33
-
-12. Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236 36
-
-13. The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236 39
-
-14. Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5 42
-
-15. Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75 43
-
-16. Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B. 96 45
-
-17. The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5 49
-
-18. The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der Heyden 51
-
-19. Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38 54
-
-20. Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh. B. 17 56
-
-21. Landscape. By Both. B. 3 59
-
-22. A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51 61
-
-23. Title Piece. By Berchem. B. 35 64
-
-24. The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. 1 66
-
-25. Studies of a Dog. By Paul Potter. British Museum 69
-
-26. The Cow. By Paul Potter. B. 3 72
-
-27. Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2 73
-
-28. Pigs. By K. Du Jardin. B. 15 76
-
-29. A Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16 78
-
-
-
-
-DUTCH ETCHERS
-OF
-THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
-
-
-
-
-INTRODUCTION
-
-
-I
-
-When, towards the close of the last century, Adam Bartsch began that
-monument of his industry and patience, _Le Peintre Graveur_, he devoted
-the first volumes of his twenty-one, not to the early engravers of
-Germany or Italy, but to the Dutch etchers of the seventeenth century.
-These were, in fact, the idols of the amateur of that day; and the
-indiscriminate praises which Bartsch lavishes on mediocre artists, like
-Waterloo or Le Ducq, sufficiently show how uncontested was their rank,
-and how fashionable their reputation.
-
-Since then their vogue has considerably declined. Rembrandt, of whom
-Bartsch treated in a separate work, is perhaps more admired, more
-studied than he ever was. His etchings, reproduced in more or less
-accurate forms, are not only familiar to artists and to students, but,
-to a certain extent, reach even the general public. But Rembrandt’s
-glory has obscured the fame of his countrymen and contemporaries. Like
-Shakespeare by the side of the lesser Elizabethans, he stands forth
-alone and dazzling, and, though they enjoy a titular renown, they suffer
-a comparative neglect.
-
-Yet, if Rembrandt is by far the greatest, others are great also. The
-following pages are designed to serve as a sort of introduction to the
-more notable among these etchers, in the same way that Mr. Hamerton’s
-monograph, the first of the present series of the _Portfolio_, was
-intended as an introduction to the etched work of Rembrandt.
-
-And first, let us warn the reader who is familiar perhaps with
-masterpieces like the _Christ Healing the Sick_ and _Rembrandt Drawing
-at a Window_, _Clement de Jonghe_, or _The Three Trees_, but who is not
-yet acquainted with the etchings of Ostade and Paul Potter, not to
-expect too much. Few of these lesser masters approach Rembrandt in the
-specific qualities of the etcher: he is beyond them all in
-draughtsmanship, far beyond them in the intensity of his imagination.
-Yet the best of them must rank high.
-
-It is his immensity of range which marks off Rembrandt, more even than
-his transcendent powers, from the rest of the Dutch etchers. Not only
-did his production exceed by far the most prolific among them, but he
-touched on almost every side of life. Yet he was not the school in
-epitome, as a hasty enthusiasm might affirm. With all his breadth of
-sympathy, his insatiable curiosity, he was not quite universal. The life
-of animals, the growth and beauty of trees, the motion of the
-sea-waves--none of these attracted Rembrandt deeply. And here, to
-supplement him, we have the work of men like Potter, Backhuysen,
-Ruisdael, each developing his peculiar vein.
-
-All of these etchers whom we have to consider are, however, independent
-of Rembrandt and his influence. The Rembrandt school has been expressly
-excluded from the present monograph. For, interesting as some of those
-artists are, the first thought suggested by their work is that it
-recalls Rembrandt: the second thought, that it is not Rembrandt. It is
-their relation to their master that interests us rather than any
-intrinsic excellence of their own.
-
-Only the independent masters, therefore, are exhibited here; and from
-these groups of etchers several of the greatest names in Dutch art are
-absent. Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Vermeer of Delft, Hobbema, De Hooch--none
-of these, so far as we know, has left a single plate. Adriaen Brouwer
-etched a few; but they afford only the slightest indications of his
-genius. And Albert Cuyp, who is the author of half a dozen small
-etchings, showed in this line but little of his skill, and did not
-apparently pursue it farther.
-
-Yet the quantity of etched plates produced during this period in Holland
-is immense, and most of the best work was published within the same two
-or three decades. To take a single year, 1652, Potter’s studies of
-horses, a set of cattle by Berchem, several plates by Du Jardin, one of
-the finest pieces of Ostade, _La Fileuse_, appeared in it; while the
-year following saw the publication of Adriaen van de Velde’s largest
-etching, and Ruisdael’s _Three Oaks_ had been issued but three years
-earlier. Rembrandt’s _Tobit Blind_ is dated 1651, and the _Three
-Crosses_ 1653. This great fecundity has been necessarily a source of
-some embarrassment to the writer; and though a number of minor men have
-been omitted, several etchers have been included, whom for the sake of
-completeness it was necessary to give some account of, but whom it is
-hard to make interesting, and about whom enthusiasm is impossible.
-
-
-II
-
-Treating, as it does, of so considerable a number of masters, the
-present monograph aims at indicating, as far as space would allow,
-something of the relations between them, and at tracing the
-interdependence of the various schools. To have taken the etchers
-separately and considered their work apart, would have meant the
-compilation of a tediously crowded catalogue.
-
-But when once the masters are approached from the historical side, it is
-impossible to treat them simply as etchers. It is as painters that they
-influenced and were influenced. Consequently some account has had to be
-taken of them as painters. And since some who produced little, and that
-little not very remarkable, in etching, are yet of great significance as
-artists, it has been impossible to treat each man simply on his merits
-as an etcher. Hence, for instance, much more space has been devoted to
-Ruisdael than the quality or the amount of his work on copper strictly
-merits.
-
-The lives of most of these artists have, till recently, rested on a
-somewhat shifting foundation. Dates of birth and death have fluctuated
-in various authors with easy rapidity. Of some, even now, nothing
-certain is known.
-
-But the researches of Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede de
-Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved much,
-disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To Dr.
-Bredius’ _Meisterwerke der königlichen Gemälde-Galerie im Haag_, and
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 1.--The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29._]
-
-still more to his _Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam_, the
-writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to
-acknowledge.
-
-But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the
-lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were
-in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or
-exchanged it only for a home a few miles off: Haarlem for Amsterdam, or
-Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or spent some
-years in France or Germany; but here the journey itself is sometimes
-only a matter of inference from the painter’s works. Birth, marriage,
-and death: there is little beyond these, and the dates of their
-principal productions, to record about many of these men.
-
-Of the whole social life of the Holland of that day we know practically
-nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings not
-survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this country
-and its history! Most countries that have left us great art have left us
-also great literature, and each is the complement of the other. The
-marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their
-incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recollections,
-gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is the same
-with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the
-flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only
-material we have for investigating and realising that movement.
-
-There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in
-seventeenth-century Holland; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland.
-Besides the names of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not in
-literature proper, not a single author’s name is familiar, nor any book
-eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is certainly
-not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch. Hence
-a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies so
-near us: a remoteness emphasised in England by the general ignorance of
-the language.
-
-When one looks at a picture by Watteau, one seems to be joining in the
-conversation of those adorable ladies and their gallants; half
-instinctively, one seems to divine the witty phrase, the happy
-compliment that is on the speaker’s lips. But the conversations of Ter
-Borch and of Metsu are mute and distant. We hear the jovial laughter of
-Hals, but we cannot divine his jests and oaths. And Van de Velde’s merry
-skating companies, and Ostade’s tavern-haunting peasants, and the family
-groups in their gravely furnished rooms, rich with a sober opulence, of
-De Hooch or of Jan Steen, all, in spite of their human touches and their
-gaiety, affect us with a kind of haunting silence.
-
-Mr. Pater, in one of the most finished and charming of his Imaginary
-Portraits, _Sebastian van Storck_, called up a picture of the social
-life of these times, very suggestive and delightful; but it was
-noteworthy, how much of it was merely a reconstruction, in words, of
-impressions from the contemporary pictures.
-
-After all, however, our ignorance may not cost us much. We judge the
-painters as painters, and by their works; we are not distracted by
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 2.--Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3._]
-
-other circumstances about them, and that is an advantage. They may have
-had theories about painting, but fortunately we do not know them, except
-by inference from their practice.
-
-And if seventeenth-century Holland has only expressed herself in
-painting, she has known how to express herself with marvellous fulness.
-Never before, and never perhaps since, has pictorial art been so
-universally the speech of a nation; never has it been more various and
-abundant. Instead of being the handmaid of religion or the adornment of
-a court, it is now for the first time itself: full-blooded, active,
-exuberant, scorning nothing, attempting everything. Modern with all the
-added richness that the modern spirit allows in life and art, it
-reflects the just pride and joy of a great nation arrived, through
-incredible struggle and privation, at victory and peace.
-
-Yet more wonderful even than this abundance is the fine tact, the
-instinctive judgment, which guided such profuse creation.
-
-For in all the great painters of Holland there is the same sure choice
-of subjects proper to painting, the same sure avoidance of what does not
-lend itself so much to painting as to some other expression of art.
-Religious pictures in the old sense, pictures intended for churches,
-were forbidden by the Protestant spirit. No court existed to patronise
-the painters. Yet they seemed unconscious of being cut off from any
-province. In the life around them they found overflowing material, and
-their choice of subject was invariably simple, never a complex product
-like the engravings of Dürer, half literary in their interest; never
-anecdotic or moral. An excellent tradition was begun, which lasted
-through the century.
-
-Nor was this tradition due to the creative impulse of one man. There was
-nothing in Holland parallel to the renovation, the re-creation rather,
-of Flemish art by Rubens. Rembrandt came near the beginning, but he did
-not start the period. One cannot say precisely how this great tradition
-began; it seems as if the flowering time came all at once throughout the
-country, with the mysterious suddenness of spring. Till the seventeenth
-century, it was Italy from which Dutch artists took their inspiration,
-but henceforward it is a native impulse. Only men of lesser importance
-went to paint at Rome, and even then they took there more than they
-brought away.
-
-
-III
-
-Considered as etchers, the Dutch masters range themselves somewhat
-differently.
-
-Only a few, seemingly, realised the specific capacities and limitations
-of etching: the rest regarded it merely as a method of reproducing their
-drawings, as an easier kind of engraving. This was probably the
-conception of those who first applied acid to metal for the purpose of
-reproducing designs, at the beginning of the sixteenth century: the art
-had been formerly employed only in the damascening of swords or armour.
-Albert Dürer is an exception; for, though he did not develop the method
-far, he saw that it required a different kind of handling from that
-suitable for the burin; and in his few etched plates the work is freer
-and more open than that of his line-engravings.
-
-The first men to use etching extensively were the Hopfer family of
-Augsburg, who produced a great number of prints, chiefly decorative
-designs.
-
-It was employed in landscape by Altdorfer, Hirschvogel, Lautensack, and
-others among the Little Masters. But these did little more than
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 3.--Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade.
-British Museum._]
-
-carry on the Nürnberg tradition of engraving, through another medium.
-They had little or no influence on the Dutchmen.
-
-A new and powerful stimulus, however, was to be given to etching with
-the beginning of the seventeenth century, by the prolific and famous
-French artist, Jacques Callot. Born in 1592, Callot produced a great
-mass of work before his death in 1638, and his etchings, by which alone
-he is known, had a great popularity in his lifetime. In 1624 he was
-invited to Brussels by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, and was
-commissioned by her to commemorate the Siege of Breda, an event which
-also occasioned a masterpiece to Velasquez, the famous _Lances_ of
-Madrid. Callot undoubtedly brought the art into prominence and favour in
-the Netherlands. Yet of direct influence over either Flemings or
-Dutchmen, Callot had little or none. His spirit was too essentially
-French, his method too individual, for him to be imitated by men of such
-different race and temperament.
-
-In 1627, however, Callot met, at Nancy, Claude Lorraine, and probably
-instructed him in etching. Claude left Nancy for Italy in the same year,
-and in the following year etched his first plates. Between 1630 and
-1663, he published a considerable number, among them some of exquisite
-delicacy and beauty. And from these etchings many of the Dutchmen derive
-their inspiration; and Claude is said to have employed men like
-Swaneveldt, Andries Both, and Jan Miel for inserting figures in his
-landscapes.
-
-Another foreign master who exercised a widespread influence over the
-Dutch etchers was the German, Adam Elsheimer. Traces of this influence
-pervade the history of Dutch art, as Dr. Bode in his _Studien zur
-Geschichte der hollädndischen Malerei_ has very fully demonstrated.
-
-Elsheimer etched a few plates; but, with all deference to Dr. Bode’s
-authority, we find it difficult to attach to them the importance which
-he gives them. Through the etchings and engravings made from his
-pictures Elsheimer was undoubtedly a source of inspiration to the
-Dutchmen, but scarcely through the rare and by no means remarkable
-plates which he etched himself.
-
-The real importance of Elsheimer, and the secret of his fascination over
-his contemporaries, lie in his fresh treatment of light and shade.
-Problems of lighting occupied his contemporaries, Caravaggio and
-Honthorst, but these devoted their skill chiefly to effects of double
-lighting and strong contrast; it was the rendering of luminous shadow
-and subtle tones of twilight that Elsheimer was the first to attack. In
-this he is a forerunner of Rembrandt, who undoubtedly took suggestions
-from him, and was helped by him in his own development of chiaroscuro.
-Rembrandt cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of what
-Elsheimer had done before him.
-
-But Rembrandt was by no means the only Dutch master who profited by the
-German’s art. The whole of the Italianised Dutch school at Rome, men
-like Poelenburg for instance, felt his influence more or less strongly.
-Nor was he without followers in the native school of landscape painters
-and etchers in Holland, as we shall see when we come to them.
-
-Elsheimer, in fine, though by no means a great painter, is of
-considerable historical importance, and the admiration which he excited
-in his
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 4.--The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16._]
-
-own day can hardly be over-estimated. So great a man as Rubens admired
-him so much that he had three of his landscapes on his walls, and made
-copies from his paintings and designs.
-
-This is the more remarkable, because Rubens rarely occupied himself with
-the problems that fascinated Elsheimer. And while these problems were
-of a kind to appeal to etchers, it was not on etching but on
-line-engraving, an art admitting little scope for subtlety of
-chiaroscuro, that Rubens cast his potent influence. Without using the
-burin himself, he employed a number of brilliant engravers to reproduce
-his designs, just as Raphael had employed Marc Antonio for the like
-purpose. Even in our day, when public picture-galleries are numerous and
-the distances between various capitals have so immensely shrunk, the
-fame of the great painters rests still to a large extent on photographs
-and engravings from their works; it is easy, therefore, to comprehend of
-what capital importance it was for masters of the sixteenth and
-seventeenth centuries to secure competent interpreters.
-
-Line-engraving was admirably suited for the reproduction of pictures
-like those of Rubens, with their large design and flowing sweep. And so
-potent was Rubens’s example, that etching found in Belgium only a few
-isolated, and with the single exception of Vandyck, unimportant
-followers.
-
-In Holland it was just the reverse. Perhaps it was the result of some
-vital difference in temperament between the Flemings and the Dutchmen,
-such as caused the one country to embrace the severer, soberer religion
-of Protestantism, while the other clung to the more ancient creed of
-Rome, with its strong appeal to the senses; at any rate, it seems
-characteristic that line-engraving, with its capacity for reproducing
-qualities of splendour and spacious action, should have found in Antwerp
-its most effective, various, and brilliant exposition, while the
-plainer, more self-contained, more intense spirit of the great Dutchmen
-developed the more personal, intimate, subtle art of etching, as it had
-never been developed before.
-
-But Dutchmen, no less than Flemings, felt the need for reproducing their
-designs, and here arose a difficulty. For etching is not, in spite of
-modern successes, so well adapted to reproduction as line-engraving is.
-
-As we have said, it was only a certain number of the Dutchmen who
-divined this. Rembrandt, of course, perceived it; and though he spread
-his fame by working steadily on copper as well as on canvas, he made his
-etched work independent of his painting and never a simple reproduction
-of pictures. Lesser men had not the intelligence to do as he did; and
-many of the artists of whom we shall treat, though they produced fine
-work on copper, cannot be esteemed true etchers.
-
-We will begin our studies with one who was, beyond dispute, a born
-etcher, Ostade.
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 5.--Man and Woman Conversing. By Ostade. B. 37._]
-
-
-
-
-OSTADE AND HIS SCHOOL
-
-
-I
-
-Adriaen van Ostade was born in Haarlem, at the end of 1610. The
-researches of Dr. Van der Willigen have placed this fact beyond doubt,
-and the old tradition of his having been born at Lübeck must therefore
-be set aside. In the baptismal register for December 10, 1610, there is
-entered the name of Adriaen, son of Jan Hendricx, of Eyndhoven, and of
-Janneke Hendriksen. On the 2nd of June, 1621, the birth of Isack, son of
-the same parents, is recorded.
-
-These dates have always been associated with the births of the brothers
-Ostade, and there are other grounds for identifying them with the
-Adriaen and Isack just mentioned.
-
-Jan Hendricx was a weaver, and in consequence of the religious
-persecutions of the time, left his native Eyndhoven, a village in North
-Brabant, for Haarlem. This was some time before 1605, for in that year,
-already a burgess of the town, he married. He had several children; and
-in a document of 1650, two of them are mentioned as brother and sister
-to Adriaen and Isack, who are thus proved to have been his sons. The
-name of Ostade was taken from a hamlet close to Eyndhoven. Adriaen is
-first mentioned with this surname as a member of the civic guard, in
-1636.
-
-Haarlem, M. Vosmaer has said, is in two things like Florence. It is a
-city of flowers and a city of artists. Its archives show that from an
-early time the arts flourished and were fostered there. Money was never
-grudged for fine work in every branch of skilful industry, no less than
-for good painting and good sculpture. The goldsmith, the potter, the
-leather-worker, the stone-cutter, could find employment for their powers
-and remuneration worth their skill. Haarlem was, in fact, a type of
-those busy and prosperous cities where it seems that art thrives best;
-for though art and commerce are often supposed to have a natural
-disagreement, history shows them to have been the most apt companions.
-
-But the city of Dierick Bouts, of Albert van Ouwater, of Jan Scorel, was
-at the time of Ostade’s birth, in a condition even more favourable for
-the production of fine work than it had been in the fifteenth and
-following centuries. In 1573 occurred the famous siege by the Spaniards.
-Those who had borne the burden of those terrible days were now growing
-old; but the young generation received and handed on their heroic
-memories, unembittered by thoughts of loss, suffering, or defeat. And
-when, in 1609, peace came, and the United Provinces, acknowledged by
-Spain, turned to enjoy their victorious repose, there was added the
-sense of triumph to that of trials endured. It was the great time for
-Holland. Her soldiers were famed as the finest in Europe. Her navy was
-the most powerful, the best-manned. Her cities grew, and wealth poured
-into them. A universal well-being pervaded the country, and a spirit of
-joy and of expansion, like the glow of health, diffused itself in the
-citizens.
-
-It was natural that art, too, should feel this new influence. And in
-Haarlem, where the siege had destroyed so much of the old town, and
-modern buildings of warm red brick had sprung round the vast surviving
-monument of the middle ages, the Groote Kerk of St. Bavon; in Haarlem
-especially, a new spirit, intensely modern, began to possess the rising
-painters. From art which lavished its parade of dexterity on the old
-mythological fables, handled without heart or meaning, from the smooth
-and pallid conventionalities of Cornelis Corneliszoon, and the
-extravagant cleverness of Goltzius, these men turned to the life that
-was around them. Among them were artists like Jan de Bray, Esaias van de
-Velde, Dirk and Frans Hals. It was in the studio of Frans Hals that the
-young Ostade learnt to paint. Already in 1616, Hals had painted his
-superb group of the civic guard, and was now in the fulness of his
-extraordinary power. The exuberant joy and energy, the confident
-sincerity, the swift and certain touch, intimate with realities, that
-marked Hals, were typical of the country and the time. Life--that is
-the
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 6.--The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23._]
-
-absolute necessity for such an artist: for him everything that has life
-is a possible subject, a possible realm to conquer. A subject that he
-cannot feel, as well as conceive, his instinct rejects at once. A great
-pride of life is what characterises Hals’ pictures human life in all its
-fulness he accepts: unhindered by the shrinkings of more fastidious
-natures, he enjoys with a robust enjoyment.
-
-It is the same also with Ostade; but the pupil was too individual an
-artist to repeat his master. Ostade felt, perhaps, that he could never
-rival those magnificent portrait-groups, and his own preferences, his
-own gifts, led him to a different choice of subject.
-
-Perhaps some who have seen Ostade’s pictures and found them coarse and
-ignoble, have imagined the painter of them to be equally coarse and
-ignoble-looking as his boors. His portrait shows him a man of somewhat
-severe, keen countenance, in plain attire; a grave man, one would say,
-with humour lurking in his gravity, as often happens; it is a portrait
-that might be taken for that of an Englishman of the Commonwealth.
-Ostade was, in fact, a well-to-do citizen of the middle class. His
-collection of pictures, sold at his death in 1685, was, as we know from
-the _Haarlem Gazette_, extensive; and the fact that it contained two
-hundred of his own paintings, proves that he was, unlike so many of his
-compeers, far removed from want.
-
-Of Ostade’s life, apart from his production, we know almost nothing. He
-was a member of the _Oude Schuts_, the ancient and honourable Company of
-Arquebusiers. He was married twice; first, in 1636, to Machtelgen
-Pietersen, who died in 1642; and again to a second wife, whose name is
-not known, by whom he had a girl, Johanna Maria. This daughter married a
-surgeon, Dirk van der Stoel, into whose hands Ostade’s etched plates and
-proofs passed at his death.
-
-In 1647 and 1661 Ostade is mentioned as a member of the government of
-the Guild. In 1662, he was dean of the Guild. An incident of his earlier
-years is of interest, as showing his liberal spirit. In 1642 he joined
-Salomon Ruysdael, at a meeting of the Guild, in protesting against the
-policy of protection, which inspired Haarlem Guild, like many others, to
-oppose the importation of works of art from other towns or their sale in
-Haarlem.
-
-Ostade seems never to have travelled, like many of his countrymen,
-beyond the borders of Holland, nor ever to have changed his home, except
-from one street of Haarlem to another.
-
-He died in 1685.
-
-On an early afternoon of May his body was carried from his house in the
-Kuis-straat to the Groote Kerk, a little company of his friends
-following.
-
-
-II
-
-With most of the Dutch artists, etching was a subordinate
-accomplishment, and their work on copper is but a less interesting
-reflection of their work on canvas. This cannot be said of Ostade. As
-with Rembrandt, his etched work is the complement, rather than a
-supplement merely, of his painting. To the present writer, indeed, his
-etchings have more interest than his pictures. The latter are numerous;
-they may be seen in almost all galleries of importance, and the reader
-is doubtless familiar with their characteristics. Delightful as they
-often are, they do not rival those of Adriaen Brouwer, who was by four
-years Ostade’s senior, and who, though born a Fleming, worked mostly in
-Holland, and entered Hals’ studio at the same time. There are a few
-plates attributed to Brouwer; but, if genuine, these show that he never
-thoroughly mastered the technique of etching; none of them approaches
-the least successful plates of Ostade. Brouwer as a painter, on the
-other hand, surpasses beyond question all the painters of peasant life,
-whether of Holland or of Flanders.
-
-Ostade does not manage paint with the freedom of a great master, but his
-drawing is always superb. The drawing reproduced (Fig. 3) is a
-characteristic specimen. It is the end of a game of backgammon. The game
-is won, but the defeated player refuses to accept his defeat without a
-careful scrutiny. In the attitudes, the gestures of players and
-onlookers, everything is vital; the moment is admirably caught.
-
-There is an etching also of a game of backgammon, but it does not
-directly illustrate the drawing.
-
-Ostade did, however, make use of sketches for his etchings. There is in
-the British Museum a sketch for _The Father of a Family_ (B. 33). A
-comparison of this with the etched plate is interesting. There is a
-certain affinity to Rembrandt in the manner of drawing; less summary and
-swift, but masterful and free. And, like Rembrandt, Ostade does not use
-his sketch as a finished thing, and copy it faithfully and minutely. His
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 7.--The Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44._]
-
-interest in the subject has not died out; he is alert for a new posture,
-a fresh touch, a livelier handling of some part of his design, that may
-improve the whole. In this case the drawing, which is of a different
-shape from the print and much broader, contains at the left the figure
-of a man seated and cutting a loaf of bread on his knees. Ostade felt
-that this figure disturbed the unity of the piece no less than the sense
-of home seclusion, and he omitted it from his work on the copper. This
-reveals the born etcher: one who works with directness, swiftness,
-passion; whose needle takes the impulse of his thought immediately, who
-never works in cold blood.
-
-
-III
-
-Let us now consider the etchings themselves. There are just fifty in
-all, and nine or perhaps ten of the number are dated. The earliest date
-is 1647, the latest 1678. Arranging the dated plates in order of time,
-we get the following table. The references are to the numbers in
-Bartsch, _Peintre-Graveur_, Vol. I.:--
-
-1647.
-
-The Hurdy-Gurdy Player. B. 8.
-The Barn. B. 23.
-The Family. B. 46.
-
-
-1648.
-
-The Father of the Family. B. 33.
-
-
-1652.
-
-The Wife Spinning. B. 31.
-
-
-1653.
-
-The Tavern Brawl. B. 18.
-Saying Grace. B. 34.
-
-
-1671.
-
-The Cobbler. B. 27.
-
-
-1678.[1]
-
-The Child and the Doll. B. 16.
-
-To this may possibly be added _The Humpbacked Fiddler_ (B. 44). Neither
-Bartsch nor Dutuit appears to have noticed a date on this plate; but it
-seems clear that it is there, following the signature, though obscured
-by lines. The writer inclines to decipher it as 1631 or 1651; but it is
-impossible to be positive on the point. These data would doubtless serve
-many critics with material for constructing a chronological list of the
-whole of the etchings. But this amusement shall be left to the reader.
-The etchings, as a matter of fact, do not present any marked variety of
-treatment. Ostade was not, like Rembrandt, a master of many styles; nor
-did he develop any particular style by continually surpassing his own
-successes. We can only say that he seems to have attained his greatest
-mastery in a middle period, about 1650. _The Wife Spinning_ of 1652 is
-not followed by any dated piece that at all rivals it. _The Cobbler_ of
-1671, for instance, which was a failure in the first biting, betrays
-also a certain languor of handling, very different from the
-inexhaustible care and skill bestowed on the earlier plate.
-
-This inference is confirmed by what we know of Ostade’s work on canvas.
-His first period dates from 1630 to 1635; then follows a middle period
-in which, influenced by Rembrandt, he adopted a warmer scheme of colour;
-lastly, in a third period, he began to repeat himself and decline.
-
-Beyond such general deductions it does not seem worth while to go. In
-Rembrandt’s case the question of chronology is of extreme interest and
-significance, but in Ostade there is no development to speak of, and to
-labour after exhibiting it would be waste of time.
-
-Next, as to the various states of the etchings. The reverence for first
-states and rare states, common to collectors, has from their point of
-view its own justification; but they are apt perhaps sometimes to
-confuse the æsthetic value of a print with its market value. Artists, on
-the other hand, are sometimes prone to dismiss the whole question of
-states as tedious and absurd. It is, however, of great importance that
-the etcher should be judged on his own merits and not on the merits, or
-demerits, of other people. Ostade undoubtedly made alterations in his
-plates during printing and thus created “states”; but many more states
-were created after his death by other hands re-working the worn copper.
-
-It is reasonable to suppose that the last state touched by the artist is
-the one that he would wish to be taken as typical of his perfect work.
-
-But the question arises: Which is the last state touched by the artist?
-
-The work of later hands, added to a plate after the artist’s death, does
-not concern us; but the development of the etching up to that state when
-the artist leaves it as a finished thing, must interest us greatly. How
-are we to decide?
-
-In the case of Ostade, we are helped a little by external data. As we
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 8.--Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B.
-42._]
-
-have seen, the plates were sold at his death in 1685. We know also that
-they were sold again by their new possessor, Dirk van der Stoel,
-Ostade’s son-in-law, in 1686; and eight years later again, in 1694. What
-state they were in then we can only conjecture: but we may infer
-something from what we know to have been their state in 1710 or a little
-later.
-
-In the year just mentioned a French engraver, Bernard Picart, arrived in
-Holland; and some time after his arrival he published a collection of
-the etched work of Ostade and of his pupil Bega. The book of Ostade’s
-etchings was bought, perhaps on its publication, by Hans Sloane: and
-through him it has passed into the possession of the British Museum.
-Whoever examines it will notice at once the inequality of the plates:
-some are worn and harshly retouched, some are passable, a few are even
-good. Something of this is due to the delicately-worked plates, giving
-out sooner than those more coarsely etched. Probably also some were more
-in demand than others. Thus, to take a few examples: while _The Painter
-in His Studio_ (B. 32) is in the tenth and last state, and _Peasant
-Paying His Reckoning_ (B. 42) is in the seventh or last but one, _The
-Dance in the Tavern_ (B. 49) is in the fourth out of seven states in
-all, and _The Empty Jug_ (B. 15) in the fourth out of eight states in
-all. And several of the smaller plates are still in the second state.
-
-In determining therefore the extent to which later hands have worked on
-the etchings, each must be considered separately. Only in a few cases,
-probably, are those in Picart’s edition still in the condition left by
-the master himself; and most seem to have been retouched more than once.
-Every one will judge for himself the precise point at which new work
-comes in: and opinion will always differ on such questions. As Ostade
-was not always successful in his first biting, the second state is
-generally the most representative. _Peasant Paying His Reckoning_ is a
-very different thing in Picart’s edition from the brilliant second state
-of the same etching.
-
-The student of Ostade will find Dutuit’s book[2] indispensable: it
-contains all that was known of the etchings and their different
-impressions up to the year of its publication. And the author’s own
-collection was perhaps unrivalled. Nevertheless, it is not perfect. The
-states are described with an extraordinary superfluity of detail, and
-the one or two differentiating circumstances are buried in a mass of
-irrelevant description. Verification is therefore a matter of time and
-labour.
-
-There are also a few states still undescribed. Still, for those who have
-an appetite for “states,” Dutuit is very satisfying.
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 9--Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34._]
-
-
-IV
-
-Ostade’s etched work is, considered as etching, unequal. Sometimes, as
-for instance in _The Cobbler_ (B. 27), the first biting was not a
-success; at other times, as in the _Man Laughing_ (B. 4), the _Saying
-Grace_ (B. 34), or the _Fiddlers_ (B. 45), the plate has been
-over-bitten. The plate which Bartsch calls _La Fileuse_ (_The Wife
-Spinning_. B. 31) [Plate I.], is one which represents very fully some of
-Ostade’s characteristic excellences as an etcher. It is a fine example
-of his success in bathing his subject in atmosphere. One feels the quiet
-afternoon warmth upon the cottage-front, as the woman who spins feels
-it, as the child feels it, as the two basking pigs feel it. That
-softness of air, which in our northern climate gives even to the near
-trees a kind of impalpable look, and which seems to clothe things with
-itself--that is what Ostade has sought to render with mere etched lines;
-and he has triumphed over immense difficulties. His figures detach
-themselves with a wonderful reality, with no hard brilliancy, no
-superfluous shadows. There is a fine absence of cleverness in such quiet
-mastery of means.
-
-More remarkable still is the little plate (B. 42) which is reproduced in
-Fig. 8. The amount of knowledge, of feeling for light and shadow, of
-subtle and sure draughtsmanship in this small etching is astonishing.
-The problem of painting daylight as it is diffused in a room through the
-window, which, of all painters in the world, Jan Vermeer and Pieter de
-Hooch, and, in a different way, Rembrandt and Ostade himself, have most
-fully mastered, is here attacked in etching, and with extraordinary
-success. What seems strange is that a problem so fascinating, one which
-had evidently a strong seduction for Ostade in his painting, should have
-been attempted by him so rarely in his etchings. _The Painter in his
-Studio_ (B. 32) is another success in the same line, while the _Players
-at Backgammon_ (B. 39) is partly a failure, through the biting having
-gone wrong. But, as a rule, Ostade prefers out-of-door effects.
-
-None of the etchings quite rivals, in the writer’s judgment at least,
-this little plate, _Peasant Paying his Reckoning_. But there are several
-typical small pieces which have a great charm. The _Spectacle-seller_
-(B. 22, Fig. 1), for instance, is an admirable composition, and the
-
-[Illustration]
-
-etching rich. The _Humpbacked Fiddler_ (B. 44, Fig. 7), and the _Man and
-Woman Conversing_ (B. 25, Fig. 5), though the needle has been used
-somewhat differently in each, have similar merit.
-
-But the plates that interest, perhaps, most, are not always those which
-are etched the best. The chief glory of Ostade is his imaginative
-draughtsmanship, and akin to this are his vivid human sympathy and his
-humour. These are not so manifest in the plates we have mentioned as in
-some others.
-
-But before passing to those pieces which show these qualities at their
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 10.--The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26._]
-
-best, let us notice one which is unlike any of the others. This is _The
-Barn_ (B. 28, Fig. 6). Had the execution of this plate matched the
-feeling it evinces, it would have been a fine achievement. Who does not
-know the strange, vague impression which such a barn as this produces on
-the mind? The cool dimness, the mysterious shadow among the rafters,
-penetrated here and there by soft rays, the atmosphere of the farm,
-scent of hay, cries of fowls, mingling in a sense of imperturbable
-antiquity--all exhale an intangible emotion impossible to express in
-language, but which a painting or an etching could well convey. Ostade
-has conceived his subject finely; but the acid and the needle have
-imperfectly seconded his design. Rembrandt would have given us out of
-such material a memorable plate indeed. But let us not deny Ostade his
-due. Much in the piece is admirable: note especially the softness with
-which the light comes through the chinks on to the hay.
-
-In _The Angler_ (B. 26, Fig. 10) the difficulties attempted are less
-great, and there seems little wanting to entire success. Here Ostade’s
-human interest is engaged, and whenever this is so, he is great. The
-stationary posture, the muscular habit of the angler, with lax body but
-firm wrist, is perfectly given; as is the slackening of the line, the
-indolent gaze of the boy leaning on the rail, and the sleepy impression
-of a still summer day without breezes.
-
-It is in such expressive drawing of the human body that Ostade shows
-himself a master. The delighted eagerness of the baby in Fig. 4; the
-jerk of its short limbs and crowing of its lips; or in _The Music Party_
-(B. 30), the boisterous, maudlin pleasure of the man who sits in the
-chair, beating time with his hand to the laborious scraping of the
-fiddler, catching what he can of the score, with what humour and
-expression are these portrayed! One hears the terrible discord and the
-cheerful thump of the peasant’s fist accompanying it.
-
-Another piece of imaginative drawing is _The Brawl_ (B. 18). The loose,
-ineffectual, lurching stroke of the drunken man, the startled effort of
-the fat man as he springs up from his barrel, the terror of the woman
-clasping her baby closer, the mingled fear, anger, and surprise of the
-little man who has provoked the quarrel and prepares to defend
-himself--all are excellent.
-
-The same qualities pervade Ostade’s largest plate, the _Dance in the
-Tavern_ (B. 49), which also shows his extraordinary art in composition
-at its best.
-
-There are people, and perhaps always will be, who find in work such as
-Ostade’s nothing but vulgarity. And some, who cannot help enjoying his
-fine drawing, find themselves repelled by his choice of subjects.
-
-It seems difficult to understand this repulsion. For in his etchings, at
-any rate, Ostade shows no exclusive preference for the coarse and
-sordid. Mr. Hamerton has accused him of deadness of heart and apathy of
-intellect, and declares him to be insensitive to all that is best among
-the poor. But is this quite true?
-
-An accomplished lady some time ago wrote an essay in condemnation of the
-“vulgarity” of John Leech and Charles Keene in certain of their drawings
-for _Punch_. Such criticism seems to argue an excessive delicacy or a
-deficiency of humour. Ostade’s range was limited, compared with that of
-those two great artists, but as a draughtsman he is in the same order
-with them; and in the writer’s judgment he is equally free from that
-dulness which has no sense for the fine or rare in men and things, that
-acceptance of the common price, the common standard, which are the
-attributes of real vulgarity.
-
-Look, for instance, at the etching reproduced (Fig. 9). The subject has
-been the theme of many painters and engravers. It is a subject easily
-spoiled; a little too much of sentimental piety, a little too much of
-satirical mockery, and the theme is made trivial or obvious. But
-Ostade’s feeling is just right. There is no drawing of a trite moral,
-as, for instance, in the treatment of the same subject by a later
-engraver, Nicholas van Haeften. Nor is there a hint of mockery at the
-discrepancy between the “good things” for which Heaven is thanked and
-the humble pottage on the table. But is there not, besides the wonderful
-sensitiveness of drawing in the figures, which makes one feel how the
-toil-hardened, clumsy hands tremble awkwardly as they are clasped, and
-how the boy, though his back is turned, is shutting his eyes resolutely
-tight--is there not also a tenderness, a dignity in the whole?
-
-Again, in the little plate, _The Child and Doll_, is there not true
-feeling, expressed with a fine reticence, in the mother’s face and in
-the child’s? The careful fondness of the mother is even better expressed
-in another etching, where she hands a baby down to the eager arms of its
-elder sister, a child of six or seven, who receives it with joyful
-pride. The drawing reminds one of some of the exquisitely humorous and
-exquisitely tender sketches of Leech.
-
-
-V
-
-It is when we come to the work of his pupils, Bega and Dusart, that we
-realise best Ostade’s finer qualities.
-
-Cornelis Pietersz Bega was born at Haarlem in 1620, and died there of
-the plague in 1664, fully twenty years before his master.
-
-According to Houbraken’s story, his real name was Begyn, which he
-changed to Bega after being turned out of his father’s house for his
-youthful escapades. The story is not incredible of such a youth as he
-appears in his portrait, gay and somewhat vain-looking, with long
-curling locks.
-
-Bega’s etchings are thirty-eight in number, and have a very distinctive
-air. Certain characteristics seem to indicate that his original bent was
-towards a decorative treatment of his subject. His drawings show a care
-for the happy disposition of drapery, remarkable in this school. He has
-a feeling for large design, combined with great indifference to human
-character. But such treatment was alien to the Dutch school in general;
-nor did Dutch peasants lend themselves at all willingly, so it seems, to
-passive decoration. Certainly a pupil of Ostade’s would have no
-encouraging influences to help him forward on such lines. So, though
-Bega adopts in part the themes and general handling of his teacher, the
-rather flat design which he affects, his frankly artificial chiaroscuro,
-his use of light and shadow as masses of black and white rather than as
-opportunities of mystery, contrast strongly with Ostade’s solid
-modelling, his pervading atmosphere, and his pre-occupying human
-interest. One perceives that the master’s influence could not altogether
-swamp the pupil’s natural impulse: but neither wins the day, and the
-result is an unsatisfying compromise.
-
-_The Tavern_ (Fig. 11) is a very characteristic plate. It is very
-brilliant, and makes a powerful impression at first sight. But it does
-not bear close study. There is a want of subtlety in it, and a want of
-feeling; a certain hardness, combined with a certain cleverness, that
-repels.
-
-Bega’s two other large plates, also of tavern scenes, reveal just the
-same qualities, and need not be further particularised.
-
-In technical character, these etchings recall the Spanish etcher Goya,
-who was also fond of producing a sharp, vivid, emphatic effect by a
-similar artificial manner of lighting. Not improbably Bega’s etchings
-may have been known to Goya, and given him a suggestion.
-
-Bega had apparently no tenderness, and little or no interest in
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 11.--The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32._]
-
-humanity. This deficiency, in one of the Dutch school, and trained in
-the Dutch tradition, is notable. One has only to turn from his mother
-and baby sitting by the window (B. 21) to Ostade’s _Child and Doll_, to
-feel what a difference lies between the two.
-
-Cornelis Dusart was a much later scholar. At Bega’s death he was only a
-child of four, and he survived Ostade many years, living on till 1704.
-When Ostade died, he finished his master’s uncompleted pictures, but
-kept them till his death in his own possession.
-
-Some of Dusart’s etchings, as for instance _The Village Fête_ (B. 16)
-have a pleasing effect, with well-managed light and shade; but they
-cannot be compared with the similar pieces by Ostade, whose method is
-here carried on, but in an inferior manner. Yet he has a vein of his
-own, a gross, riotous, extravagant vein, with a great fondness for
-violent action. In the plate called by Bartsch _Le Violon Assis_ (B.
-15), which was too large to be reproduced here, his specific qualities
-appear to great advantage.
-
-One seems to hear an hilarious din merely from looking at it. The
-fiddler plays with a wild fantastic energy; one peasant accompanies him
-with crashing tankard and roaring chorus; another sits bent and sullen
-with his head on his hands. The landlord, with huge frame and round
-paunch, looks on with twinkling eyes. A woman by the great chimney, on
-which hangs the notice of a sale of tulips and hyacinths, “Tulpaan en
-Hyacinthen,” calls a child to her. The roomy background with its beams
-and rafters, is drawn and lighted with extraordinary skill. As a page of
-daily life, fresh and vivid, this etching deserves the fullest praise.
-
-Dusart in his later years devoted himself to mezzotint, and produced a
-great deal in this manner. These engravings, some of which represent in
-Dusart’s extravagant way, the joy in Holland at the taking of Namur in
-1695 by William III., are more interesting historically than
-artistically. It was not till the middle of next century that mezzotint,
-the invention of which does not date from much earlier than Dusart’s
-birth, reached its perfection in the hands of the English engravers.
-
-
-
-
-THE ETCHERS OF LANDSCAPE
-
-
-I
-
-The seventeenth century, which inaugurated so much that is
-characteristic in modern art, permitted for the first time the
-recognition of landscape as a subject worthy for its own sake of
-painting. And feeling for landscape seems to be almost entirely a modern
-thing.
-
-Drawings of landscape by Titian and Campagnola among the Italians, and
-by Dürer among the Germans, had indicated the first beginnings of a
-preference; and there are a certain number of landscape subjects among
-the engraved work of the Little Masters. But these are occasional
-efforts by men whose chief work lay in other lines. In painting no one
-ventured as yet to concentrate his interest on the landscape, and though
-men like the Flemish Joachim Patinir evidently cared more for their
-backgrounds of mountain and river than for the human incidents which
-relieve them, they had not the courage to cast away compromise and brave
-authority by omitting the traditional foreground.
-
-Rubens is the first great Northern master who paints landscape with
-entire and frank abandonment to the subject. The broad prospects and
-swelling undulations of Flemish country are painted by him with a kind
-of glory that reflects his large and joyous mind. Lodowyck de Vadder and
-Lucas van Uden, his contemporaries, etched landscape for the first time
-in Flanders. But it was in Holland that this line was most abundantly
-developed. To tranquil, observant natures, such as seem typical of the
-nation, there was in landscape a strong appeal, a permanent delight. The
-majority of the Dutch etchers found here their chief material.
-
-
-II
-
-Earliest, perhaps, of all Dutch landscape painters, and almost certainly
-earliest among Dutch landscape etchers, is a little known artist,
-Hercules Seghers. A mystery hangs over him; for though there is
-documentary evidence in an inventory of 1625 or thereabouts, that he
-painted a considerable number of landscapes, these pictures have nearly
-all disappeared. Some, doubtless, may be lurking under other names; one,
-called a Rembrandt, was discovered some time ago at Florence; one is at
-Berlin; but this can hardly account for all. We can only guess what they
-were like from the etchings, which are usually either views
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 12.--Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236._]
-
-of Holland with vast horizons, or strange visions of wild and
-mountainous country. Seghers was born in 1589,[3] and died in 1650. A
-scholar of Gillis van Connincxloo, he was producing work as early as
-1607, and from that date to 1630 seems to have been his chief period of
-activity.[4] His life, like that of several of the Dutch masters, was a
-long and hopeless struggle against poverty. He is said to have become a
-drunkard, and to have died from the effects of a fall. Dr. Bredius,
-judging apparently from his work, thinks that he must have visited the
-Alps, travelled into Italy, and found a stimulus in the art of Adam
-Elsheimer. Certainly the rocky landscapes which appear in the etchings
-could have no archetypes in Holland. But there is so strong a vein of
-the fantastic in them, that it is difficult to believe they were done
-from nature, especially when one observes how precise a pencil Seghers
-uses when he sketches his native country. However, truth to mountain
-formation is anything but an easy thing to seize; only by incessant
-training and close observation does the eye acquire it; and to draw
-rocks imaginatively, that is, with vivid realisation of their essential
-forms, is scarcely possible to one who has not the work of predecessors
-to learn from and to surpass, and whose eye has not dwelt upon them from
-childhood. One may imagine, therefore, that the efforts of a lowlander,
-to whom mountains must have had something visionary and strange in their
-aspect, would be halting, laborious, and confused in grappling with such
-unfamiliar material. The rocks painted by Patinir are a case in point.
-This may well explain the singular shortcomings of Seghers’ rendering of
-rocks and mountains. In his attempts to represent floating clouds on the
-mountain sides he is simply grotesque.
-
-If, then, it was actual scenery that Seghers etched, where is that
-scenery to be found? It is certainly not the Alps, and though one or two
-plates suggest the Tyrol, the landscape is most like in character to the
-Karst district on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. One of the
-etchings might almost stand for the rock-surrounded plain of Cettinjé,
-in Montenegro, though to infer that Seghers travelled to so remote a
-country would be a wild conjecture.
-
-There can be no doubt, on the other hand, of the influence of Elsheimer
-over Seghers, and through him, over Rembrandt.
-
-In the National Gallery there is a picture by Elsheimer representing
-_Tobias and the Angel_, in a wooded landscape. This was engraved by
-Elsheimer’s friend, Count de Goudt, and either from the picture or the
-engraving,[5] Seghers borrowed the main features of one of his etchings
-(Fig. 12). The two chief figures have been retained almost unaltered;
-but their being placed higher up in the picture makes a considerable
-change in the composition, they have more dignity and significance. The
-elimination, also, of some rather trivial details, such as the great
-flowers in the foreground, and the passing figures in the middle
-distance, make for the same effect. A kind of mystery and solemnity have
-been added to the landscape, and in fact the impression of the whole is
-deepened and enlarged. The subject has been fused in Seghers’ mind and
-has become his own.
-
-At his death, Seghers’ effects, including his etched plates, were sold.
-Among the buyers of these latter were, apparently, Antoni Waterloo and
-Rembrandt. Waterloo published some of Seghers’ landscapes with his own,
-and it has been assumed by Dutuit that these impressions were from the
-earlier artist’s plates, re-worked. Comparison of one of the original
-etchings, however, with that published by Waterloo of the same subject,
-leads the writer to doubt this. The work is entirely different.
-
-Rembrandt, we know from the inventory of his effects taken in 1656,
-bought six of Seghers’ landscapes, and he also bought the copper on
-which had been etched the _Tobias and the Angel_. It was re-worked by
-Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt’s work as a _Flight into
-Egypt_.[6] (See Fig. 13.)
-
-The dark wooded landscape remains unaltered, and though the Holy Family
-and a group of trees now occupy the right hand of the scene, the great
-wing of the angel is still distinctly to be seen above them, and
-Tobias’s legs have not been perfectly erased.
-
-Rembrandt, we may be sure, would never have taken another man’s work
-unless he had found in it a strong appeal to his own nature. And Seghers
-seems to have been his prototype in landscape. On the one hand, the
-mysterious, darkly wooded, mountainous visions of Seghers suggest the
-type of landscape in which Rembrandt set, for instance, his own _Tobias
-and the Angel_,[7] a type which he was fond of reproducing. On the other
-hand, Seghers’ love for the vast distances of Holland, crowded plains
-with broad rivers winding into an infinite horizon, appears again in
-some of Rembrandt’s etchings, and more notably still in those spacious
-prospects, “escapes for the mind” as Mr. Pater has called them, of
-Rembrandt’s pupil, the most truly Dutch and perhaps the greatest, of all
-the landscape painters of Holland--Philip de Koninck.
-
-To return to Seghers’ etchings. There is something about them which
-arrests the eye at once, and this is partly due to their peculiar
-printing. Seghers was a born maker of experiments, and in nearly all his
-plates sought to get an effect of colour. In fact, it is usually
-asserted
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 13.--The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236._]
-
-that he anticipated, by a hundred years, the coloured engravings of
-Leblond.
-
-Printing in colour from two or more blocks had been practised by
-wood-engravers long before this time. Burgkmair and Cranach in Germany,
-Ugo da Carpi and Andrea Andreani in Italy, had produced a number of
-these “chiaroscuros,” as they are called, with charming effect. This was
-about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And almost in Seghers’ own
-time, Hendrik Goltzius, of Haarlem, published some of his best work from
-coloured wood-blocks.
-
-But in all of these cases, at least two, and often three separate blocks
-were used, and the colours superimposed on each other. This was also the
-procedure of Leblond, though he used metal plates and mezzotint.
-
-Seghers, however, employed a single plate only, and his effects are not
-due to what is usually understood as colour printing. He first prepared
-his paper with a coat of paint, which formed the ground; in some cases
-this was a greenish tint. He then etched his subject and printed it in
-an indigo ink; and in order to procure shading of the same colour, he
-lightly scratched the parts to be shaded with the dry-point, so that the
-copper held the ink on its surface. By this simple means he produced an
-apparently complex effect.[8]
-
-The green tint and dark-blue ink are, of course, only taken as a
-specimen, for Seghers used various colours. Sometimes the impressions
-are printed on linen. In one case the etching is printed in white on a
-brown ground.
-
-Besides views of Dutch plains and of mountain scenery, Seghers also
-etched trees; not with great success, but with a striving after truth of
-foliage very rare in his day. Now and then, too, he attempted buildings,
-and with a real feeling for the romantic, for picturesque beauty, in
-architecture.
-
-On the whole, we must allow an important place in the history of Dutch
-landscape to Hercules Seghers. But that must not prevent us from
-perceiving that it is an historical importance only. Seghers opened up
-the road, but he achieved no eminent triumph himself. Nor, in spite of
-his suggestiveness for Rembrandt and De Koninck, does he seem to have
-exercised any great influence on the landscape etchers who immediately
-succeeded him.
-
-He has no affinity with the men whose work we must now consider.
-
-
-III
-
-The two diverging tendencies of Dutch art, that which fed on the Italian
-tradition and that which clung to the native soil, are both to some
-extent represented in Seghers.
-
-Leaving for a time the Italianised masters, let us follow the main
-development of Dutch landscape art, the painters and etchers whom
-Holland alone inspired.
-
-The first names of note are those of Esaias and Jan van de Velde. Jan
-was born in 1596, Esaias a few years earlier. Of the former we shall say
-something later on. He produced a great deal of work, the most
-remarkable part of which is a number of plates engraved and etched in
-the manner of Elsheimer. It is by these plates that he is best known,
-and through them he ranks as one of the Italianised school. As, however,
-he etched a certain number of purely Dutch landscapes, after the designs
-probably of his brother, he must also be mentioned here. These
-landscapes are mostly sets of traditional subjects, such as the
-sixteenth century loved: _The Four Elements_, _The Four Seasons_, _The
-Twelve Months_. Always strongly overworked with the burin, these
-etchings have a somewhat harsh and dry effect. The harshness is
-especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage. It is as if the
-artist were striving to reproduce with the etching-needle the manner of
-line-engraving as employed by the Goltzius school. Failing to secure
-this he has recourse to the burin to supplement his incomplete success
-in etching.
-
-Esaias uses the acid in a much franker fashion. A plate of his, which we
-may take as representative, depicts a whale cast on the shores of
-Holland, perhaps at Scheveningen, in 1614. A great crowd has assembled
-on the beach staring at the stranded monster, examining and measuring
-its vast proportions. The dunes recede in the distance; boats are at
-anchor in the surf.
-
-The scene is treated with the plainness and sincerity characteristic of
-Dutch art. And the etching, with its firmly and rather coarsely bitten
-lines, unsophisticated by the burin, has a solidity and simplicity not
-without attraction.
-
-Regarded as etching, this is primitive work. Still it is genuine
-etching, and by one who has perceived that needle and acid demand an
-employment and an aim different in kind from that of the graver. It is
-interesting, therefore, to compare this plate with the line-engraving of
-a similar subject, representing another whale stranded, a few years
-before, in 1598, by Jacob Matham, the pupil of Goltzius.
-
-With the Van de Veldes it is natural to associate two contemporaries,
-who with them helped to inaugurate the great age of Dutch art; Pieter
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 14.--Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5._]
-
-Molyn, the elder, and Jan van Goyen, the latter born in the same year
-with Jan van de Velde.
-
-Molyn, who was born in London, but was working in Haarlem before 1616,
-is an artist of real independence. A set of etchings, published in 1626,
-shows the same qualities that appear in his drawings--firm
-draughtsmanship, openness and freedom of design, and a fine economy of
-means. Heaths and moors, a climbing country road with plodding waggon, a
-wayside inn, such were the simple elements which he translated into
-always distinguished work. Doubtless to Molyn’s teaching must be
-attributed something of that fine manner which imparts so much charm to
-the pictures of Gerard Ter Borch, his pupil.
-
-Dying in 1656, Molyn survived by a few years one who, though not a
-pupil, came certainly under his influence; Van Goyen. Till lately Van
-Goyen, perhaps because his works are better known, was supposed to have
-been Molyn’s teacher, or at least to have given a stimulus to his art.
-Van Goyen shows more power in his drawings than in his paintings, which
-are sometimes but little removed from sepia monochromes; and it is a
-surprise to come, here and there, upon a picture of his which is bright
-and fresh. The few etchings which he published are undated, but belong,
-according to Dr. Lippman, to his middle life, 1625-30. They
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 15.--Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75._]
-
-have not the character of Molyn’s plates, and are far less good as
-etchings.
-
-Simon de Vlieger, who ranks in date as a younger contemporary of the Van
-de Veldes and of Molyn, is more successful as an etcher in the few
-plates which he produced, than any of the early landscape artists.
-Unhampered by the traditions of the line-engraver, he aims at an effect
-at once delicate and free. As a painter, he is known almost entirely by
-sea-pieces, silvery in tone, from which Jan van de Cappelle drew
-something of his mastery over still effects at sea, mornings of sleepy
-mist through which the sun breaks palely on the sails of anchored
-vessels. Like most of the Dutch painters, de Vlieger changed his home
-several times. Born at Rotterdam in 1600, he was at Delft from 1634 to
-1640, and from then till his death, nineteen years later, at Amsterdam.
-It seems probable that here he gave lessons to the young Willem van de
-Velde, who was afterwards to be famous as the greatest of Dutch
-sea-painters, and who died at Greenwich, a Court painter to Charles II.
-
-In his etchings, which are undated, de Vlieger does not attempt the sea;
-though one (B. 10), a fine piece in its way, is a scene on the
-sea-beach, with fishermen and their haul. The best of the plates are two
-Sylvan pieces, _The Wood by the Canal_ (B. 6), and the _Grassy Hill_ (B.
-7). The foliage is more sensitively treated than it commonly is by Dutch
-etchers, and with more approach to delicate truth. There is also a set
-of animals and poultry; possibly one of the earliest sets of subjects of
-this kind, which the middle of the century found so popular.
-
-
-IV
-
-With Allardt van Everdingen (1621-1675) we reach a new element in Dutch
-landscape. Working under Pieter Molyn at Haarlem, he began by painting
-marine subjects; and with a view to increasing his knowledge of the sea,
-took ship on the Baltic. But a storm drove him to Norway; and there for
-some time, taking advantage of misfortune, he lingered travelling and
-sketching.
-
-Before 1645, however--that is before he was twenty-five, Everdingen was
-back in Haarlem. He now began to paint pictures from his Norwegian
-sketches: and to the Dutch public this northern scenery disclosed a
-novel charm. Used to wide pastures and ample skies, they found a
-romantic strangeness in tumbling streams among rocks and pine-forests,
-where the sky was shut off by mountain slopes.
-
-In 1652 Everdingen removed to Amsterdam, where he remained till his
-death. Probably his fame had preceded him: at any rate his popularity
-soon grew great there also, and his canvases were much sought after.
-
-Besides numerous pictures, the Norwegian sketches provided the artist
-with material for a long series of etchings. Fig. 15 is a very
-characteristic specimen of them. Without any extraordinary qualities,
-they have often a genuine charm. The Norwegian landscape is treated
-with insight into its peculiar features, and though Everdingen fails
-entirely to suggest the rush and foam of torrents, he makes fine use of
-the log cabins, rafts, and palings, and etches pines with truth and
-spirit.
-
-Of a probably later date are the four views of a watering-place,
-possibly Spa, one of which is here reproduced (Fig. 16). The subject is
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 16.--Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B.
-96._]
-
-interesting, and the handling of the buildings and the groups of people
-is excellent.
-
-Everdingen was not without humour, which is shown in the long series of
-illustrations to _Reynard the Fox_. But most readers will probably find
-the chief interest of the artist to lie in his relations with a greater
-man, Ruisdael.
-
-
-V
-
-Though a native of Haarlem, Jacob van Ruisdael produced most of his
-life’s work at Amsterdam. He is conjectured to have been born about
-1625; the precise year has not been discovered. His father Isaak, a
-frame-maker, had him trained as a surgeon; and it was not till after he
-had passed a course of surgery that he abandoned the profession for
-painting, in which he had early shown his gift.
-
-Ruisdael’s first pictures are dated 1646, and his works from that year
-to 1655, his “early period,” are nearly all views of Haarlem and its
-neighbourhood. Thoroughly Dutch in character, they have little of that
-gloomy tone so frequent in the artist’s later time. The beautiful _View
-of Haarlem_ at the Hague, with its massed clouds and ray of sunshine
-gliding over the plain, is a perfect example of this early manner.
-
-With Ruisdael’s removal from Haarlem, a great change comes over his art.
-There seems no doubt that his early Dutch landscapes were not popular.
-They were perhaps too original. He came to Amsterdam poor and without
-much reputation, and he found there, established in fame and popularity,
-Allardt van Everdingen, returned from Norway and now attracting the
-world of buyers by his pictures of that wild and romantic country. It
-was in 1652, as we have seen, that Everdingen settled in the city, and
-three or four years later Ruisdael arrived. He did not become a burgess
-till 1659, but had probably been already some years in residence before
-the formal inscription of his name.
-
-From this period dates the lamentable change in Ruisdael’s art. The
-master, whose native independence is so marked that one is at a loss to
-name his probable teacher, of his own will and in sheer mortification of
-spirit at his want of success, forces himself from the meadows and dunes
-of his delight, and invents, to win the patronage of the rich men of
-Amsterdam, a Norway of his own. A visit to North Germany, of which there
-is some evidence, helped his invention. Now begins the long series of
-waterfalls and pines and torrents so familiar in the picture galleries.
-It is not on these that Ruisdael’s fame rests; on this ground
-Everdingen, in spite of his inferior merits as a painter, remains his
-master. But as the pictures of this period are the most common, the
-public is apt to identify him with this acquired style in which the
-true Ruisdael is obscured. For this reason it was a fortunate choice
-which secured for the National Gallery, two years ago, so exquisite a
-specimen of the painter at his best as the _Shore at Scheveningen_, No.
-1390. The chilly ending of an afternoon, with clouds blowing up and the
-rain beginning, the vexed movement of shallow water as the rising wind
-breaks it into short waves, the wetness of the spray-laden atmosphere,
-are painted with a sensitive subtlety that more modern landscape, with
-all its triumphs, has not excelled. The mood of feeling here expressed
-is intimately Ruisdael’s own. Without the brooding melancholy which
-became oppressively habitual later, which found such grandiose
-expression in pictures like the famous _Jews’ Burying-place_ at Dresden,
-there is here a latent sadness that seems to have been bred in the fibre
-of the man. It seems a kind of expectation of sorrow; the mood that
-poetry with greater intensity has expressed in some lines of Browning
-which suggest themselves:
-
- The rain set early in to-night;
- The sullen wind was soon awake:
- It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
- And did its worst to vex the lake.
- I listened, with heart fit to break....
-
-For such a nature who would predict happiness? Fortune satisfied that
-inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing poverty, and
-the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore the artist
-down. The autumn of 1681 found him ill and helpless; so helpless that
-the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of Mennonites,
-procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem. There he
-lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St. Bavon’s.
-
-
-VI
-
-Ruisdael’s etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number; only
-seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what their
-technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude
-for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it
-far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the _Three Oaks_ (B.
-6), is dated 1649, and it is difficult to assign any of the others,
-except possibly the _Cornfield_, to a later date.
-
-Of the four large plates, the one which Bartsch calls _Les Voyageurs_
-(B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild
-and intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great
-roots of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills
-the left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the
-wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at
-one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael’s strong feeling for old
-trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious,
-inspires him here; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of
-sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the
-difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master and
-the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael never
-succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in
-etched line; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his
-sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh
-and wonderful, make his work always interesting.
-
-The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings of
-the same kind of subject. Though the first, _The Little Bridge_, is not
-a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is
-penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity
-and neglected solitude. The _Three Oaks_ are etched with truth and
-strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger
-plate. The _Cornfield_ (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.
-
-There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the _Three
-Oaks_ and the _Cornfield_. As the later states are by far the more
-common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched,
-and, in the writer’s opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first
-three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire on
-this consummate master of clouds!) has been inserted, and in all there
-is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still
-suggesting an alien hand.
-
-Ruisdael’s etching is little more than an illustration of his painting;
-criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the
-other.
-
-Ruisdael’s great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical
-importance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way for
-Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the landscape of
-modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a considerable
-figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive waterfalls,
-which too often represent him, his real qualities would have more chance
-of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 17.--The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5._]
-
-more various, more subtle, altogether finer than Hobbema, except when
-Hobbema is at his very best, as in the severely charming _Avenue of
-Middleharnis_. Hobbema often fails to convince, because he has not
-sufficiently felt his subject; and so he will paint a grand sky with the
-wind moving great clouds across it, but when he comes to the trees of
-his foreground he forgets his sky, and paints the branches in a
-breathlessly stiff atmosphere, without the suggestion of a wind. The
-resulting effect is a perplexing heaviness. Ruisdael betrays the same
-defect in his later pictures; what else could one expect from one
-condemned to produce unrealities for a market? But in his good period he
-always shows an impressible imagination, and his materials are fused by
-the feeling in which he steeps them. His sense for the beauty of trees
-is profound, though rather limited in its range. He was lacking in the
-consummate style of Crome, and would never have achieved the largeness
-and reticent power of a picture like the English master’s _Avenue at
-Chapel Fields_. But for skies, for clouds, he has an eye more true, a
-love more comprehensive, than those of any who had gone before him, than
-those of many who were to follow him. He piles his clouds in mountainous
-glory, “trailing” their shadows over the wide country, till the level
-pastures of Holland grow in “visionary majesties” like the grandest
-mountains of Norway. This gives us all the more reason to deplore the
-absence of any attempt to deal with clouds in the etchings, still more
-the presence of those inflated shapes inserted by a stupid publisher.
-
-
-VII
-
-Though an important figure in the history of landscape painting,
-Ruisdael did not strongly influence the contemporary etchers of
-landscape. Hobbema, his famous scholar, did not, so far as we know, etch
-at all. A few etchers, however, felt Ruisdael’s stimulus more or less:
-Van Beresteyn, who was working at Haarlem in 1644, and produced some
-etchings somewhat in the manner of Ruisdael’s _Cornfield_, but with a
-mannered treatment of trees: H. Naiwincx, who handled a delicate point,
-and etched a set of graceful plates of woodland and river: and Adriaen
-Verboom, who in his two or three etchings is perhaps more successful in
-treatment of trees than any of the Dutchmen.
-
-But more celebrated than any of these is Antoni Waterloo.
-
-His etchings, to which alone he owes his reputation, are considerably
-over a hundred in number; and as the subjects are monotonous, they soon
-become tedious. Groups of trees by a roadside, or a fringe of wood alone
-occupy Waterloo’s needle. Now and then, as in B. 28, the touch is light
-and the effect pleasant: but having once found a formula, Waterloo is
-content to repeat it. His foliage is hard and heavy.
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 18.--The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der
-Heyden._]
-
-Roelant Roghman (1597-1686), though most of his plates are nominally
-topographical, shows more feeling, if less skill. One set of plates by
-him illustrates the Dutch postal system between the mother country and
-the East Indies, and has therefore an historical interest.
-
-But Roghman’s chief claim on our concern is that he was the faithful and
-beloved friend of Rembrandt. His etchings, however, show no trace of
-Rembrandt’s influence; and he was by ten years the elder man.
-
-Like Seghers and like Ruisdael, Roghman was neglected and miserable in
-his life, and died in an almshouse. One of his landscapes is in the
-National Gallery.
-
-
-VIII
-
-The illustration on page 51 (Fig. 18) is from an etching which
-represents a certain province of Dutch art, handled by several of the
-painters with much success, but scarcely touched by the etchers.
-
-Of this group, to whom architecture, whether in the spacious and austere
-interiors of the Dutch churches, or the squares and ruddy brick
-house-fronts of the towns, was the chief preoccupation, Jan van der
-Heyden is the most famous and the best. He is also the one among them
-who has etched. The illustration, though much reduced, gives a fairly
-good idea of his work. Master of a precise and patient pencil, Van der
-Heyden is not content till he has drawn in every brick, every stone. And
-the marvel is, that in spite of his method, he contrives to convey a
-certain spirit of largeness into his design. In fact, though so minute
-in detail, he seems always to have kept his eye on the whole. A pleasant
-temperate warmth of colour pervades his pictures, the kind of light
-which on certain days suffuses old brick walls, as if dyed in the
-sunshine of many summers: and that exquisite order, the almost
-extravagant cleanliness of Dutch households, makes itself felt in these
-glimpses of tree-bordered canals, and of trim house-fronts with their
-well-proportioned windows.
-
-Much of this colour persists even in the black and white of an etching
-like that reproduced. It is the day after a fire, and a little crowd of
-neighbours is gathered to look on the burnt remnant of the house. How
-
-[Illustration: _Sea Piece. From an etching by L. Backhuysen._]
-
-excellently are the groups and figures depicted! This is not true
-etcher’s work; but it is very skilful work, very good work, of its kind.
-
-Neither Van der Heyden, nor any of the Dutch painters of architecture,
-realised the capacity of outlines in stone or brick, attended by their
-circumstance of light and shadow, to impress the imagination, to stir
-emotion, as Méryon was to do later. But their work, by its soberness and
-firm simplicity, wins us. In its own way, and in its own degree, it will
-always give pleasure.
-
-
-IX
-
-From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth
-century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally
-to be expected: and among the several fine painters who now for the
-first time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and
-Ludolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger
-painted, but did not etch marine subjects; of Jan van de Capelle only
-three indifferent plates are known; and Willem van de Velde did not etch
-at all.
-
-Zeeman’s real name was Nooms; but his love of the sea procured him early
-the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled much, but
-worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born in 1623.
-
-Zeeman’s etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of
-Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They
-passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture,
-commissioned him to do them: and they were evidently popular. Such work,
-nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a
-pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose
-his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher
-as etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.
-
-Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with
-their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an
-endless fascination for him: for it is shipping, rather than the sea
-itself, which he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable
-feeling, a simple and effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of
-war move with royal stateliness; and the battle-pieces have something
-of the magnificence one imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in
-their way are plates like the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at
-morning over the still sea, bathed in a wash of limpid air and sunshine.
-Only in his clouds does Zeeman completely fail. Historically, too, these
-prints are interesting. Here, with patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of
-showing the English ship of the line or frigate, with her sails riddled,
-conquered at last, and with the Dutch tricolour hoisted over the St.
-George’s Cross. Nothing could more
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 19.--Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38._]
-
-vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at the
-time.
-
-Backhuysen’s etchings are later than Zeeman’s, being all produced in
-1701, when the artist was seventy years old,[9] and seven years before
-his death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame
-and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the
-Tsar Peter the Great; and from over much production his work suffered.
-
-The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither
-languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen’s
-drawings. It is the same with Zeeman: probably because the
-etching-needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of
-foam and the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No
-one, till Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight
-of water as the tides move it in deep seas; but the easily agitated,
-breezy motion of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a
-pleasant freshness by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of
-the ship under sail, crushing the water under her bows into foam.
-
-
-X
-
-So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists,
-who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the
-end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of
-painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added
-new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a
-few years.
-
-Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving
-originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a
-second and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.
-
-Jan van de Velde,[10] it seems probable, spent some years of his manhood
-in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any rate, a
-number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer’s manner. These are so
-heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as
-line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or
-less important part in all Jan van de Velde’s prints.
-
-One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by
-Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates
-of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology
-being at fault. Uytenbroeck’s birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode
-has pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist
-who died in 1612. The date must therefore be put back several years.
-Uytenbroeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers.
-The relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types,
-with their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment
-of Italian landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master’s
-art.
-
-Elsheimer’s influence still persists strongly in Cornelis Poelenburg,
-one of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small,
-smoothly glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in
-every
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 20.--Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh.
-B. 17._]
-
-gallery. Poelenburg did not etch himself, but his friend Jan Gerritz
-Bronchorst etched from his paintings and in his style, though with less
-grace and elegance. We find here the beginnings of that school of
-landscape, “Arcadian” as Bode calls it, which so soon received its
-fullest and most perfect expression in the large and tranquil art of
-Claude.
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 21.--Landscape. By Both. B. 3._]
-
-Pieter de Laer, of whose etchings of animals we shall say something in
-the next chapter, etched one landscape at least in the delicate soft
-manner of that master. And with him maybe associated Bartolomeus
-Breenbergh, who lived in Rome from his twenty-first to his twenty-eighth
-year, 1620-1627. He was married at Amsterdam in 1633 and died there in
-1659 or earlier; but was at Rome again in the interval, during which he
-published (1640) a set of very attractive little prints. Fig. 20 is an
-example of his work.
-
-The same delicate, fine needle, and the same preference for the
-picturesque, characterise the earlier etchings of Thomas Wyck. Later he
-adopted a freer, broader style, and worked on a larger scale, but with
-less success.
-
-But the most conspicuous and important of this group is Jan Both. Like
-Poelenburg, he was a man of Utrecht, where he was born in 1610 and where
-he died in 1652. His portrait, taken in his later days at home, is that
-of a stout, grave burgher. Quite young he left the studio of his master
-Bloemart and travelled through France to Rome. There the soft sunshine
-of Claude fascinated him and he began to follow in the footsteps of that
-famous painter.
-
-Every one knows the landscapes of Both, their smooth, rather insipid
-grace, their premeditated balance of composition, their elegant
-monotony. It is certain that they were popular in Holland, whither they
-were brought in ships from Italy to adorn the walls of wealthy buyers.
-Probably in that day such painting of placid sunshine was a new thing;
-what we perceive to be a surface acquaintance with Nature savoured
-almost of intimacy; and doubtless Both’s pretty and monotonous
-conventions had then a permanent charm.
-
-In his etchings, Both’s weaknesses do not appear so strongly. And,
-wisely, he did not produce many. Had there been more they would, beyond
-doubt, have been precisely similar to what we have; and from mere
-fatigue at their monotony one would have rated them below their worth.
-
-As it is, the ten landscapes after his own designs are more than enough
-to reveal Both’s great limitations. Yet they are few enough for us to
-enjoy them. For, after all, they are attractive and accomplished
-etchings. From Claude, Both had learned how to produce, with a nice
-management of the acid, an exquisite softness in his distances. The
-atmosphere is limpid and bathed in sunshine, and the foregrounds are
-suggested with that light touch and selection of detail which are first
-requisites in an etching.
-
-Here, again, it is only fair to the artist to judge him by the early
-states of his work. The ruled lines defacing the sky which they are
-meant to constitute, were added in the second state by the publisher. Of
-that there can be little doubt. Unfortunately, Both’s first states are
-extremely rare.
-
-Both’s pupil, Willem de Heusch, approaches if he does not rival his
-master. He is not independent enough, however, to merit special notice.
-
-Herman van Swanevelt, another artist whose birth-date must be put
-further back than the traditional 1620,[11] lived on to 1690, when he
-died at Rome. His etchings are more considerable in number than in
-merit. He began the school of reminiscences from Claude and Titian’s
-landscapes which lingered on through paler and paler repetitions into
-the eighteenth century, in the sad facility of Genoels and Van der Cabel
-and Glauber. Never was art more bloodless and apathetic than in these
-degenerate spoilers of a fine tradition.
-
-
-
-
-THE ETCHERS OF PASTORAL
-
-
-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
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 22.--A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51._]
-
-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.
-
-
-II
-
-Moses van Uytenbroeck and Claes Moeyart, whose etchings in the style of
-Elsheimer were mentioned earlier, both produced a certain number of
-purely pastoral plates. Of Uytenbroeck, we have a set of groups of
-animals with backgrounds of Campagna landscape, which seem to date from
-early in the century. And in the later manner of Moeyart, dated 1638, is
-a group of cattle, sheep, and goats, under shady trees, in a
-conventional landscape but with an unidealised Dutch herdsman. Neither
-of these men etched cattle with much knowledge or spirit, though
-Moeyart was an artist of many-sided talent, and painted pictures that
-are excellent in their way.
-
-Considerably better is an etching by Jan Gerritz Bleecker, also dated
-1638. It is a group of cattle with a cowherd piping, conceived in the
-pastoral vein of Potter’s _Shepherd_. Here, already, the interest of the
-artist begins to centre on the animals.
-
-In Pieter de Laer this interest is still more frank. Born before 1613,
-de Laer found early a home in Italy, where his pictures were widely
-appreciated. In the same year that we have just mentioned, 1638, he,
-too, published a set of etchings of animals, in which attitude and
-action are caught with far more vivacity and truth than hitherto, while
-the design--though coarsely bitten--is light and free, compared with
-earlier work. Another set of horses, which probably followed this, is
-the prototype of studies like those of Potter’s.
-
-De Laer seems to have been one of the first Dutchmen to import Dutch
-realism and the Dutch method of painting into Italy. The Italians found
-in such art something fresh and vigorous. De Laer soon gained immense
-vogue in the south, and had a corresponding influence on his countrymen
-who came to work there.
-
-Among these, probably, was Claes Pietersz Berchem. It is not known for
-certain whether this artist visited Italy, but the internal evidence of
-his pictures points strongly to the supposition that he did. At any
-rate, Dr. Bredius is convinced of it, and for the present we may safely
-accept the hypothesis on his authority.
-
-Berchem was born at Haarlem in 1620, but was working at Amsterdam before
-1642, in which year his name occurs as member of the Haarlem Guild of
-St. Luke. We also know that he was painted by Rembrandt in 1647.[12] Was
-this before or after his journey to Italy, asks Bredius, and leaves the
-question open. The etchings, however, help us towards an answer. 1644 is
-the date on a set of cattle, with a milkmaid for title; also on the
-_Return from the Fields_ (_L’Homme Monté sur l’Âne_) (B. 5). These are
-etched with fine, delicate short strokes, in a manner afterwards
-abandoned by Berchem. His most celebrated print, however, the so-called
-“Diamond,” or _Joueur de Cornemuse_ (B. 4), and the _Fluting Shepherd_
-(B. 6), are in the delicate early manner, and must be assigned to the
-same date. Now, these are all unmistakably Italian in character. If we
-may assume from Berchem’s pictures that he had been to Italy, we can
-assume it with equal safety from these etchings. We may infer, then,
-that in 1647 he had already returned from Italy. Berchem had many
-pupils, including Karel du Jardin, of whom we shall speak later. He was
-evidently one of the popular artists of the day. It is curious to
-compare the features of the man as they live in
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 23.--Title Piece._ _By Berchem._ _B. 35._]
-
-Rembrandt’s magnificent portrait,[13] with the characteristics of his
-art. It is a face in which, for all its obvious strength, there is a
-want of gentleness, fineness, impressibility; a type of nature that
-succeeds easier in life than in art: for the qualities which count for
-strength in the world count often in art for weakness. And weak, in
-truth, is Berchem the artist.
-
-With his paintings we are not now concerned. Through them he rivalled
-Both in popularity, and for facility and complacency it is hard to say
-which bears the palm. Berchem is quite content to paint the gnarled
-trunk of an oak, the hairy leaf of a burdock, the moss on a stone and
-the stone itself, grass and leaping water, as of the same polished, one
-might almost say, “slimy” texture. So long as he has produced an
-agreeable composition, he is content.
-
-In his etchings, this insensibility to the fine differences in the grain
-and moulding of things, all that goes to give trees and rocks and plants
-the charm and interest of character, is less obviously disclosed. At
-first sight the plates have a pleasant look, they are touched by a
-cunning hand which has attained no common skill in distributing light
-and in grouping. But one has not to look at them long before wearying of
-their emptiness. Berchem etches cows, and sheep, and goats, because they
-make pretty groups in composition--they add to the effect of a pastoral
-landscape; but in themselves he shows no real interest whatever. His
-goats pose; his cows have a look of faded human sentiment; his very
-sheep are foolishly self-conscious. Though they are drawn with a certain
-spirit and with a “touch” that mediocre artists and their admirers
-mistake for an evidence of genius, the main truths in the lines of these
-animal forms escape him.
-
-In fine, Berchem was one of those men who have little of the artist in
-them but skill of hand and facility in assimilation. Having invented or
-concocted a recipe for producing a chosen class of subjects, he is
-perfectly happy in repeating himself as long as the demand continues.
-Berchem lived sixty-three years, and worked hard.
-
-
-III
-
-Who that has seen it can forget the portrait of Paul Potter by his
-friend Van der Helst? The most beautiful portrait of that accomplished
-painter, it has also an impalpable attraction that comes wholly from the
-sitter, and of the many choice pictures in that choice gallery of the
-Hague, the Mauritzhuis, its charm is not the least enduring.
-
-The picture was painted in 1654, when Potter was already near death. A
-certain drooping of the eyelids, a pallor of the face, indicate the
-fatigue which was overmastering his powers. He was not yet thirty when
-he died, but his production had been immense. And in him, as sometimes
-happens, Nature, as if by a kind of anticipation, had brought the inborn
-gift to early flower, a compensation in some sort to the world for its
-early loss.
-
-It was at Enkhuisen, a village on the extreme point of jutting land
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 24.--The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. 1._]
-
-that looks out upon the Zuider Zee, that Paul Potter was born, Nov. 20,
-1625. But only his early boyhood was passed there, for in 1631 his
-father Pieter, also a painter, removed to Amsterdam. From his father the
-boy first learnt to draw, and perhaps from him also inherited the love
-of animals which was so strong in him. M. van Westrheene, in his life of
-Potter, conjectures that he was influenced by two artists, Aelbert
-Klomp and Govert Camphuisen, who painted pictures of the kind that
-Potter made famous. But these men appear to have begun painting too late
-for this to have been possible. Dr. Bredius thinks Claes Moeyart was a
-more likely source of influence. It is known also that at a certain
-period, about 1642, Potter was in the studio of Jacob de Wet at Haarlem.
-But whoever may have taught him, his early ripeness and the strong
-sincerity of his nature assure us that Potter derived little from any
-teacher. With vivid preferences, a habit of subtle observation, and an
-extraordinary skill of hand, he would have been content to repeat no
-master’s formulas, however popular. His first signed picture and his
-first signed etching bear the same date, 1643. He was eighteen years
-old. The etching (B. 14) shows already skill in grouping and a hitherto
-unknown knowledge in etching of animal forms. Its fault is over-much
-elaboration. Three years later Potter was at Delft, and there in 1647,
-at the age of twenty-two, painted his most famous picture, _The Young
-Bull_, now at the Hague. It was one of the pictures carried off by
-Napoleon, and of all those masterpieces from all countries which were
-restored by France in 1815, this was esteemed the second in value. Since
-then its fame has fallen, but with all its obvious demerits it has
-suffered more--to borrow an expression applied by Mr. Swinburne to
-Byron’s Address to Ocean in _Childe Harold_--from praise than from
-dispraise. In 1649 Potter removed to the Hague, and it was here that he
-met his wife, Adriana Balcheneynde, daughter of an architect in that
-town. They were married in the following year. His marriage did not stop
-the artist’s ceaseless industry, but rather increased it by his desire
-to provide for his household. Thinking perhaps to find more patrons
-there than at the Hague, he was induced by Dr. Tulp, the professor of
-anatomy, famous from Rembrandt’s picture, to come to Amsterdam. In a
-letter by a Frenchman who was in Amsterdam at this time, looking for
-pictures on behalf of Queen Christina of Sweden, we have a glimpse of
-Potter in his studio, working with prodigious assiduity. The Frenchman
-found Potter at work on a painting which had already cost him five
-months of continuous toil. “Rien ne se peut voir plus curieusement
-fait,” says the Frenchman. When we consider that the painter produced
-considerably over one hundred pictures in his brief life, it is amazing
-to realise his powers of work. He was only to live two years longer.
-
-
-IV
-
-The etched work of Potter that has come down to us consists of eighteen
-plates; not many, considering how prolific he was as a painter, but all
-the plates are important.
-
-Taking them in chronological order, we have first the etching already
-spoken of, done when the artist was only eighteen, _The Cowherd_ (B.
-14). In 1649, six years after its original execution, the plate was
-reduced in length by Potter and the new date affixed. A reedy hollow,
-with a pool, was substituted for the group of three cows at the left;
-and an alteration was also made in the feet of one of the cows
-descending the hill on the right. The etching, we know, was popular.
-For, after it had been cut down, it was issued by at least three
-publishers in turn; by F. de Wit, by P. Schenk, and by an anonymous
-publisher who effaced the two former names. Probably in the first
-instance it was issued by Potter himself, as was the series of cattle
-published in 1650.
-
-Full of skill in grouping and knowledge of form as this plate is, it is
-certainly inferior to the later etchings. Already, by the next year,
-Potter was able to produce a print, _The Shepherd_ (B. 15) which
-surpasses it in every way, and which to more sound drawing adds a
-pastoral atmosphere of lightness and sunshine and repose.
-
-Berchem, Potter’s senior by five years, was at Haarlem in 1642, when
-Potter, as we know, was in De Wet’s studio. We may assume, therefore,
-that the two met. Perhaps it was in emulation of Berchem’s set of
-etchings, published in 1644, that Potter produced his _Cowherd_ and
-_Shepherd_. If so, he succeeded in surpassing them.
-
-There now occurs an interval of some years in Potter’s etched work. His
-next publication, so far as we know, was the series of eight plates (B.
-1-8) representing cattle, and beginning with the fine _Bull_ (Fig. 24).
-This title-piece is dated 1650, so that we may refer the production of
-the plates to 1649, and possibly the year or two immediately preceding.
-However, the fact that 1649 is the date of the revised _Cowherd_ seems
-to point to Potter’s having resumed his interest in etching in that
-year, and to his having executed the whole set after the re-publication
-of that plate.
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 25.--Studies of a Dog. By Paul Potter. British
-Museum._]
-
-He would hardly issue an immature work, when he had by him much more
-triumphant specimens of his skill.
-
-As studies of animals, these eight little plates are as good as they can
-be. But they are not more than studies. As we saw, it had become a
-fashion for artists to etch such studies, and so spread their fame among
-those who could not buy their pictures. This at once suggests the reason
-of Potter’s deficiency as an etcher. Strictly speaking, he was not an
-etcher at all. He used etching because it was the favourite medium for
-multiplying sketches of his time. But one feels that the burin would
-have been the apter instrument for that sure and cunning hand. There is
-a deliberation, a want of immediacy in these designs, that are not of
-the born etcher. Between the treatment of cattle in these etchings and
-their treatment in line-engraving by Lucas van Leyden there is no
-essential difference.
-
-But we must take things as they are, and as specimens of subtle and
-certain drawing, the plates are astonishing. The attitudes and movements
-of oxen have never been better given. But it is not in mere correctness
-of drawing that Potter excels his rivals. Berchem was only interested in
-animals so far as they helped him in the composition of a landscape, but
-with Potter they were the main interest, he loved them for themselves.
-And in expressing that vague inarticulate soul that is in the look of
-cattle, that mildness and acquiescence which are in their attitudes and
-motions, he is a master, greater than any.
-
-There is something in Dutch landscape, so open, tranquil, large, which
-seems to look for the presence of these peaceful creatures as its
-natural complement; their spirit is so entirely in harmony with the
-spirit of their pastures. Not accidental, perhaps, nor without its due
-effect, was the Dutch strain of blood in the American poet who seems to
-have first suggested in words what Potter expressed in art--
-
- Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain, or halt in the leafy shade,
- What is it that you express in your eyes?
- It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.[14]
-
-Like Whitman, Potter is possessed by the fascination of animals; he,
-too, “stands and looks at them long and long.” And with a feeling so
-reticent that its intensity escapes a superficial notice, he puts into
-these etched lines the breath that moves their bodies, and the dumbness
-that looks out of their eyes.
-
-
-V
-
-Two years after the publication of the cattle series, appeared the five
-larger plates of horses. These have less the air of being mere etched
-studies for pictures; they seem to have been made for their own sake,
-and make a kind of history, such as Tolstoi in the strange story of
-Kohlstomir has written; a kind of Horse’s Progress.
-
-The fourth (B. 12), the _Two Plough Horses_, is reproduced on Plate III.
-This and the _Horse Whinnying_ (B. 10) seem to the writer the finest of
-the series, and the finest of all Potter’s etchings. The work is
-entirely simple and unaffected: there is immense skill, but no apparent
-consciousness of it, still less parade of it. Nothing adventitious is
-brought in, no artifice is used of setting or surrounding: bathed in
-light and air, on their own level pastures, the horses stand clearly
-outlined. But what a feeling of morning freshness, of careless and free
-joy, is in the breeze that tosses the mane of the whinnying horse, and
-makes him tremble with felt vitality! It is a triumph of the untamed
-energy of life. How different a picture from this of the two tired
-creatures, set free from their heavy labour at the plough, but no longer
-rejoicing in their freedom, except as a respite. By some magic of
-sympathy Potter makes us feel the ache of their limbs, stiff with
-fatigue, just as he expresses the patience in their eyes. Yet tender as
-is the feeling of the drawing, it is so restrained that “pity” seems a
-word out of place. It is rather the simple articulation by means of
-sensitive portrayal, of an else inarticulate pathos. Such drawing as
-this is in a true sense imaginative.
-
-The studies of dogs, reproduced in Fig. 25 are an admirable example of
-Potter’s gift. It is interesting to compare them with a drawing by
-Berchem, also in the British Museum, representing a hunting scene, with
-the boar at bay and dogs springing at him or struggling in the leash.
-Unfortunately, it has been impossible to find room for a reproduction
-of it; but whoever looks at it will perceive at once a vital difference
-between such drawing and that of Potter’s. Berchem sketches the scene in
-a rapid, summary manner, using a few strokes only for each figure. It is
-Rembrandt’s method; but what a difference in the result! There is a
-sketch by Rembrandt of a lion springing at and seizing a man on
-horseback. Only a few lines are used, but the whole action of each
-figure is expressed perfectly. Berchem thinks to do the like, but his
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 26.--The Cow. By Paul Potter. B. 3._]
-
-lines are all just beside the truth. His mind, which has not sufficient
-love for things to brood upon their forms, is incapable of the swift act
-of sympathy necessary to seize their movement in action; and its power
-of reproduction, by nature probably a delicate and precise faculty, has
-been warped and blunted by the man’s satisfaction in his own cleverness,
-till it gives an inaccurate image.
-
-Berchem’s work is therefore false, and deserves to be called
-unimaginative. It convinces only the incompetent spectator of things.
-
-Potter’s work is never false, and its imaginative quality is rather
-obscured than absent in his poorer productions. The fact is that, having
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 27.--Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2._]
-
-given the vital image of an animal, he could not resist the temptation
-of adding to it non-essential facts. He had not that transcendent
-intelligence which instinctively practises the economy called “style.”
-But it was on the side of intelligence, certainly not of tenderness or
-sympathy, that he was lacking. He sat down to Nature’s feast, and the
-delight of his eyes seduced him.
-
-Before leaving this plate of the _Two Plough Horses_, we may notice a
-point which does not seem to have been remarked before, that there was
-apparently a kind of tradition of subjects among the animal painters and
-etchers. This plate was published, in the set of horses, in 1652. But in
-a set of etchings published the year before, 1651, by the artist Dirk
-Stoop, this identical subject appears. The horses stand towards the left
-of the plate in precisely the position of Potter’s horses.
-
-Stoop, though as good as many of the Dutch etchers, was no consummate
-draughtsman, and his horses are not to be compared with Potter’s. Yet
-they do not look in the least like a copy, while the dates
-discountenance such a supposition. If there be any direct relation
-between the two etchings it must have been Potter who took a hint from
-Stoop. But it seems equally likely to suppose that the subject, two
-plough-horses released from labour, was a traditional one. The life of
-cattle and horses does not offer more than a certain number of typical
-pictures, and hence the tendency of painters and etchers to repeat the
-same subject, always with an eye to improving on the best yet done; just
-as earlier painters would choose a _Saint Sebastian_ as the typical
-subject in which to display their power of painting the human figure. In
-the same way Potter’s fifth etching of horses, where he depicts the
-forlorn death that overcomes the worn-out beast, has its prototype in a
-similar etching by Pieter de Laer, and the subject is repeated by Du
-Jardin.
-
-The etcher mentioned above, Dirk Stoop, Jed a wandering life, went to
-Lisbon, became painter to the Court there, and, being brought over to
-England with the Infanta, worked also in London. His etchings of horses
-and dogs are less good than those of the court _fêtes_, processions, and
-spectacles at Lisbon, at Hampton Court, and at London.
-
-
-VI
-
-If Potter did not produce many etchings himself, Marcus de Bye, who
-etched in most cases after Potter’s designs, was comparatively prolific.
-He produced over a hundred prints. Some of these,
-
-[Illustration: _Ox and Sheep. From an etching by A. Van de Velde._]
-
-purporting to be after drawings by Potter, are studies, not of cattle
-and sheep or horses, but of wild animals--lions, tigers, and wolves. If
-these could be taken as fairly representative of Potter’s work, we
-should have to infer that Potter was far less fortunate in his drawing
-of wild creatures than of tame. And it would be unlike Potter to have
-made such studies except from the life. De Bye, however, lost a great
-deal of the subtlety and life of his original in working from Potter’s
-sketches. Karel du Jardin is a more independent artist. Born at
-Amsterdam in 1622, he was trained in Berchem’s studio, but went to Italy
-still young. There he found De Laer’s pictures in great esteem, and
-developed a manner and a choice of subject very similar to his. Some
-time before 1656 he returned to Holland, and remained at the Hague till
-1659, when he removed to Amsterdam. There he painted some fine
-portraits, quite unlike his ordinary pictures in style, being stirred to
-emulation presumably by the superb Corporation pieces then produced
-there. In 1675 he started again for Italy, but died three years later in
-Venice.
-
-The British Museum possesses a red-chalk drawing of Du Jardin by
-himself. It is an agreeable portrait, but the face does not suggest much
-power.
-
-Though a pupil of Berchem, Du Jardin in his etchings follows Potter much
-more than that artist. Dr. Lippmann, in fact, speaks of him as “Schuler
-Potters,” but the expression must only mean a follower, not a pupil, of
-Potter.
-
-Twenty-four of Du Jardin’s etchings are dated, the dates being 1652,
-1653, 1655, 1656, 1658, 1659, 1660, and 1675. Only one piece belongs to
-the last year, while the other years have two, three, four, and five
-pieces each. So that, whenever the undated etchings were produced, the
-bulk of Du Jardin’s work on copper may safely be assigned to the eight
-years 1652-1660; that is to say, to the first years after his return to
-Holland, and possibly to the last year or two of his first stay in
-Italy. Most of the etchings are from sketches made in Italy. Fig. 27 is
-an example, and is a good specimen of Du Jardin as an etcher. There is
-nothing very original about such art, but its agreeable qualities will
-always give pleasure. Du Jardin, in his drawing and in his painting, has
-a light and happy touch; yet beyond such craftsman’s merits there is
-little to be said for him. He seems to have painted and etched what was
-the fashion with a facile grace and commendable skill, but without any
-strong inborn love of the subjects he handled.
-
-As an etcher he is of the same order as Potter. A good many of the
-prints are pastoral landscapes; these are less good than those in which
-animals are the main subject. To turn from some of these small landscape
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 28.--Pigs. By K. Du Jardin. B. 15._]
-
-studies of Du Jardin’s, in which nothing is seized strongly while
-everything is made a little dull, to an etching of Rembrandt’s, say
-_Six’s Bridge_, is to receive a most vivid impression of Rembrandt’s
-immense superiority. Rembrandt’s light sketch is instinct with style; Du
-Jardin, in these prints at any rate, has no style at all. Such etchings
-as that of the pigs (Fig. 28) are of far higher quality.
-
-Another etcher from Amsterdam, Adriaen van de Velde, came strongly under
-Potter’s influence. Born in 1635-36 Van de Velde, like Du Jardin,
-studied with Berchem. It has sometimes been assumed that he, too,
-followed up his studies with a journey to Italy, but Dr. Bredius decides
-against this supposition. There is Italian scenery in many of Adriaen’s
-pictures, but there were plenty of fellow artists to borrow materials
-for such backgrounds from. And with him the landscape is never much more
-than a background. His interest lay more in his cattle and his figures
-than in their surrounding. It is known, indeed, that he inserted figures
-for several of the landscape painters, including Ruisdael and Hobbema.
-
-Van de Velde’s etchings are nearly all of cattle, and here he sometimes
-comes near Potter in drawing, while in management of the acid he is
-decidedly Potter’s superior. His earliest dated etching of 1653 is a
-large plate, which though not powerful has a real beauty. The cow which
-forms the centre of the composition is almost identical with that in the
-foreground of Potter’s _Cowherd_. Perhaps this was deliberate imitation,
-and if so, is evidence of the recognition Potter’s knowledge of animal
-form commanded, but it may equally well have been an accident. The whole
-plate is bathed in drowsy sunshine, with which the man asleep by the
-roadside, drawn with an admirable suggestion of repose, harmonises well.
-This print is one of those which must be seen in the silvery earliest
-state to be appreciated.
-
-The original design for this plate is in the British Museum. In the same
-collection is also the design for _The Cow Lying Down_ (B. 2). On the
-same sheet of paper is a study of part of the cow in a slightly altered
-position, and this has been adopted in the etching. Except for this
-insignificant change, the two etchings are copied from the pencil
-studies with entire fidelity. And probably this was always Van de
-Velde’s practice, as it was with Potter and Du Jardin. It is, therefore,
-strictly speaking, incorrect to describe the drawings as being made for
-the etchings. The studies were etched simply that they might be
-multiplied.
-
-None of the studies of cattle, etched by the Dutch masters, surpasses
-Van de Velde’s set of three, numbered 11, 12, and 13 in Bartsch. The
-second is reproduced (Plate IV.). Potter never produced an effect so
-delicate and so rich in colour as Van de Velde in these three etchings.
-At the same time there is no ostentation of skill; rather there seems a
-
-[Illustration: _Fig. 29.--A Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16._]
-
-kind of modesty in the workmanship that is winning. Equally excellent is
-the charming little study of a goat (Fig. 29).
-
-Van de Velde, if not a great artist, was a true one, and his early death
-at the age of thirty-seven was a loss to the art of Holland.
-
-
-
-
-INDEX
-
-
-Altdorfer, 12
-
-Amsterdam Cabinet, Master of, 60
-
-
-Backhuysen, 53, 54, 55
-
-Bartsch, 5, 23
-
-Bassano, 60
-
-Bega, 26, 31, 32
-
-Berchem, 60, 63-65, 68, 71, 72
-
-Beresteyn, C. van, 50
-
-Bleecker, 63
-
-Bode, 13, 55, 56
-
-Both, A. 13
-
-Both, J. 57, 58, 65
-
-Bray, J. de, 18
-
-Bredius, 8, 37, 63, 67, 77
-
-Breenbergh, 57
-
-Bronchorst, 56
-
-Brouwer, 21
-
-Bye, M. de, 74, 75
-
-
-Cabel, A. van der, 48, 58
-
-Callot, 12, 13
-
-Campagnola, 35
-
-Camphuisen, 67
-
-Capelle, J. van de, 43, 53
-
-Caravaggio, 13
-
-Claude, 13, 55, 56, 57
-
-Constable, 49
-
-Cornelis Cornelisz, 18
-
-Crome, 49, 50
-
-
-Du Jardin, 60, 64, 74, 75
-
-Dürer, 11, 35, 60
-
-Dusart, 31, 34
-
-Dutuit, 24, 26, 38
-
-
-Elsheimer, 13, 14, 37, 55
-
-Everdingen, A. van, 44-46
-
-
-Fyt, J., 62
-
-
-Genoels, 58
-
-Glauber, 58
-
-Goltzius, 18, 39
-
-Goudt, Count de, 37
-
-Goya, 32
-
-Goyen, J. van, 42, 43
-
-Gozzoli, 60
-
-Groot, Hofstede de, 8
-
-Grotius, 9
-
-
-Haeften, N. van, 31
-
-Hals, D., 18
-
-Hals, F., 6, 18, 20
-
-Hamerton, 6, 30
-
-Helst, B. van der, 65
-
-Heusch, W. de, 58
-
-Heyden, J. van der, 52, 53
-
-Hirschvogel, 12
-
-Hobbema, 6, 49, 50, 77
-
-Honthorst, 13
-
-Hooch, P. de, 6, 9, 28
-
-Hopfer, 12
-
-
-Keene, 31
-
-Klomp, 66
-
-Koehler, 40
-
-Koninck, P. de, 39
-
-
-Laer, P. de, 57, 63, 74
-
-Lautensack, 12
-
-Leblond, 39, 40
-
-Le Ducq, 5
-
-Leech, 31
-
-Leyden, Lucas van, 62, 70
-
-Lippmann, 43, 75
-
-
-Matham, 42
-
-Metsu, 9
-
-Miel, 13
-
-Moeyart, 62, 67
-
-Molyn, P. de, 42, 43
-
-
-Naiwincx, 50
-
-
-Ostade, A. van, 6, 17-32
-
-
-Pater, Walter, 9, 38
-
-Patinir, 35, 37
-
-Picart, 25
-
-Potter, 6, 60, 62, 63, 65-75, 77
-
-
-Rembrandt, 5, 6, 13, 15, 24, 28, 38, 63, 72, 76
-
-Roghman, 50, 52
-
-Rousseau, Th., 49
-
-Rubens, 11, 14, 15, 35, 60, 61
-
-Ruisdael, 6, 7, 46-50, 77
-
-
-Seghers, H., 36-40
-
-Snyders, 60, 62
-
-Spinoza, 9
-
-Steen, 6, 9
-
-Stoop, 74
-
-Swanevelt, 13, 48, 58
-
-
-Terborch, 9, 42
-
-Theocritus, 62
-
-Titian, 35
-
-Tolstoi, 71
-
-
-Uden, L. van, 35
-
-Uytenbroeck, M. van, 55, 62
-
-
-Vadder, L. de, 35
-
-Vandyck, 15
-
-Velasquez, 13, 60
-
-Velde, A. van de, 60, 77, 78
-
-Velde, E. van de, 18, 41
-
-Velde, J. van de, 41, 55
-
-Velde, W. van de, 44, 53
-
-Verboom, 50
-
-Vermeer, 6, 28
-
-Vlieger, S. de, 43, 53
-
-Vosmaer, 17
-
-
-Waterloo, 5, 38, 48, 50
-
-Watteau, 9
-
-Westrheene, van, 66
-
-Wet, J. de, 67, 68
-
-Whitman, 70
-
-Willigen, van der, 8, 17
-
-Wyck, 57
-
-
-Zeeman, 53, 54
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[1] The last figure is doubtful. It is 8 according to Bartsch and
-Dutuit, but may also be 9.
-
-[2] _Manuel de l’Amateur d’Estampes_: par M. Eugene Dutuit. Vol. V.
-Paris. 1882.
-
-[3] By all the older authorities the date is wrongly given as 1625.
-
-[4] The _Tobias and the Angel_ dates probably from about 1613, or a
-little later, as this was the date of de Goudt’s print.
-
-[5] Probably the engraving, since Seghers’ print is a reverse copy from
-this, but in the same sense as the picture.
-
-[6] No. 236 in Middleton’s Catalogue.
-
-[7] In the National Gallery.
-
-[8] Seghers has also been credited with the use of soft ground etching
-or of aquatint. Examination of the prints shows, however, that the
-effects in question were got either by using acid on the plate, or by
-working in dotted lines, not with the roulette but with the simple
-needle. In ascertaining these facts and in correcting some of his
-first impressions the writer has profited by the knowledge and the
-kind assistance of Mr. S. R. Koehler, Keeper of the Prints at Boston,
-U.S.A., whose authority on such questions is well known.
-
-[9] This assumes him to have been born 1631. Another date given is 1633.
-
-[10] See _supra_: p. 41.
-
-[11] A drawing of his is dated _Paris, 1623_. And according to
-Bertolotti he was in Rome by 1627.
-
-[12] Bredius gives the date as 1644.
-
-[13] Exhibited last winter (1895) at Burlington House by the Duke of
-Westminster.
-
-[14] Compare also a little-known piece of Whitman’s “The Ox-Tamer,” in
-_Autumn Rivulets_, which ends:
-
- Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them ...
- I confess I envy only his fascination--my silent, illiterate friend,
- Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
- In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.
-
-
-
-
-
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-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century</div>
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-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Laurence Binyon</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: February 16, 2021 [eBook #64570]</div>
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-
-<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ***</div>
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<p class="figcenter">
-<a href="images/cover.jpg">
-<img src="images/cover.jpg"
-height="550" alt="[Image of
-the book's cover unavailable.]" /></a>
-</p>
-
-<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""
-style="border: 2px black solid;margin:auto auto;max-width:50%;
-padding:1%;">
-<tr><td class="smcap">
-
-<p class="c">Contents:<br />
-<a href="#OSTADE_AND_HIS_SCHOOL">Ostade And His School</a><br />
-<a href="#THE_ETCHERS_OF_LANDSCAPE">The Etchers of Landscape</a><br />
-<a href="#THE_ETCHERS_OF_PASTORAL">The Etchers of Pastoral</a><br />
-<a href="#INDEX">Index</a></p>
-
-<p class="c"><a href="#LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS">List of Illustrations</a><br /> <span class="nonvis">(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers]
-clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)</span></p>
-
-<p class="c">(etext transcriber's note)</p></td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="plt_1">
-<a href="images/ill_001.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_001.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1">{1}</a></span></p>
-
-<h1>DUTCH ETCHERS<br />
-
-<small><i>OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY</i></small></h1>
-
-<p class="c"><i>By</i><br /><br />
-LAURENCE BINYON<br />
-<small><i>Of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum</i></small>
-<br /><br /><br />
-<img src="images/colophon.png"
-width="200"
-alt=""
-/>
-<br /><br /><br />
-LONDON<br />
-SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND<br />
-NEW YORK, MACMILLAN AND CO.<br />
-1895<br />
-</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2">{2}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3">{3}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
-
-<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><i>PLATES</i></th></tr>
-
-<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#plt_1">The Two Plough Horses. From the etching by Paul Potter. B. 12</a></td>
-<td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#plt_1"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#plt_2">The Wife Spinning. From the etching by A. Van Ostade. B. 31
-</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"> <a href="#page_28"><i>to face</i> 28</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#plt_3">Sea Piece. From the etching by L. Backhuysen. B. 4
-</a></td>
-<td class="rt" valign="bottom"> <span class="ditto"> ” ”</span> <a href="#page_52">52</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#plt_4">Ox and Sheep. From the etching by A. Van de Velde. B. 12
-</a></td>
-<td class="rt" valign="bottom"> <span class="ditto"> ” ”</span> <a href="#page_74">74</a></td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
-
-<tr><th colspan="3"><i>ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT</i></th></tr>
-
-<tr><td><small>FIG.</small></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_001">1.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_001">The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_8">8</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_002">2.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_002">Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_10">10</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_003">3.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_003">Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade. British Museum</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_12">12</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_004">4.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_004">The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_14">14</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_005">5.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_005">Man and Woman Conversing. By Ostade. B. 37</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_16">16</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_006">6.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_006">The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_19">19</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_007">7.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_007">The Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_22">22</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_008">8.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_008">Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B. 42</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_25">25</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_009">9.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_009">Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_27">27</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_010">10.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_010">The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_29">29</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_011">11.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_011">The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_33">33</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_012">12.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_012">Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_36">36</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_013">13.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_013">The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_39">39</a>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4">{4}</a></span></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_014">14.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_014">Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_42">42</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_015">15.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_015">Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_43">43</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_016">16.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_016">Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B. 96</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_45">45</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_017">17.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_017">The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_49">49</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_018">18.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_018">The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der Heyden</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_51">51</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_019">19.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_019">Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_54">54</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_020">20.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_020">Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh. B. 17</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_56">56</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_021">21.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_021">Landscape. By Both. B. 3</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_59">59</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_022">22.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_022">A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_61">61</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_023">23.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_023">Title Piece. By Berchem. B. 35</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_64">64</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_024">24.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_024">The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. 1</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_66">66</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_025">25.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_025">Studies of a Dog. By Paul Potter. British Museum</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_69">69</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_026">26.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_026">The Cow. By Paul Potter. B. 3</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_72">72</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_027">27.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_027">Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_73">73</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_028">28.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_028">Pigs. By K. Du Jardin. B. 15</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_76">76</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#ill_029">29.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_029">A Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_78">78</a></td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5">{5}</a></span></p>
-
-<h1>
-DUTCH ETCHERS<br />
-<small><small>OF</small></small><br />
-THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY<br />
-</h1>
-
-<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2>
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p><span class="smcap">When</span>, towards the close of the last century, Adam Bartsch began that
-monument of his industry and patience, <i>Le Peintre Graveur</i>, he devoted
-the first volumes of his twenty-one, not to the early engravers of
-Germany or Italy, but to the Dutch etchers of the seventeenth century.
-These were, in fact, the idols of the amateur of that day; and the
-indiscriminate praises which Bartsch lavishes on mediocre artists, like
-Waterloo or Le Ducq, sufficiently show how uncontested was their rank,
-and how fashionable their reputation.</p>
-
-<p>Since then their vogue has considerably declined. Rembrandt, of whom
-Bartsch treated in a separate work, is perhaps more admired, more
-studied than he ever was. His etchings, reproduced in more or less
-accurate forms, are not only familiar to artists and to students, but,
-to a certain extent, reach even the general public. But Rembrandt’s
-glory has obscured the fame of his countrymen and contemporaries. Like
-Shakespeare by the side of the lesser Elizabethans, he stands forth
-alone and dazzling, and, though they enjoy a titular renown, they suffer
-a comparative neglect.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6">{6}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Yet, if Rembrandt is by far the greatest, others are great also. The
-following pages are designed to serve as a sort of introduction to the
-more notable among these etchers, in the same way that Mr. Hamerton’s
-monograph, the first of the present series of the <i>Portfolio</i>, was
-intended as an introduction to the etched work of Rembrandt.</p>
-
-<p>And first, let us warn the reader who is familiar perhaps with
-masterpieces like the <i>Christ Healing the Sick</i> and <i>Rembrandt Drawing
-at a Window</i>, <i>Clement de Jonghe</i>, or <i>The Three Trees</i>, but who is not
-yet acquainted with the etchings of Ostade and Paul Potter, not to
-expect too much. Few of these lesser masters approach Rembrandt in the
-specific qualities of the etcher: he is beyond them all in
-draughtsmanship, far beyond them in the intensity of his imagination.
-Yet the best of them must rank high.</p>
-
-<p>It is his immensity of range which marks off Rembrandt, more even than
-his transcendent powers, from the rest of the Dutch etchers. Not only
-did his production exceed by far the most prolific among them, but he
-touched on almost every side of life. Yet he was not the school in
-epitome, as a hasty enthusiasm might affirm. With all his breadth of
-sympathy, his insatiable curiosity, he was not quite universal. The life
-of animals, the growth and beauty of trees, the motion of the
-sea-waves&mdash;none of these attracted Rembrandt deeply. And here, to
-supplement him, we have the work of men like Potter, Backhuysen,
-Ruisdael, each developing his peculiar vein.</p>
-
-<p>All of these etchers whom we have to consider are, however, independent
-of Rembrandt and his influence. The Rembrandt school has been expressly
-excluded from the present monograph. For, interesting as some of those
-artists are, the first thought suggested by their work is that it
-recalls Rembrandt: the second thought, that it is not Rembrandt. It is
-their relation to their master that interests us rather than any
-intrinsic excellence of their own.</p>
-
-<p>Only the independent masters, therefore, are exhibited here; and from
-these groups of etchers several of the greatest names in Dutch art are
-absent. Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Vermeer of Delft, Hobbema, De Hooch&mdash;none
-of these, so far as we know, has left a single plate. Adriaen Brouwer
-etched a few; but they afford only the slightest indications of his
-genius. And Albert Cuyp, who is the author of half a dozen<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7">{7}</a></span> small
-etchings, showed in this line but little of his skill, and did not
-apparently pursue it farther.</p>
-
-<p>Yet the quantity of etched plates produced during this period in Holland
-is immense, and most of the best work was published within the same two
-or three decades. To take a single year, 1652, Potter’s studies of
-horses, a set of cattle by Berchem, several plates by Du Jardin, one of
-the finest pieces of Ostade, <i>La Fileuse</i>, appeared in it; while the
-year following saw the publication of Adriaen van de Velde’s largest
-etching, and Ruisdael’s <i>Three Oaks</i> had been issued but three years
-earlier. Rembrandt’s <i>Tobit Blind</i> is dated 1651, and the <i>Three
-Crosses</i> 1653. This great fecundity has been necessarily a source of
-some embarrassment to the writer; and though a number of minor men have
-been omitted, several etchers have been included, whom for the sake of
-completeness it was necessary to give some account of, but whom it is
-hard to make interesting, and about whom enthusiasm is impossible.</p>
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>Treating, as it does, of so considerable a number of masters, the
-present monograph aims at indicating, as far as space would allow,
-something of the relations between them, and at tracing the
-interdependence of the various schools. To have taken the etchers
-separately and considered their work apart, would have meant the
-compilation of a tediously crowded catalogue.</p>
-
-<p>But when once the masters are approached from the historical side, it is
-impossible to treat them simply as etchers. It is as painters that they
-influenced and were influenced. Consequently some account has had to be
-taken of them as painters. And since some who produced little, and that
-little not very remarkable, in etching, are yet of great significance as
-artists, it has been impossible to treat each man simply on his merits
-as an etcher. Hence, for instance, much more space has been devoted to
-Ruisdael than the quality or the amount of his work on copper strictly
-merits.</p>
-
-<p>The lives of most of these artists have, till recently, rested on a
-somewhat shifting foundation. Dates of birth and death have fluctuated
-in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8">{8}</a></span> various authors with easy rapidity. Of some, even now, nothing
-certain is known.</p>
-
-<p>But the researches of Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede de
-Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved much,
-disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To Dr.
-Bredius’ <i>Meisterwerke der königlichen Gemälde-Galerie im Haag</i>, and</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_001">
-<a href="images/ill_003.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_003.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 1.&mdash;The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">still more to his <i>Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam</i>, the
-writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to
-acknowledge.</p>
-
-<p>But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the
-lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were
-in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or
-exchanged it only for a home a few miles off: Haarlem for Amsterdam,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9">{9}</a></span> or
-Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or spent some
-years in France or Germany; but here the journey itself is sometimes
-only a matter of inference from the painter’s works. Birth, marriage,
-and death: there is little beyond these, and the dates of their
-principal productions, to record about many of these men.</p>
-
-<p>Of the whole social life of the Holland of that day we know practically
-nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings not
-survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this country
-and its history! Most countries that have left us great art have left us
-also great literature, and each is the complement of the other. The
-marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their
-incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recollections,
-gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is the same
-with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the
-flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only
-material we have for investigating and realising that movement.</p>
-
-<p>There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in
-seventeenth-century Holland; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland.
-Besides the names of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not in
-literature proper, not a single author’s name is familiar, nor any book
-eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is certainly
-not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch. Hence
-a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies so
-near us: a remoteness emphasised in England by the general ignorance of
-the language.</p>
-
-<p>When one looks at a picture by Watteau, one seems to be joining in the
-conversation of those adorable ladies and their gallants; half
-instinctively, one seems to divine the witty phrase, the happy
-compliment that is on the speaker’s lips. But the conversations of Ter
-Borch and of Metsu are mute and distant. We hear the jovial laughter of
-Hals, but we cannot divine his jests and oaths. And Van de Velde’s merry
-skating companies, and Ostade’s tavern-haunting peasants, and the family
-groups in their gravely furnished rooms, rich with a sober opulence, of
-De Hooch or of Jan Steen, all, in spite of their human touches and their
-gaiety, affect us with a kind of haunting silence.</p>
-
-<p>Mr. Pater, in one of the most finished and charming of his Imaginary<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10">{10}</a></span>
-Portraits, <i>Sebastian van Storck</i>, called up a picture of the social
-life of these times, very suggestive and delightful; but it was
-noteworthy, how much of it was merely a reconstruction, in words, of
-impressions from the contemporary pictures.</p>
-
-<p>After all, however, our ignorance may not cost us much. We judge the
-painters as painters, and by their works; we are not distracted by</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_002">
-<a href="images/ill_004.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_004.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 2.&mdash;Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">other circumstances about them, and that is an advantage. They may have
-had theories about painting, but fortunately we do not know them, except
-by inference from their practice.</p>
-
-<p>And if seventeenth-century Holland has only expressed herself in
-painting, she has known how to express herself with marvellous fulness.
-Never before, and never perhaps since, has pictorial art been so
-universally the speech of a nation; never has it been more various and
-abundant. Instead of being the handmaid of religion or the adornment of
-a court, it is now for the first time itself: full-blooded, active,
-exuberant, scorning nothing, attempting everything. Modern with all the
-added richness that the modern spirit allows in life and art, it
-reflects the just pride and joy of a great nation arrived, through
-incredible struggle and privation, at victory and peace.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11">{11}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Yet more wonderful even than this abundance is the fine tact, the
-instinctive judgment, which guided such profuse creation.</p>
-
-<p>For in all the great painters of Holland there is the same sure choice
-of subjects proper to painting, the same sure avoidance of what does not
-lend itself so much to painting as to some other expression of art.
-Religious pictures in the old sense, pictures intended for churches,
-were forbidden by the Protestant spirit. No court existed to patronise
-the painters. Yet they seemed unconscious of being cut off from any
-province. In the life around them they found overflowing material, and
-their choice of subject was invariably simple, never a complex product
-like the engravings of Dürer, half literary in their interest; never
-anecdotic or moral. An excellent tradition was begun, which lasted
-through the century.</p>
-
-<p>Nor was this tradition due to the creative impulse of one man. There was
-nothing in Holland parallel to the renovation, the re-creation rather,
-of Flemish art by Rubens. Rembrandt came near the beginning, but he did
-not start the period. One cannot say precisely how this great tradition
-began; it seems as if the flowering time came all at once throughout the
-country, with the mysterious suddenness of spring. Till the seventeenth
-century, it was Italy from which Dutch artists took their inspiration,
-but henceforward it is a native impulse. Only men of lesser importance
-went to paint at Rome, and even then they took there more than they
-brought away.</p>
-
-<h3>III</h3>
-
-<p>Considered as etchers, the Dutch masters range themselves somewhat
-differently.</p>
-
-<p>Only a few, seemingly, realised the specific capacities and limitations
-of etching: the rest regarded it merely as a method of reproducing their
-drawings, as an easier kind of engraving. This was probably the
-conception of those who first applied acid to metal for the purpose of
-reproducing designs, at the beginning of the sixteenth century: the art
-had been formerly employed only in the damascening of swords or armour.
-Albert Dürer is an exception; for, though he did not develop the method
-far, he saw that it required a different kind of handling from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12">{12}</a></span> that
-suitable for the burin; and in his few etched plates the work is freer
-and more open than that of his line-engravings.</p>
-
-<p>The first men to use etching extensively were the Hopfer family of
-Augsburg, who produced a great number of prints, chiefly decorative
-designs.</p>
-
-<p>It was employed in landscape by Altdorfer, Hirschvogel, Lautensack, and
-others among the Little Masters. But these did little more than</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_003">
-<a href="images/ill_005.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_005.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 3.&mdash;Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade.
-British Museum.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">carry on the Nürnberg tradition of engraving, through another medium.
-They had little or no influence on the Dutchmen.</p>
-
-<p>A new and powerful stimulus, however, was to be given to etching with
-the beginning of the seventeenth century, by the prolific and famous
-French artist, Jacques Callot. Born in 1592, Callot produced a great
-mass of work before his death in 1638, and his etchings, by which alone
-he is known, had a great popularity in his lifetime. In 1624 he was
-invited to Brussels by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, and was
-com<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13">{13}</a></span>missioned by her to commemorate the Siege of Breda, an event which
-also occasioned a masterpiece to Velasquez, the famous <i>Lances</i> of
-Madrid. Callot undoubtedly brought the art into prominence and favour in
-the Netherlands. Yet of direct influence over either Flemings or
-Dutchmen, Callot had little or none. His spirit was too essentially
-French, his method too individual, for him to be imitated by men of such
-different race and temperament.</p>
-
-<p>In 1627, however, Callot met, at Nancy, Claude Lorraine, and probably
-instructed him in etching. Claude left Nancy for Italy in the same year,
-and in the following year etched his first plates. Between 1630 and
-1663, he published a considerable number, among them some of exquisite
-delicacy and beauty. And from these etchings many of the Dutchmen derive
-their inspiration; and Claude is said to have employed men like
-Swaneveldt, Andries Both, and Jan Miel for inserting figures in his
-landscapes.</p>
-
-<p>Another foreign master who exercised a widespread influence over the
-Dutch etchers was the German, Adam Elsheimer. Traces of this influence
-pervade the history of Dutch art, as Dr. Bode in his <i>Studien zur
-Geschichte der hollädndischen Malerei</i> has very fully demonstrated.</p>
-
-<p>Elsheimer etched a few plates; but, with all deference to Dr. Bode’s
-authority, we find it difficult to attach to them the importance which
-he gives them. Through the etchings and engravings made from his
-pictures Elsheimer was undoubtedly a source of inspiration to the
-Dutchmen, but scarcely through the rare and by no means remarkable
-plates which he etched himself.</p>
-
-<p>The real importance of Elsheimer, and the secret of his fascination over
-his contemporaries, lie in his fresh treatment of light and shade.
-Problems of lighting occupied his contemporaries, Caravaggio and
-Honthorst, but these devoted their skill chiefly to effects of double
-lighting and strong contrast; it was the rendering of luminous shadow
-and subtle tones of twilight that Elsheimer was the first to attack. In
-this he is a forerunner of Rembrandt, who undoubtedly took suggestions
-from him, and was helped by him in his own development of chiaroscuro.
-Rembrandt cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of what
-Elsheimer had done before him.</p>
-
-<p>But Rembrandt was by no means the only Dutch master who profited<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14">{14}</a></span> by the
-German’s art. The whole of the Italianised Dutch school at Rome, men
-like Poelenburg for instance, felt his influence more or less strongly.
-Nor was he without followers in the native school of landscape painters
-and etchers in Holland, as we shall see when we come to them.</p>
-
-<p>Elsheimer, in fine, though by no means a great painter, is of
-considerable historical importance, and the admiration which he excited
-in his</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_004">
-<a href="images/ill_006.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_006.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 4.&mdash;The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">own day can hardly be over-estimated. So great a man as Rubens admired
-him so much that he had three of his landscapes on his walls, and made
-copies from his paintings and designs.</p>
-
-<p>This is the more remarkable, because Rubens rarely occupied himself with
-the problems that fascinated Elsheimer. And while these problems<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15">{15}</a></span> were
-of a kind to appeal to etchers, it was not on etching but on
-line-engraving, an art admitting little scope for subtlety of
-chiaroscuro, that Rubens cast his potent influence. Without using the
-burin himself, he employed a number of brilliant engravers to reproduce
-his designs, just as Raphael had employed Marc Antonio for the like
-purpose. Even in our day, when public picture-galleries are numerous and
-the distances between various capitals have so immensely shrunk, the
-fame of the great painters rests still to a large extent on photographs
-and engravings from their works; it is easy, therefore, to comprehend of
-what capital importance it was for masters of the sixteenth and
-seventeenth centuries to secure competent interpreters.</p>
-
-<p>Line-engraving was admirably suited for the reproduction of pictures
-like those of Rubens, with their large design and flowing sweep. And so
-potent was Rubens’s example, that etching found in Belgium only a few
-isolated, and with the single exception of Vandyck, unimportant
-followers.</p>
-
-<p>In Holland it was just the reverse. Perhaps it was the result of some
-vital difference in temperament between the Flemings and the Dutchmen,
-such as caused the one country to embrace the severer, soberer religion
-of Protestantism, while the other clung to the more ancient creed of
-Rome, with its strong appeal to the senses; at any rate, it seems
-characteristic that line-engraving, with its capacity for reproducing
-qualities of splendour and spacious action, should have found in Antwerp
-its most effective, various, and brilliant exposition, while the
-plainer, more self-contained, more intense spirit of the great Dutchmen
-developed the more personal, intimate, subtle art of etching, as it had
-never been developed before.</p>
-
-<p>But Dutchmen, no less than Flemings, felt the need for reproducing their
-designs, and here arose a difficulty. For etching is not, in spite of
-modern successes, so well adapted to reproduction as line-engraving is.</p>
-
-<p>As we have said, it was only a certain number of the Dutchmen who
-divined this. Rembrandt, of course, perceived it; and though he spread
-his fame by working steadily on copper as well as on canvas, he made his
-etched work independent of his painting and never a simple reproduction<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16">{16}</a></span>
-of pictures. Lesser men had not the intelligence to do as he did; and
-many of the artists of whom we shall treat, though they produced fine
-work on copper, cannot be esteemed true etchers.</p>
-
-<p>We will begin our studies with one who was, beyond dispute, a born
-etcher, Ostade.</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_005">
-<a href="images/ill_007.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_007.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 5.&mdash;Man and Woman Conversing. By Ostade. B. 37.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17">{17}</a></span></p>
-
-<h2><a name="OSTADE_AND_HIS_SCHOOL" id="OSTADE_AND_HIS_SCHOOL"></a>OSTADE AND HIS SCHOOL</h2>
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p><span class="smcap">Adriaen van Ostade</span> was born in Haarlem, at the end of 1610. The
-researches of Dr. Van der Willigen have placed this fact beyond doubt,
-and the old tradition of his having been born at Lübeck must therefore
-be set aside. In the baptismal register for December 10, 1610, there is
-entered the name of Adriaen, son of Jan Hendricx, of Eyndhoven, and of
-Janneke Hendriksen. On the 2nd of June, 1621, the birth of Isack, son of
-the same parents, is recorded.</p>
-
-<p>These dates have always been associated with the births of the brothers
-Ostade, and there are other grounds for identifying them with the
-Adriaen and Isack just mentioned.</p>
-
-<p>Jan Hendricx was a weaver, and in consequence of the religious
-persecutions of the time, left his native Eyndhoven, a village in North
-Brabant, for Haarlem. This was some time before 1605, for in that year,
-already a burgess of the town, he married. He had several children; and
-in a document of 1650, two of them are mentioned as brother and sister
-to Adriaen and Isack, who are thus proved to have been his sons. The
-name of Ostade was taken from a hamlet close to Eyndhoven. Adriaen is
-first mentioned with this surname as a member of the civic guard, in
-1636.</p>
-
-<p>Haarlem, M. Vosmaer has said, is in two things like Florence. It is a
-city of flowers and a city of artists. Its archives show that from an
-early time the arts flourished and were fostered there. Money was never
-grudged for fine work in every branch of skilful industry, no less than
-for good painting and good sculpture. The goldsmith, the potter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18">{18}</a></span> the
-leather-worker, the stone-cutter, could find employment for their powers
-and remuneration worth their skill. Haarlem was, in fact, a type of
-those busy and prosperous cities where it seems that art thrives best;
-for though art and commerce are often supposed to have a natural
-disagreement, history shows them to have been the most apt companions.</p>
-
-<p>But the city of Dierick Bouts, of Albert van Ouwater, of Jan Scorel, was
-at the time of Ostade’s birth, in a condition even more favourable for
-the production of fine work than it had been in the fifteenth and
-following centuries. In 1573 occurred the famous siege by the Spaniards.
-Those who had borne the burden of those terrible days were now growing
-old; but the young generation received and handed on their heroic
-memories, unembittered by thoughts of loss, suffering, or defeat. And
-when, in 1609, peace came, and the United Provinces, acknowledged by
-Spain, turned to enjoy their victorious repose, there was added the
-sense of triumph to that of trials endured. It was the great time for
-Holland. Her soldiers were famed as the finest in Europe. Her navy was
-the most powerful, the best-manned. Her cities grew, and wealth poured
-into them. A universal well-being pervaded the country, and a spirit of
-joy and of expansion, like the glow of health, diffused itself in the
-citizens.</p>
-
-<p>It was natural that art, too, should feel this new influence. And in
-Haarlem, where the siege had destroyed so much of the old town, and
-modern buildings of warm red brick had sprung round the vast surviving
-monument of the middle ages, the Groote Kerk of St. Bavon; in Haarlem
-especially, a new spirit, intensely modern, began to possess the rising
-painters. From art which lavished its parade of dexterity on the old
-mythological fables, handled without heart or meaning, from the smooth
-and pallid conventionalities of Cornelis Corneliszoon, and the
-extravagant cleverness of Goltzius, these men turned to the life that
-was around them. Among them were artists like Jan de Bray, Esaias van de
-Velde, Dirk and Frans Hals. It was in the studio of Frans Hals that the
-young Ostade learnt to paint. Already in 1616, Hals had painted his
-superb group of the civic guard, and was now in the fulness of his
-extraordinary power. The exuberant joy and energy, the confident
-sincerity, the swift and certain touch, intimate with realities, that
-marked Hals, were typical of the country and the time. Life&mdash;that is
-the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19">{19}</a></span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_006">
-<a href="images/ill_008.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_008.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 6.&mdash;The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20">{20}</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="nind">absolute necessity for such an artist: for him everything that has life
-is a possible subject, a possible realm to conquer. A subject that he
-cannot feel, as well as conceive, his instinct rejects at once. A great
-pride of life is what characterises Hals’ pictures human life in all its
-fulness he accepts: unhindered by the shrinkings of more fastidious
-natures, he enjoys with a robust enjoyment.</p>
-
-<p>It is the same also with Ostade; but the pupil was too individual an
-artist to repeat his master. Ostade felt, perhaps, that he could never
-rival those magnificent portrait-groups, and his own preferences, his
-own gifts, led him to a different choice of subject.</p>
-
-<p>Perhaps some who have seen Ostade’s pictures and found them coarse and
-ignoble, have imagined the painter of them to be equally coarse and
-ignoble-looking as his boors. His portrait shows him a man of somewhat
-severe, keen countenance, in plain attire; a grave man, one would say,
-with humour lurking in his gravity, as often happens; it is a portrait
-that might be taken for that of an Englishman of the Commonwealth.
-Ostade was, in fact, a well-to-do citizen of the middle class. His
-collection of pictures, sold at his death in 1685, was, as we know from
-the <i>Haarlem Gazette</i>, extensive; and the fact that it contained two
-hundred of his own paintings, proves that he was, unlike so many of his
-compeers, far removed from want.</p>
-
-<p>Of Ostade’s life, apart from his production, we know almost nothing. He
-was a member of the <i>Oude Schuts</i>, the ancient and honourable Company of
-Arquebusiers. He was married twice; first, in 1636, to Machtelgen
-Pietersen, who died in 1642; and again to a second wife, whose name is
-not known, by whom he had a girl, Johanna Maria. This daughter married a
-surgeon, Dirk van der Stoel, into whose hands Ostade’s etched plates and
-proofs passed at his death.</p>
-
-<p>In 1647 and 1661 Ostade is mentioned as a member of the government of
-the Guild. In 1662, he was dean of the Guild. An incident of his earlier
-years is of interest, as showing his liberal spirit. In 1642 he joined
-Salomon Ruysdael, at a meeting of the Guild, in protesting against the
-policy of protection, which inspired Haarlem Guild, like many others, to
-oppose the importation of works of art from other towns or their sale in
-Haarlem.</p>
-
-<p>Ostade seems never to have travelled, like many of his countrymen,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21">{21}</a></span>
-beyond the borders of Holland, nor ever to have changed his home, except
-from one street of Haarlem to another.</p>
-
-<p>He died in 1685.</p>
-
-<p>On an early afternoon of May his body was carried from his house in the
-Kuis-straat to the Groote Kerk, a little company of his friends
-following.</p>
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>With most of the Dutch artists, etching was a subordinate
-accomplishment, and their work on copper is but a less interesting
-reflection of their work on canvas. This cannot be said of Ostade. As
-with Rembrandt, his etched work is the complement, rather than a
-supplement merely, of his painting. To the present writer, indeed, his
-etchings have more interest than his pictures. The latter are numerous;
-they may be seen in almost all galleries of importance, and the reader
-is doubtless familiar with their characteristics. Delightful as they
-often are, they do not rival those of Adriaen Brouwer, who was by four
-years Ostade’s senior, and who, though born a Fleming, worked mostly in
-Holland, and entered Hals’ studio at the same time. There are a few
-plates attributed to Brouwer; but, if genuine, these show that he never
-thoroughly mastered the technique of etching; none of them approaches
-the least successful plates of Ostade. Brouwer as a painter, on the
-other hand, surpasses beyond question all the painters of peasant life,
-whether of Holland or of Flanders.</p>
-
-<p>Ostade does not manage paint with the freedom of a great master, but his
-drawing is always superb. The drawing reproduced (Fig. 3) is a
-characteristic specimen. It is the end of a game of backgammon. The game
-is won, but the defeated player refuses to accept his defeat without a
-careful scrutiny. In the attitudes, the gestures of players and
-onlookers, everything is vital; the moment is admirably caught.</p>
-
-<p>There is an etching also of a game of backgammon, but it does not
-directly illustrate the drawing.</p>
-
-<p>Ostade did, however, make use of sketches for his etchings. There is in
-the British Museum a sketch for <i>The Father of a Family</i> (B. 33). A
-comparison of this with the etched plate is interesting. There is a
-certain affinity to Rembrandt in the manner of drawing; less summary and
-swift,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22">{22}</a></span> but masterful and free. And, like Rembrandt, Ostade does not use
-his sketch as a finished thing, and copy it faithfully and minutely. His</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_007">
-<a href="images/ill_009.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_009.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 7.&mdash;The Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">interest in the subject has not died out; he is alert for a new posture,
-a fresh touch, a livelier handling of some part of his design, that may
-im<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23">{23}</a></span>prove the whole. In this case the drawing, which is of a different
-shape from the print and much broader, contains at the left the figure
-of a man seated and cutting a loaf of bread on his knees. Ostade felt
-that this figure disturbed the unity of the piece no less than the sense
-of home seclusion, and he omitted it from his work on the copper. This
-reveals the born etcher: one who works with directness, swiftness,
-passion; whose needle takes the impulse of his thought immediately, who
-never works in cold blood.</p>
-
-<h3>III</h3>
-
-<p>Let us now consider the etchings themselves. There are just fifty in
-all, and nine or perhaps ten of the number are dated. The earliest date
-is 1647, the latest 1678. Arranging the dated plates in order of time,
-we get the following table. The references are to the numbers in
-Bartsch, <i>Peintre-Graveur</i>, Vol. I.:&mdash;</p>
-
-<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
-<tr><td class="cspc">1647.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Hurdy-Gurdy Player. B. 8.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Barn. B. 23.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Family. B. 46.</td></tr>
-<tr><td class="cspc">1648.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Father of the Family. B. 33.</td></tr>
-<tr><td class="cspc">1652.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Wife Spinning. B. 31.</td></tr>
-<tr><td class="cspc">1653.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Tavern Brawl. B. 18.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Saying Grace. B. 34.</td></tr>
-<tr><td class="cspc">1671.</td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Cobbler. B. 27.</td></tr>
-<tr><td class="cspc">1678.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td>The Child and the Doll. B. 16.</td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<p class="nind">To this may possibly be added <i>The Humpbacked Fiddler</i> (B. 44).<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24">{24}</a></span> Neither
-Bartsch nor Dutuit appears to have noticed a date on this plate; but it
-seems clear that it is there, following the signature, though obscured
-by lines. The writer inclines to decipher it as 1631 or 1651; but it is
-impossible to be positive on the point. These data would doubtless serve
-many critics with material for constructing a chronological list of the
-whole of the etchings. But this amusement shall be left to the reader.
-The etchings, as a matter of fact, do not present any marked variety of
-treatment. Ostade was not, like Rembrandt, a master of many styles; nor
-did he develop any particular style by continually surpassing his own
-successes. We can only say that he seems to have attained his greatest
-mastery in a middle period, about 1650. <i>The Wife Spinning</i> of 1652 is
-not followed by any dated piece that at all rivals it. <i>The Cobbler</i> of
-1671, for instance, which was a failure in the first biting, betrays
-also a certain languor of handling, very different from the
-inexhaustible care and skill bestowed on the earlier plate.</p>
-
-<p>This inference is confirmed by what we know of Ostade’s work on canvas.
-His first period dates from 1630 to 1635; then follows a middle period
-in which, influenced by Rembrandt, he adopted a warmer scheme of colour;
-lastly, in a third period, he began to repeat himself and decline.</p>
-
-<p>Beyond such general deductions it does not seem worth while to go. In
-Rembrandt’s case the question of chronology is of extreme interest and
-significance, but in Ostade there is no development to speak of, and to
-labour after exhibiting it would be waste of time.</p>
-
-<p>Next, as to the various states of the etchings. The reverence for first
-states and rare states, common to collectors, has from their point of
-view its own justification; but they are apt perhaps sometimes to
-confuse the æsthetic value of a print with its market value. Artists, on
-the other hand, are sometimes prone to dismiss the whole question of
-states as tedious and absurd. It is, however, of great importance that
-the etcher should be judged on his own merits and not on the merits, or
-demerits, of other people. Ostade undoubtedly made alterations in his
-plates during printing and thus created “states”; but many more states
-were created after his death by other hands re-working the worn copper.</p>
-
-<p>It is reasonable to suppose that the last state touched by the artist is
-the one that he would wish to be taken as typical of his perfect work.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25">{25}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>But the question arises: Which is the last state touched by the artist?</p>
-
-<p>The work of later hands, added to a plate after the artist’s death, does
-not concern us; but the development of the etching up to that state when
-the artist leaves it as a finished thing, must interest us greatly. How
-are we to decide?</p>
-
-<p>In the case of Ostade, we are helped a little by external data. As we</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_008">
-<a href="images/ill_010.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_010.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 8.&mdash;Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B.
-42.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">have seen, the plates were sold at his death in 1685. We know also that
-they were sold again by their new possessor, Dirk van der Stoel,
-Ostade’s son-in-law, in 1686; and eight years later again, in 1694. What
-state they were in then we can only conjecture: but we may infer
-something from what we know to have been their state in 1710 or a little
-later.</p>
-
-<p>In the year just mentioned a French engraver, Bernard Picart, arrived in
-Holland; and some time after his arrival he published a collection of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26">{26}</a></span>
-the etched work of Ostade and of his pupil Bega. The book of Ostade’s
-etchings was bought, perhaps on its publication, by Hans Sloane: and
-through him it has passed into the possession of the British Museum.
-Whoever examines it will notice at once the inequality of the plates:
-some are worn and harshly retouched, some are passable, a few are even
-good. Something of this is due to the delicately-worked plates, giving
-out sooner than those more coarsely etched. Probably also some were more
-in demand than others. Thus, to take a few examples: while <i>The Painter
-in His Studio</i> (B. 32) is in the tenth and last state, and <i>Peasant
-Paying His Reckoning</i> (B. 42) is in the seventh or last but one, <i>The
-Dance in the Tavern</i> (B. 49) is in the fourth out of seven states in
-all, and <i>The Empty Jug</i> (B. 15) in the fourth out of eight states in
-all. And several of the smaller plates are still in the second state.</p>
-
-<p>In determining therefore the extent to which later hands have worked on
-the etchings, each must be considered separately. Only in a few cases,
-probably, are those in Picart’s edition still in the condition left by
-the master himself; and most seem to have been retouched more than once.
-Every one will judge for himself the precise point at which new work
-comes in: and opinion will always differ on such questions. As Ostade
-was not always successful in his first biting, the second state is
-generally the most representative. <i>Peasant Paying His Reckoning</i> is a
-very different thing in Picart’s edition from the brilliant second state
-of the same etching.</p>
-
-<p>The student of Ostade will find Dutuit’s book<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> indispensable: it
-contains all that was known of the etchings and their different
-impressions up to the year of its publication. And the author’s own
-collection was perhaps unrivalled. Nevertheless, it is not perfect. The
-states are described with an extraordinary superfluity of detail, and
-the one or two differentiating circumstances are buried in a mass of
-irrelevant description. Verification is therefore a matter of time and
-labour.</p>
-
-<p>There are also a few states still undescribed. Still, for those who have
-an appetite for “states,” Dutuit is very satisfying.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27">{27}</a></span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_009">
-<a href="images/ill_011.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_011.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 9&mdash;Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28">{28}</a></span></p>
-
-<h3>IV</h3>
-
-<p>Ostade’s etched work is, considered as etching, unequal. Sometimes, as
-for instance in <i>The Cobbler</i> (B. 27), the first biting was not a
-success; at other times, as in the <i>Man Laughing</i> (B. 4), the <i>Saying
-Grace</i> (B. 34), or the <i>Fiddlers</i> (B. 45), the plate has been
-over-bitten. The plate which Bartsch calls <i>La Fileuse</i> (<i>The Wife
-Spinning</i>. B. 31) [Plate I.], is one which represents very fully some of
-Ostade’s characteristic excellences as an etcher. It is a fine example
-of his success in bathing his subject in atmosphere. One feels the quiet
-afternoon warmth upon the cottage-front, as the woman who spins feels
-it, as the child feels it, as the two basking pigs feel it. That
-softness of air, which in our northern climate gives even to the near
-trees a kind of impalpable look, and which seems to clothe things with
-itself&mdash;that is what Ostade has sought to render with mere etched lines;
-and he has triumphed over immense difficulties. His figures detach
-themselves with a wonderful reality, with no hard brilliancy, no
-superfluous shadows. There is a fine absence of cleverness in such quiet
-mastery of means.</p>
-
-<p>More remarkable still is the little plate (B. 42) which is reproduced in
-Fig. 8. The amount of knowledge, of feeling for light and shadow, of
-subtle and sure draughtsmanship in this small etching is astonishing.
-The problem of painting daylight as it is diffused in a room through the
-window, which, of all painters in the world, Jan Vermeer and Pieter de
-Hooch, and, in a different way, Rembrandt and Ostade himself, have most
-fully mastered, is here attacked in etching, and with extraordinary
-success. What seems strange is that a problem so fascinating, one which
-had evidently a strong seduction for Ostade in his painting, should have
-been attempted by him so rarely in his etchings. <i>The Painter in his
-Studio</i> (B. 32) is another success in the same line, while the <i>Players
-at Backgammon</i> (B. 39) is partly a failure, through the biting having
-gone wrong. But, as a rule, Ostade prefers out-of-door effects.</p>
-
-<p>None of the etchings quite rivals, in the writer’s judgment at least,
-this little plate, <i>Peasant Paying his Reckoning</i>. But there are several
-typical small pieces which have a great charm. The <i>Spectacle-seller</i>
-(B. 22, Fig. 1), for instance, is an admirable composition, and the</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="plt_2">
-<a href="images/ill_012.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_012.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29">{29}</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="nind">etching rich. The <i>Humpbacked Fiddler</i> (B. 44, Fig. 7), and the <i>Man and
-Woman Conversing</i> (B. 25, Fig. 5), though the needle has been used
-somewhat differently in each, have similar merit.</p>
-
-<p>But the plates that interest, perhaps, most, are not always those which
-are etched the best. The chief glory of Ostade is his imaginative
-draughtsmanship, and akin to this are his vivid human sympathy and his
-humour. These are not so manifest in the plates we have mentioned as in
-some others.</p>
-
-<p>But before passing to those pieces which show these qualities at their</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_010">
-<a href="images/ill_013.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_013.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 10.&mdash;The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">best, let us notice one which is unlike any of the others. This is <i>The
-Barn</i> (B. 28, Fig. 6). Had the execution of this plate matched the
-feeling it evinces, it would have been a fine achievement. Who does not
-know the strange, vague impression which such a barn as this produces on
-the mind? The cool dimness, the mysterious shadow among the rafters,
-penetrated here and there by soft rays, the atmosphere of the farm,
-scent of hay, cries of fowls, mingling in a sense of imperturbable<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30">{30}</a></span>
-antiquity&mdash;all exhale an intangible emotion impossible to express in
-language, but which a painting or an etching could well convey. Ostade
-has conceived his subject finely; but the acid and the needle have
-imperfectly seconded his design. Rembrandt would have given us out of
-such material a memorable plate indeed. But let us not deny Ostade his
-due. Much in the piece is admirable: note especially the softness with
-which the light comes through the chinks on to the hay.</p>
-
-<p>In <i>The Angler</i> (B. 26, Fig. 10) the difficulties attempted are less
-great, and there seems little wanting to entire success. Here Ostade’s
-human interest is engaged, and whenever this is so, he is great. The
-stationary posture, the muscular habit of the angler, with lax body but
-firm wrist, is perfectly given; as is the slackening of the line, the
-indolent gaze of the boy leaning on the rail, and the sleepy impression
-of a still summer day without breezes.</p>
-
-<p>It is in such expressive drawing of the human body that Ostade shows
-himself a master. The delighted eagerness of the baby in Fig. 4; the
-jerk of its short limbs and crowing of its lips; or in <i>The Music Party</i>
-(B. 30), the boisterous, maudlin pleasure of the man who sits in the
-chair, beating time with his hand to the laborious scraping of the
-fiddler, catching what he can of the score, with what humour and
-expression are these portrayed! One hears the terrible discord and the
-cheerful thump of the peasant’s fist accompanying it.</p>
-
-<p>Another piece of imaginative drawing is <i>The Brawl</i> (B. 18). The loose,
-ineffectual, lurching stroke of the drunken man, the startled effort of
-the fat man as he springs up from his barrel, the terror of the woman
-clasping her baby closer, the mingled fear, anger, and surprise of the
-little man who has provoked the quarrel and prepares to defend
-himself&mdash;all are excellent.</p>
-
-<p>The same qualities pervade Ostade’s largest plate, the <i>Dance in the
-Tavern</i> (B. 49), which also shows his extraordinary art in composition
-at its best.</p>
-
-<p>There are people, and perhaps always will be, who find in work such as
-Ostade’s nothing but vulgarity. And some, who cannot help enjoying his
-fine drawing, find themselves repelled by his choice of subjects.</p>
-
-<p>It seems difficult to understand this repulsion. For in his etchings, at
-any rate, Ostade shows no exclusive preference for the coarse and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31">{31}</a></span>
-sordid. Mr. Hamerton has accused him of deadness of heart and apathy of
-intellect, and declares him to be insensitive to all that is best among
-the poor. But is this quite true?</p>
-
-<p>An accomplished lady some time ago wrote an essay in condemnation of the
-“vulgarity” of John Leech and Charles Keene in certain of their drawings
-for <i>Punch</i>. Such criticism seems to argue an excessive delicacy or a
-deficiency of humour. Ostade’s range was limited, compared with that of
-those two great artists, but as a draughtsman he is in the same order
-with them; and in the writer’s judgment he is equally free from that
-dulness which has no sense for the fine or rare in men and things, that
-acceptance of the common price, the common standard, which are the
-attributes of real vulgarity.</p>
-
-<p>Look, for instance, at the etching reproduced (Fig. 9). The subject has
-been the theme of many painters and engravers. It is a subject easily
-spoiled; a little too much of sentimental piety, a little too much of
-satirical mockery, and the theme is made trivial or obvious. But
-Ostade’s feeling is just right. There is no drawing of a trite moral,
-as, for instance, in the treatment of the same subject by a later
-engraver, Nicholas van Haeften. Nor is there a hint of mockery at the
-discrepancy between the “good things” for which Heaven is thanked and
-the humble pottage on the table. But is there not, besides the wonderful
-sensitiveness of drawing in the figures, which makes one feel how the
-toil-hardened, clumsy hands tremble awkwardly as they are clasped, and
-how the boy, though his back is turned, is shutting his eyes resolutely
-tight&mdash;is there not also a tenderness, a dignity in the whole?</p>
-
-<p>Again, in the little plate, <i>The Child and Doll</i>, is there not true
-feeling, expressed with a fine reticence, in the mother’s face and in
-the child’s? The careful fondness of the mother is even better expressed
-in another etching, where she hands a baby down to the eager arms of its
-elder sister, a child of six or seven, who receives it with joyful
-pride. The drawing reminds one of some of the exquisitely humorous and
-exquisitely tender sketches of Leech.</p>
-
-<h3>V</h3>
-
-<p>It is when we come to the work of his pupils, Bega and Dusart, that we
-realise best Ostade’s finer qualities.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32">{32}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Cornelis Pietersz Bega was born at Haarlem in 1620, and died there of
-the plague in 1664, fully twenty years before his master.</p>
-
-<p>According to Houbraken’s story, his real name was Begyn, which he
-changed to Bega after being turned out of his father’s house for his
-youthful escapades. The story is not incredible of such a youth as he
-appears in his portrait, gay and somewhat vain-looking, with long
-curling locks.</p>
-
-<p>Bega’s etchings are thirty-eight in number, and have a very distinctive
-air. Certain characteristics seem to indicate that his original bent was
-towards a decorative treatment of his subject. His drawings show a care
-for the happy disposition of drapery, remarkable in this school. He has
-a feeling for large design, combined with great indifference to human
-character. But such treatment was alien to the Dutch school in general;
-nor did Dutch peasants lend themselves at all willingly, so it seems, to
-passive decoration. Certainly a pupil of Ostade’s would have no
-encouraging influences to help him forward on such lines. So, though
-Bega adopts in part the themes and general handling of his teacher, the
-rather flat design which he affects, his frankly artificial chiaroscuro,
-his use of light and shadow as masses of black and white rather than as
-opportunities of mystery, contrast strongly with Ostade’s solid
-modelling, his pervading atmosphere, and his pre-occupying human
-interest. One perceives that the master’s influence could not altogether
-swamp the pupil’s natural impulse: but neither wins the day, and the
-result is an unsatisfying compromise.</p>
-
-<p><i>The Tavern</i> (Fig. 11) is a very characteristic plate. It is very
-brilliant, and makes a powerful impression at first sight. But it does
-not bear close study. There is a want of subtlety in it, and a want of
-feeling; a certain hardness, combined with a certain cleverness, that
-repels.</p>
-
-<p>Bega’s two other large plates, also of tavern scenes, reveal just the
-same qualities, and need not be further particularised.</p>
-
-<p>In technical character, these etchings recall the Spanish etcher Goya,
-who was also fond of producing a sharp, vivid, emphatic effect by a
-similar artificial manner of lighting. Not improbably Bega’s etchings
-may have been known to Goya, and given him a suggestion.</p>
-
-<p>Bega had apparently no tenderness, and little or no interest in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33">{33}</a></span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_011">
-<a href="images/ill_014.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_014.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 11.&mdash;The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34">{34}</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="nind">humanity. This deficiency, in one of the Dutch school, and trained in
-the Dutch tradition, is notable. One has only to turn from his mother
-and baby sitting by the window (B. 21) to Ostade’s <i>Child and Doll</i>, to
-feel what a difference lies between the two.</p>
-
-<p>Cornelis Dusart was a much later scholar. At Bega’s death he was only a
-child of four, and he survived Ostade many years, living on till 1704.
-When Ostade died, he finished his master’s uncompleted pictures, but
-kept them till his death in his own possession.</p>
-
-<p>Some of Dusart’s etchings, as for instance <i>The Village Fête</i> (B. 16)
-have a pleasing effect, with well-managed light and shade; but they
-cannot be compared with the similar pieces by Ostade, whose method is
-here carried on, but in an inferior manner. Yet he has a vein of his
-own, a gross, riotous, extravagant vein, with a great fondness for
-violent action. In the plate called by Bartsch <i>Le Violon Assis</i> (B.
-15), which was too large to be reproduced here, his specific qualities
-appear to great advantage.</p>
-
-<p>One seems to hear an hilarious din merely from looking at it. The
-fiddler plays with a wild fantastic energy; one peasant accompanies him
-with crashing tankard and roaring chorus; another sits bent and sullen
-with his head on his hands. The landlord, with huge frame and round
-paunch, looks on with twinkling eyes. A woman by the great chimney, on
-which hangs the notice of a sale of tulips and hyacinths, “Tulpaan en
-Hyacinthen,” calls a child to her. The roomy background with its beams
-and rafters, is drawn and lighted with extraordinary skill. As a page of
-daily life, fresh and vivid, this etching deserves the fullest praise.</p>
-
-<p>Dusart in his later years devoted himself to mezzotint, and produced a
-great deal in this manner. These engravings, some of which represent in
-Dusart’s extravagant way, the joy in Holland at the taking of Namur in
-1695 by William III., are more interesting historically than
-artistically. It was not till the middle of next century that mezzotint,
-the invention of which does not date from much earlier than Dusart’s
-birth, reached its perfection in the hands of the English engravers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35">{35}</a></span></p>
-
-<h2><a name="THE_ETCHERS_OF_LANDSCAPE" id="THE_ETCHERS_OF_LANDSCAPE"></a>THE ETCHERS OF LANDSCAPE</h2>
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> seventeenth century, which inaugurated so much that is
-characteristic in modern art, permitted for the first time the
-recognition of landscape as a subject worthy for its own sake of
-painting. And feeling for landscape seems to be almost entirely a modern
-thing.</p>
-
-<p>Drawings of landscape by Titian and Campagnola among the Italians, and
-by Dürer among the Germans, had indicated the first beginnings of a
-preference; and there are a certain number of landscape subjects among
-the engraved work of the Little Masters. But these are occasional
-efforts by men whose chief work lay in other lines. In painting no one
-ventured as yet to concentrate his interest on the landscape, and though
-men like the Flemish Joachim Patinir evidently cared more for their
-backgrounds of mountain and river than for the human incidents which
-relieve them, they had not the courage to cast away compromise and brave
-authority by omitting the traditional foreground.</p>
-
-<p>Rubens is the first great Northern master who paints landscape with
-entire and frank abandonment to the subject. The broad prospects and
-swelling undulations of Flemish country are painted by him with a kind
-of glory that reflects his large and joyous mind. Lodowyck de Vadder and
-Lucas van Uden, his contemporaries, etched landscape for the first time
-in Flanders. But it was in Holland that this line was most abundantly
-developed. To tranquil, observant natures, such as seem typical of the
-nation, there was in landscape a strong appeal, a permanent delight. The
-majority of the Dutch etchers found here their chief material.</p>
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>Earliest, perhaps, of all Dutch landscape painters, and almost certainly
-earliest among Dutch landscape etchers, is a little known artist,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36">{36}</a></span>
-Hercules Seghers. A mystery hangs over him; for though there is
-documentary evidence in an inventory of 1625 or thereabouts, that he
-painted a considerable number of landscapes, these pictures have nearly
-all disappeared. Some, doubtless, may be lurking under other names; one,
-called a Rembrandt, was discovered some time ago at Florence; one is at
-Berlin; but this can hardly account for all. We can only guess what they
-were like from the etchings, which are usually either views</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_012">
-<a href="images/ill_015.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_015.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 12.&mdash;Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">of Holland with vast horizons, or strange visions of wild and
-mountainous country. Seghers was born in 1589,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> and died in 1650. A
-scholar of Gillis van Connincxloo, he was producing work as early as
-1607, and from that date to 1630 seems to have been his chief period of
-activity.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> His life, like that of several of the Dutch masters, was a
-long and hopeless<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37">{37}</a></span> struggle against poverty. He is said to have become a
-drunkard, and to have died from the effects of a fall. Dr. Bredius,
-judging apparently from his work, thinks that he must have visited the
-Alps, travelled into Italy, and found a stimulus in the art of Adam
-Elsheimer. Certainly the rocky landscapes which appear in the etchings
-could have no archetypes in Holland. But there is so strong a vein of
-the fantastic in them, that it is difficult to believe they were done
-from nature, especially when one observes how precise a pencil Seghers
-uses when he sketches his native country. However, truth to mountain
-formation is anything but an easy thing to seize; only by incessant
-training and close observation does the eye acquire it; and to draw
-rocks imaginatively, that is, with vivid realisation of their essential
-forms, is scarcely possible to one who has not the work of predecessors
-to learn from and to surpass, and whose eye has not dwelt upon them from
-childhood. One may imagine, therefore, that the efforts of a lowlander,
-to whom mountains must have had something visionary and strange in their
-aspect, would be halting, laborious, and confused in grappling with such
-unfamiliar material. The rocks painted by Patinir are a case in point.
-This may well explain the singular shortcomings of Seghers’ rendering of
-rocks and mountains. In his attempts to represent floating clouds on the
-mountain sides he is simply grotesque.</p>
-
-<p>If, then, it was actual scenery that Seghers etched, where is that
-scenery to be found? It is certainly not the Alps, and though one or two
-plates suggest the Tyrol, the landscape is most like in character to the
-Karst district on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. One of the
-etchings might almost stand for the rock-surrounded plain of Cettinjé,
-in Montenegro, though to infer that Seghers travelled to so remote a
-country would be a wild conjecture.</p>
-
-<p>There can be no doubt, on the other hand, of the influence of Elsheimer
-over Seghers, and through him, over Rembrandt.</p>
-
-<p>In the National Gallery there is a picture by Elsheimer representing
-<i>Tobias and the Angel</i>, in a wooded landscape. This was engraved by
-Elsheimer’s friend, Count de Goudt, and either from the picture or the
-engraving,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> Seghers borrowed the main features of one of his etchings<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38">{38}</a></span>
-(Fig. 12). The two chief figures have been retained almost unaltered;
-but their being placed higher up in the picture makes a considerable
-change in the composition, they have more dignity and significance. The
-elimination, also, of some rather trivial details, such as the great
-flowers in the foreground, and the passing figures in the middle
-distance, make for the same effect. A kind of mystery and solemnity have
-been added to the landscape, and in fact the impression of the whole is
-deepened and enlarged. The subject has been fused in Seghers’ mind and
-has become his own.</p>
-
-<p>At his death, Seghers’ effects, including his etched plates, were sold.
-Among the buyers of these latter were, apparently, Antoni Waterloo and
-Rembrandt. Waterloo published some of Seghers’ landscapes with his own,
-and it has been assumed by Dutuit that these impressions were from the
-earlier artist’s plates, re-worked. Comparison of one of the original
-etchings, however, with that published by Waterloo of the same subject,
-leads the writer to doubt this. The work is entirely different.</p>
-
-<p>Rembrandt, we know from the inventory of his effects taken in 1656,
-bought six of Seghers’ landscapes, and he also bought the copper on
-which had been etched the <i>Tobias and the Angel</i>. It was re-worked by
-Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt’s work as a <i>Flight into
-Egypt</i>.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> (See Fig. 13.)</p>
-
-<p>The dark wooded landscape remains unaltered, and though the Holy Family
-and a group of trees now occupy the right hand of the scene, the great
-wing of the angel is still distinctly to be seen above them, and
-Tobias’s legs have not been perfectly erased.</p>
-
-<p>Rembrandt, we may be sure, would never have taken another man’s work
-unless he had found in it a strong appeal to his own nature. And Seghers
-seems to have been his prototype in landscape. On the one hand, the
-mysterious, darkly wooded, mountainous visions of Seghers suggest the
-type of landscape in which Rembrandt set, for instance, his own <i>Tobias
-and the Angel</i>,<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> a type which he was fond of reproducing. On the other
-hand, Seghers’ love for the vast distances of Holland, crowded plains
-with broad rivers winding into an infinite horizon, appears again in
-some of Rembrandt’s etchings, and more notably still in those spacious
-prospects, “escapes for the mind” as Mr. Pater has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39">{39}</a></span> called them, of
-Rembrandt’s pupil, the most truly Dutch and perhaps the greatest, of all
-the landscape painters of Holland&mdash;Philip de Koninck.</p>
-
-<p>To return to Seghers’ etchings. There is something about them which
-arrests the eye at once, and this is partly due to their peculiar
-printing. Seghers was a born maker of experiments, and in nearly all his
-plates sought to get an effect of colour. In fact, it is usually
-asserted</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_013">
-<a href="images/ill_016.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_016.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 13.&mdash;The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">that he anticipated, by a hundred years, the coloured engravings of
-Leblond.</p>
-
-<p>Printing in colour from two or more blocks had been practised by
-wood-engravers long before this time. Burgkmair and Cranach in Germany,
-Ugo da Carpi and Andrea Andreani in Italy, had produced a number of
-these “chiaroscuros,” as they are called, with charming effect. This was
-about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And almost in Seghers’ own
-time, Hendrik Goltzius, of Haarlem, published some of his best work from
-coloured wood-blocks.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40">{40}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>But in all of these cases, at least two, and often three separate blocks
-were used, and the colours superimposed on each other. This was also the
-procedure of Leblond, though he used metal plates and mezzotint.</p>
-
-<p>Seghers, however, employed a single plate only, and his effects are not
-due to what is usually understood as colour printing. He first prepared
-his paper with a coat of paint, which formed the ground; in some cases
-this was a greenish tint. He then etched his subject and printed it in
-an indigo ink; and in order to procure shading of the same colour, he
-lightly scratched the parts to be shaded with the dry-point, so that the
-copper held the ink on its surface. By this simple means he produced an
-apparently complex effect.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
-
-<p>The green tint and dark-blue ink are, of course, only taken as a
-specimen, for Seghers used various colours. Sometimes the impressions
-are printed on linen. In one case the etching is printed in white on a
-brown ground.</p>
-
-<p>Besides views of Dutch plains and of mountain scenery, Seghers also
-etched trees; not with great success, but with a striving after truth of
-foliage very rare in his day. Now and then, too, he attempted buildings,
-and with a real feeling for the romantic, for picturesque beauty, in
-architecture.</p>
-
-<p>On the whole, we must allow an important place in the history of Dutch
-landscape to Hercules Seghers. But that must not prevent us from
-perceiving that it is an historical importance only. Seghers opened up
-the road, but he achieved no eminent triumph himself. Nor, in spite of
-his suggestiveness for Rembrandt and De Koninck, does he seem to have
-exercised any great influence on the landscape etchers who immediately
-succeeded him.</p>
-
-<p>He has no affinity with the men whose work we must now consider.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41">{41}</a></span></p>
-
-<h3>III</h3>
-
-<p>The two diverging tendencies of Dutch art, that which fed on the Italian
-tradition and that which clung to the native soil, are both to some
-extent represented in Seghers.</p>
-
-<p>Leaving for a time the Italianised masters, let us follow the main
-development of Dutch landscape art, the painters and etchers whom
-Holland alone inspired.</p>
-
-<p>The first names of note are those of Esaias and Jan van de Velde. Jan
-was born in 1596, Esaias a few years earlier. Of the former we shall say
-something later on. He produced a great deal of work, the most
-remarkable part of which is a number of plates engraved and etched in
-the manner of Elsheimer. It is by these plates that he is best known,
-and through them he ranks as one of the Italianised school. As, however,
-he etched a certain number of purely Dutch landscapes, after the designs
-probably of his brother, he must also be mentioned here. These
-landscapes are mostly sets of traditional subjects, such as the
-sixteenth century loved: <i>The Four Elements</i>, <i>The Four Seasons</i>, <i>The
-Twelve Months</i>. Always strongly overworked with the burin, these
-etchings have a somewhat harsh and dry effect. The harshness is
-especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage. It is as if the
-artist were striving to reproduce with the etching-needle the manner of
-line-engraving as employed by the Goltzius school. Failing to secure
-this he has recourse to the burin to supplement his incomplete success
-in etching.</p>
-
-<p>Esaias uses the acid in a much franker fashion. A plate of his, which we
-may take as representative, depicts a whale cast on the shores of
-Holland, perhaps at Scheveningen, in 1614. A great crowd has assembled
-on the beach staring at the stranded monster, examining and measuring
-its vast proportions. The dunes recede in the distance; boats are at
-anchor in the surf.</p>
-
-<p>The scene is treated with the plainness and sincerity characteristic of
-Dutch art. And the etching, with its firmly and rather coarsely bitten
-lines, unsophisticated by the burin, has a solidity and simplicity not
-without attraction.</p>
-
-<p>Regarded as etching, this is primitive work. Still it is genuine
-etching,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42">{42}</a></span> and by one who has perceived that needle and acid demand an
-employment and an aim different in kind from that of the graver. It is
-interesting, therefore, to compare this plate with the line-engraving of
-a similar subject, representing another whale stranded, a few years
-before, in 1598, by Jacob Matham, the pupil of Goltzius.</p>
-
-<p>With the Van de Veldes it is natural to associate two contemporaries,
-who with them helped to inaugurate the great age of Dutch art; Pieter</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_014">
-<a href="images/ill_017.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_017.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 14.&mdash;Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p>Molyn, the elder, and Jan van Goyen, the latter born in the same year
-with Jan van de Velde.</p>
-
-<p>Molyn, who was born in London, but was working in Haarlem before 1616,
-is an artist of real independence. A set of etchings, published in 1626,
-shows the same qualities that appear in his drawings&mdash;firm
-draughtsmanship, openness and freedom of design, and a fine economy of
-means. Heaths and moors, a climbing country road with plodding waggon, a
-wayside inn, such were the simple elements which he translated into
-always distinguished work. Doubtless to Molyn’s teaching must be
-attributed something of that fine manner which imparts so much charm to
-the pictures of Gerard Ter Borch, his pupil.</p>
-
-<p>Dying in 1656, Molyn survived by a few years one who, though not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43">{43}</a></span> a
-pupil, came certainly under his influence; Van Goyen. Till lately Van
-Goyen, perhaps because his works are better known, was supposed to have
-been Molyn’s teacher, or at least to have given a stimulus to his art.
-Van Goyen shows more power in his drawings than in his paintings, which
-are sometimes but little removed from sepia monochromes; and it is a
-surprise to come, here and there, upon a picture of his which is bright
-and fresh. The few etchings which he published are undated, but belong,
-according to Dr. Lippman, to his middle life, 1625-30. They</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_015">
-<a href="images/ill_018.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_018.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 15.&mdash;Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">have not the character of Molyn’s plates, and are far less good as
-etchings.</p>
-
-<p>Simon de Vlieger, who ranks in date as a younger contemporary of the Van
-de Veldes and of Molyn, is more successful as an etcher in the few
-plates which he produced, than any of the early landscape artists.
-Unhampered by the traditions of the line-engraver, he aims at an effect
-at once delicate and free. As a painter, he is known almost entirely by
-sea-pieces, silvery in tone, from which Jan van de Cappelle drew
-something of his mastery over still effects at sea, mornings of sleepy
-mist<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44">{44}</a></span> through which the sun breaks palely on the sails of anchored
-vessels. Like most of the Dutch painters, de Vlieger changed his home
-several times. Born at Rotterdam in 1600, he was at Delft from 1634 to
-1640, and from then till his death, nineteen years later, at Amsterdam.
-It seems probable that here he gave lessons to the young Willem van de
-Velde, who was afterwards to be famous as the greatest of Dutch
-sea-painters, and who died at Greenwich, a Court painter to Charles II.</p>
-
-<p>In his etchings, which are undated, de Vlieger does not attempt the sea;
-though one (B. 10), a fine piece in its way, is a scene on the
-sea-beach, with fishermen and their haul. The best of the plates are two
-Sylvan pieces, <i>The Wood by the Canal</i> (B. 6), and the <i>Grassy Hill</i> (B.
-7). The foliage is more sensitively treated than it commonly is by Dutch
-etchers, and with more approach to delicate truth. There is also a set
-of animals and poultry; possibly one of the earliest sets of subjects of
-this kind, which the middle of the century found so popular.</p>
-
-<h3>IV</h3>
-
-<p>With Allardt van Everdingen (1621-1675) we reach a new element in Dutch
-landscape. Working under Pieter Molyn at Haarlem, he began by painting
-marine subjects; and with a view to increasing his knowledge of the sea,
-took ship on the Baltic. But a storm drove him to Norway; and there for
-some time, taking advantage of misfortune, he lingered travelling and
-sketching.</p>
-
-<p>Before 1645, however&mdash;that is before he was twenty-five, Everdingen was
-back in Haarlem. He now began to paint pictures from his Norwegian
-sketches: and to the Dutch public this northern scenery disclosed a
-novel charm. Used to wide pastures and ample skies, they found a
-romantic strangeness in tumbling streams among rocks and pine-forests,
-where the sky was shut off by mountain slopes.</p>
-
-<p>In 1652 Everdingen removed to Amsterdam, where he remained till his
-death. Probably his fame had preceded him: at any rate his popularity
-soon grew great there also, and his canvases were much sought after.</p>
-
-<p>Besides numerous pictures, the Norwegian sketches provided the artist
-with material for a long series of etchings. Fig. 15 is a very
-characteristic specimen of them. Without any extraordinary qualities,
-they have often<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45">{45}</a></span> a genuine charm. The Norwegian landscape is treated
-with insight into its peculiar features, and though Everdingen fails
-entirely to suggest the rush and foam of torrents, he makes fine use of
-the log cabins, rafts, and palings, and etches pines with truth and
-spirit.</p>
-
-<p>Of a probably later date are the four views of a watering-place,
-possibly Spa, one of which is here reproduced (Fig. 16). The subject is</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_016">
-<a href="images/ill_019.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_019.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 16.&mdash;Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B.
-96.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">interesting, and the handling of the buildings and the groups of people
-is excellent.</p>
-
-<p>Everdingen was not without humour, which is shown in the long series of
-illustrations to <i>Reynard the Fox</i>. But most readers will probably find
-the chief interest of the artist to lie in his relations with a greater
-man, Ruisdael.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46">{46}</a></span></p>
-
-<h3>V</h3>
-
-<p>Though a native of Haarlem, Jacob van Ruisdael produced most of his
-life’s work at Amsterdam. He is conjectured to have been born about
-1625; the precise year has not been discovered. His father Isaak, a
-frame-maker, had him trained as a surgeon; and it was not till after he
-had passed a course of surgery that he abandoned the profession for
-painting, in which he had early shown his gift.</p>
-
-<p>Ruisdael’s first pictures are dated 1646, and his works from that year
-to 1655, his “early period,” are nearly all views of Haarlem and its
-neighbourhood. Thoroughly Dutch in character, they have little of that
-gloomy tone so frequent in the artist’s later time. The beautiful <i>View
-of Haarlem</i> at the Hague, with its massed clouds and ray of sunshine
-gliding over the plain, is a perfect example of this early manner.</p>
-
-<p>With Ruisdael’s removal from Haarlem, a great change comes over his art.
-There seems no doubt that his early Dutch landscapes were not popular.
-They were perhaps too original. He came to Amsterdam poor and without
-much reputation, and he found there, established in fame and popularity,
-Allardt van Everdingen, returned from Norway and now attracting the
-world of buyers by his pictures of that wild and romantic country. It
-was in 1652, as we have seen, that Everdingen settled in the city, and
-three or four years later Ruisdael arrived. He did not become a burgess
-till 1659, but had probably been already some years in residence before
-the formal inscription of his name.</p>
-
-<p>From this period dates the lamentable change in Ruisdael’s art. The
-master, whose native independence is so marked that one is at a loss to
-name his probable teacher, of his own will and in sheer mortification of
-spirit at his want of success, forces himself from the meadows and dunes
-of his delight, and invents, to win the patronage of the rich men of
-Amsterdam, a Norway of his own. A visit to North Germany, of which there
-is some evidence, helped his invention. Now begins the long series of
-waterfalls and pines and torrents so familiar in the picture galleries.
-It is not on these that Ruisdael’s fame rests; on this ground
-Everdingen, in spite of his inferior merits as a painter, remains his
-master. But as the pictures of this period are the most common, the
-public is apt to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47">{47}</a></span> identify him with this acquired style in which the
-true Ruisdael is obscured. For this reason it was a fortunate choice
-which secured for the National Gallery, two years ago, so exquisite a
-specimen of the painter at his best as the <i>Shore at Scheveningen</i>, No.
-1390. The chilly ending of an afternoon, with clouds blowing up and the
-rain beginning, the vexed movement of shallow water as the rising wind
-breaks it into short waves, the wetness of the spray-laden atmosphere,
-are painted with a sensitive subtlety that more modern landscape, with
-all its triumphs, has not excelled. The mood of feeling here expressed
-is intimately Ruisdael’s own. Without the brooding melancholy which
-became oppressively habitual later, which found such grandiose
-expression in pictures like the famous <i>Jews’ Burying-place</i> at Dresden,
-there is here a latent sadness that seems to have been bred in the fibre
-of the man. It seems a kind of expectation of sorrow; the mood that
-poetry with greater intensity has expressed in some lines of Browning
-which suggest themselves:</p>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The rain set early in to-night;<br /></span>
-<span class="i2">The sullen wind was soon awake:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It tore the elm-tops down for spite,<br /></span>
-<span class="i2">And did its worst to vex the lake.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I listened, with heart fit to break....<br /></span>
-</div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p>For such a nature who would predict happiness? Fortune satisfied that
-inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing poverty, and
-the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore the artist
-down. The autumn of 1681 found him ill and helpless; so helpless that
-the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of Mennonites,
-procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem. There he
-lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St. Bavon’s.</p>
-
-<h3>VI</h3>
-
-<p>Ruisdael’s etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number; only
-seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what their
-technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude
-for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it
-far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the <i>Three Oaks</i> (B.
-6),<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48">{48}</a></span> is dated 1649, and it is difficult to assign any of the others,
-except possibly the <i>Cornfield</i>, to a later date.</p>
-
-<p>Of the four large plates, the one which Bartsch calls <i>Les Voyageurs</i>
-(B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild
-and intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great
-roots of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills
-the left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the
-wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at
-one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael’s strong feeling for old
-trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious,
-inspires him here; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of
-sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the
-difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master and
-the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael never
-succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in
-etched line; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his
-sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh
-and wonderful, make his work always interesting.</p>
-
-<p>The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings of
-the same kind of subject. Though the first, <i>The Little Bridge</i>, is not
-a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is
-penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity
-and neglected solitude. The <i>Three Oaks</i> are etched with truth and
-strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger
-plate. The <i>Cornfield</i> (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.</p>
-
-<p>There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the <i>Three
-Oaks</i> and the <i>Cornfield</i>. As the later states are by far the more
-common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched,
-and, in the writer’s opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first
-three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire on
-this consummate master of clouds!) has been inserted, and in all there
-is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still
-suggesting an alien hand.</p>
-
-<p>Ruisdael’s etching is little more than an illustration of his painting;
-criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the
-other.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49">{49}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Ruisdael’s great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical
-importance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way for
-Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the landscape of
-modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a considerable
-figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive waterfalls,
-which too often represent him, his real qualities would have more chance
-of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_017">
-<a href="images/ill_020.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_020.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 17.&mdash;The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">more various, more subtle, altogether finer than Hobbema, except when
-Hobbema is at his very best, as in the severely charming <i>Avenue of
-Middleharnis</i>. Hobbema often fails to convince, because he has not
-sufficiently felt his subject; and so he will paint a grand sky with the
-wind moving great clouds across it, but when he comes to the trees of
-his foreground he forgets his sky, and paints the branches in a
-breathlessly stiff atmosphere, without the suggestion of a wind. The
-resulting effect is a perplexing heaviness. Ruisdael betrays the same
-defect in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50">{50}</a></span> later pictures; what else could one expect from one
-condemned to produce unrealities for a market? But in his good period he
-always shows an impressible imagination, and his materials are fused by
-the feeling in which he steeps them. His sense for the beauty of trees
-is profound, though rather limited in its range. He was lacking in the
-consummate style of Crome, and would never have achieved the largeness
-and reticent power of a picture like the English master’s <i>Avenue at
-Chapel Fields</i>. But for skies, for clouds, he has an eye more true, a
-love more comprehensive, than those of any who had gone before him, than
-those of many who were to follow him. He piles his clouds in mountainous
-glory, “trailing” their shadows over the wide country, till the level
-pastures of Holland grow in “visionary majesties” like the grandest
-mountains of Norway. This gives us all the more reason to deplore the
-absence of any attempt to deal with clouds in the etchings, still more
-the presence of those inflated shapes inserted by a stupid publisher.</p>
-
-<h3>VII</h3>
-
-<p>Though an important figure in the history of landscape painting,
-Ruisdael did not strongly influence the contemporary etchers of
-landscape. Hobbema, his famous scholar, did not, so far as we know, etch
-at all. A few etchers, however, felt Ruisdael’s stimulus more or less:
-Van Beresteyn, who was working at Haarlem in 1644, and produced some
-etchings somewhat in the manner of Ruisdael’s <i>Cornfield</i>, but with a
-mannered treatment of trees: H. Naiwincx, who handled a delicate point,
-and etched a set of graceful plates of woodland and river: and Adriaen
-Verboom, who in his two or three etchings is perhaps more successful in
-treatment of trees than any of the Dutchmen.</p>
-
-<p>But more celebrated than any of these is Antoni Waterloo.</p>
-
-<p>His etchings, to which alone he owes his reputation, are considerably
-over a hundred in number; and as the subjects are monotonous, they soon
-become tedious. Groups of trees by a roadside, or a fringe of wood alone
-occupy Waterloo’s needle. Now and then, as in B. 28, the touch is light
-and the effect pleasant: but having once found a formula, Waterloo is
-content to repeat it. His foliage is hard and heavy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51">{51}</a></span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_018">
-<a href="images/ill_021.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_021.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 18.&mdash;The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der
-Heyden.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52">{52}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Roelant Roghman (1597-1686), though most of his plates are nominally
-topographical, shows more feeling, if less skill. One set of plates by
-him illustrates the Dutch postal system between the mother country and
-the East Indies, and has therefore an historical interest.</p>
-
-<p>But Roghman’s chief claim on our concern is that he was the faithful and
-beloved friend of Rembrandt. His etchings, however, show no trace of
-Rembrandt’s influence; and he was by ten years the elder man.</p>
-
-<p>Like Seghers and like Ruisdael, Roghman was neglected and miserable in
-his life, and died in an almshouse. One of his landscapes is in the
-National Gallery.</p>
-
-<h3>VIII</h3>
-
-<p>The illustration on page 51 (Fig. 18) is from an etching which
-represents a certain province of Dutch art, handled by several of the
-painters with much success, but scarcely touched by the etchers.</p>
-
-<p>Of this group, to whom architecture, whether in the spacious and austere
-interiors of the Dutch churches, or the squares and ruddy brick
-house-fronts of the towns, was the chief preoccupation, Jan van der
-Heyden is the most famous and the best. He is also the one among them
-who has etched. The illustration, though much reduced, gives a fairly
-good idea of his work. Master of a precise and patient pencil, Van der
-Heyden is not content till he has drawn in every brick, every stone. And
-the marvel is, that in spite of his method, he contrives to convey a
-certain spirit of largeness into his design. In fact, though so minute
-in detail, he seems always to have kept his eye on the whole. A pleasant
-temperate warmth of colour pervades his pictures, the kind of light
-which on certain days suffuses old brick walls, as if dyed in the
-sunshine of many summers: and that exquisite order, the almost
-extravagant cleanliness of Dutch households, makes itself felt in these
-glimpses of tree-bordered canals, and of trim house-fronts with their
-well-proportioned windows.</p>
-
-<p>Much of this colour persists even in the black and white of an etching
-like that reproduced. It is the day after a fire, and a little crowd of
-neighbours is gathered to look on the burnt remnant of the house. How</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="plt_3">
-<a href="images/ill_022.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_022.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Sea Piece. From an etching by L. Backhuysen.</i></p>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53">{53}</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="nind">excellently are the groups and figures depicted! This is not true
-etcher’s work; but it is very skilful work, very good work, of its kind.</p>
-
-<p>Neither Van der Heyden, nor any of the Dutch painters of architecture,
-realised the capacity of outlines in stone or brick, attended by their
-circumstance of light and shadow, to impress the imagination, to stir
-emotion, as Méryon was to do later. But their work, by its soberness and
-firm simplicity, wins us. In its own way, and in its own degree, it will
-always give pleasure.</p>
-
-<h3>IX</h3>
-
-<p>From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth
-century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally
-to be expected: and among the several fine painters who now for the
-first time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and
-Ludolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger
-painted, but did not etch marine subjects; of Jan van de Capelle only
-three indifferent plates are known; and Willem van de Velde did not etch
-at all.</p>
-
-<p>Zeeman’s real name was Nooms; but his love of the sea procured him early
-the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled much, but
-worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born in 1623.</p>
-
-<p>Zeeman’s etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of
-Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They
-passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture,
-commissioned him to do them: and they were evidently popular. Such work,
-nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a
-pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose
-his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher
-as etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.</p>
-
-<p>Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with
-their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an
-endless fascination for him: for it is shipping, rather than the sea
-itself, which he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable
-feeling, a simple and effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of
-war move with royal<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54">{54}</a></span> stateliness; and the battle-pieces have something
-of the magnificence one imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in
-their way are plates like the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at
-morning over the still sea, bathed in a wash of limpid air and sunshine.
-Only in his clouds does Zeeman completely fail. Historically, too, these
-prints are interesting. Here, with patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of
-showing the English ship of the line or frigate, with her sails riddled,
-conquered at last, and with the Dutch tricolour hoisted over the St.
-George’s Cross. Nothing could more</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_019">
-<a href="images/ill_023.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_023.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 19.&mdash;Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at the
-time.</p>
-
-<p>Backhuysen’s etchings are later than Zeeman’s, being all produced in
-1701, when the artist was seventy years old,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> and seven years before
-his death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame
-and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the
-Tsar Peter the Great; and from over much production his work suffered.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55">{55}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither
-languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen’s
-drawings. It is the same with Zeeman: probably because the
-etching-needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of
-foam and the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No
-one, till Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight
-of water as the tides move it in deep seas; but the easily agitated,
-breezy motion of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a
-pleasant freshness by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of
-the ship under sail, crushing the water under her bows into foam.</p>
-
-<h3>X</h3>
-
-<p>So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists,
-who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the
-end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of
-painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added
-new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a
-few years.</p>
-
-<p>Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving
-originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a
-second and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.</p>
-
-<p>Jan van de Velde,<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> it seems probable, spent some years of his manhood
-in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any rate, a
-number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer’s manner. These are so
-heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as
-line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or
-less important part in all Jan van de Velde’s prints.</p>
-
-<p>One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by
-Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates
-of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology
-being at fault. Uytenbroeck’s birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode
-has pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist
-who died in 1612. The date must therefore be put back several years.
-Uytenbroeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers.
-The<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56">{56}</a></span> relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types,
-with their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment
-of Italian landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master’s
-art.</p>
-
-<p>Elsheimer’s influence still persists strongly in Cornelis Poelenburg,
-one of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small,
-smoothly glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in
-every</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_020">
-<a href="images/ill_024.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_024.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 20.&mdash;Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh.
-B. 17.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">gallery. Poelenburg did not etch himself, but his friend Jan Gerritz
-Bronchorst etched from his paintings and in his style, though with less
-grace and elegance. We find here the beginnings of that school of
-landscape, “Arcadian” as Bode calls it, which so soon received its
-fullest and most perfect expression in the large and tranquil art of
-Claude.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57">{57}</a></span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_021">
-<a href="images/ill_025.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_025.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 21.&mdash;Landscape. By Both. B. 3.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58">{58}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Pieter de Laer, of whose etchings of animals we shall say something in
-the next chapter, etched one landscape at least in the delicate soft
-manner of that master. And with him maybe associated Bartolomeus
-Breenbergh, who lived in Rome from his twenty-first to his twenty-eighth
-year, 1620-1627. He was married at Amsterdam in 1633 and died there in
-1659 or earlier; but was at Rome again in the interval, during which he
-published (1640) a set of very attractive little prints. Fig. 20 is an
-example of his work.</p>
-
-<p>The same delicate, fine needle, and the same preference for the
-picturesque, characterise the earlier etchings of Thomas Wyck. Later he
-adopted a freer, broader style, and worked on a larger scale, but with
-less success.</p>
-
-<p>But the most conspicuous and important of this group is Jan Both. Like
-Poelenburg, he was a man of Utrecht, where he was born in 1610 and where
-he died in 1652. His portrait, taken in his later days at home, is that
-of a stout, grave burgher. Quite young he left the studio of his master
-Bloemart and travelled through France to Rome. There the soft sunshine
-of Claude fascinated him and he began to follow in the footsteps of that
-famous painter.</p>
-
-<p>Every one knows the landscapes of Both, their smooth, rather insipid
-grace, their premeditated balance of composition, their elegant
-monotony. It is certain that they were popular in Holland, whither they
-were brought in ships from Italy to adorn the walls of wealthy buyers.
-Probably in that day such painting of placid sunshine was a new thing;
-what we perceive to be a surface acquaintance with Nature savoured
-almost of intimacy; and doubtless Both’s pretty and monotonous
-conventions had then a permanent charm.</p>
-
-<p>In his etchings, Both’s weaknesses do not appear so strongly. And,
-wisely, he did not produce many. Had there been more they would, beyond
-doubt, have been precisely similar to what we have; and from mere
-fatigue at their monotony one would have rated them below their worth.</p>
-
-<p>As it is, the ten landscapes after his own designs are more than enough
-to reveal Both’s great limitations. Yet they are few enough for us to
-enjoy them. For, after all, they are attractive and accomplished
-etchings. From Claude, Both had learned how to produce, with a nice<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59">{59}</a></span>
-management of the acid, an exquisite softness in his distances. The
-atmosphere is limpid and bathed in sunshine, and the foregrounds are
-suggested with that light touch and selection of detail which are first
-requisites in an etching.</p>
-
-<p>Here, again, it is only fair to the artist to judge him by the early
-states of his work. The ruled lines defacing the sky which they are
-meant to constitute, were added in the second state by the publisher. Of
-that there can be little doubt. Unfortunately, Both’s first states are
-extremely rare.</p>
-
-<p>Both’s pupil, Willem de Heusch, approaches if he does not rival his
-master. He is not independent enough, however, to merit special notice.</p>
-
-<p>Herman van Swanevelt, another artist whose birth-date must be put
-further back than the traditional 1620,<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> lived on to 1690, when he
-died at Rome. His etchings are more considerable in number than in
-merit. He began the school of reminiscences from Claude and Titian’s
-landscapes which lingered on through paler and paler repetitions into
-the eighteenth century, in the sad facility of Genoels and Van der Cabel
-and Glauber. Never was art more bloodless and apathetic than in these
-degenerate spoilers of a fine tradition.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60">{60}</a></span></p>
-
-<h2><a name="THE_ETCHERS_OF_PASTORAL" id="THE_ETCHERS_OF_PASTORAL"></a>THE ETCHERS OF PASTORAL</h2>
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p><span class="smcap">While</span> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>This love of the domestic animals for their own sake in art seems native
-and almost peculiar to Holland.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61">{61}</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_022">
-<a href="images/ill_026.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_026.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 22.&mdash;A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62">{62}</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>“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 <i>Idylls</i> of Theocritus or the <i>Eclogues</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>Moses van Uytenbroeck and Claes Moeyart, whose etchings in the style of
-Elsheimer were mentioned earlier, both produced a certain number of
-purely pastoral plates. Of Uytenbroeck, we have a set of groups of
-animals with backgrounds of Campagna landscape, which seem to date from
-early in the century. And in the later manner of Moeyart, dated 1638, is
-a group of cattle, sheep, and goats, under shady trees, in a
-conventional landscape but with an unidealised Dutch herdsman. Neither
-of these men etched cattle with much knowledge or spirit,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63">{63}</a></span> though
-Moeyart was an artist of many-sided talent, and painted pictures that
-are excellent in their way.</p>
-
-<p>Considerably better is an etching by Jan Gerritz Bleecker, also dated
-1638. It is a group of cattle with a cowherd piping, conceived in the
-pastoral vein of Potter’s <i>Shepherd</i>. Here, already, the interest of the
-artist begins to centre on the animals.</p>
-
-<p>In Pieter de Laer this interest is still more frank. Born before 1613,
-de Laer found early a home in Italy, where his pictures were widely
-appreciated. In the same year that we have just mentioned, 1638, he,
-too, published a set of etchings of animals, in which attitude and
-action are caught with far more vivacity and truth than hitherto, while
-the design&mdash;though coarsely bitten&mdash;is light and free, compared with
-earlier work. Another set of horses, which probably followed this, is
-the prototype of studies like those of Potter’s.</p>
-
-<p>De Laer seems to have been one of the first Dutchmen to import Dutch
-realism and the Dutch method of painting into Italy. The Italians found
-in such art something fresh and vigorous. De Laer soon gained immense
-vogue in the south, and had a corresponding influence on his countrymen
-who came to work there.</p>
-
-<p>Among these, probably, was Claes Pietersz Berchem. It is not known for
-certain whether this artist visited Italy, but the internal evidence of
-his pictures points strongly to the supposition that he did. At any
-rate, Dr. Bredius is convinced of it, and for the present we may safely
-accept the hypothesis on his authority.</p>
-
-<p>Berchem was born at Haarlem in 1620, but was working at Amsterdam before
-1642, in which year his name occurs as member of the Haarlem Guild of
-St. Luke. We also know that he was painted by Rembrandt in 1647.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> Was
-this before or after his journey to Italy, asks Bredius, and leaves the
-question open. The etchings, however, help us towards an answer. 1644 is
-the date on a set of cattle, with a milkmaid for title; also on the
-<i>Return from the Fields</i> (<i>L’Homme Monté sur l’Âne</i>) (B. 5). These are
-etched with fine, delicate short strokes, in a manner afterwards
-abandoned by Berchem. His most celebrated print, however, the so-called
-“Diamond,” or <i>Joueur de Cornemuse</i> (B. 4), and the <i>Fluting Shepherd</i>
-(B. 6), are in the delicate early manner, and must be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64">{64}</a></span> assigned to the
-same date. Now, these are all unmistakably Italian in character. If we
-may assume from Berchem’s pictures that he had been to Italy, we can
-assume it with equal safety from these etchings. We may infer, then,
-that in 1647 he had already returned from Italy. Berchem had many
-pupils, including Karel du Jardin, of whom we shall speak later. He was
-evidently one of the popular artists of the day. It is curious to
-compare the features of the man as they live in</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_023">
-<a href="images/ill_027.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_027.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 23.&mdash;Title Piece.</i> <i>By Berchem.</i> <i>B. 35.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p>Rembrandt’s magnificent portrait,<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> with the characteristics of his
-art. It is a face in which, for all its obvious strength, there is a
-want of gentleness, fineness, impressibility; a type of nature that
-succeeds easier in life than in art: for the qualities which count for
-strength in the world count often in art for weakness. And weak, in
-truth, is Berchem the artist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65">{65}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>With his paintings we are not now concerned. Through them he rivalled
-Both in popularity, and for facility and complacency it is hard to say
-which bears the palm. Berchem is quite content to paint the gnarled
-trunk of an oak, the hairy leaf of a burdock, the moss on a stone and
-the stone itself, grass and leaping water, as of the same polished, one
-might almost say, “slimy” texture. So long as he has produced an
-agreeable composition, he is content.</p>
-
-<p>In his etchings, this insensibility to the fine differences in the grain
-and moulding of things, all that goes to give trees and rocks and plants
-the charm and interest of character, is less obviously disclosed. At
-first sight the plates have a pleasant look, they are touched by a
-cunning hand which has attained no common skill in distributing light
-and in grouping. But one has not to look at them long before wearying of
-their emptiness. Berchem etches cows, and sheep, and goats, because they
-make pretty groups in composition&mdash;they add to the effect of a pastoral
-landscape; but in themselves he shows no real interest whatever. His
-goats pose; his cows have a look of faded human sentiment; his very
-sheep are foolishly self-conscious. Though they are drawn with a certain
-spirit and with a “touch” that mediocre artists and their admirers
-mistake for an evidence of genius, the main truths in the lines of these
-animal forms escape him.</p>
-
-<p>In fine, Berchem was one of those men who have little of the artist in
-them but skill of hand and facility in assimilation. Having invented or
-concocted a recipe for producing a chosen class of subjects, he is
-perfectly happy in repeating himself as long as the demand continues.
-Berchem lived sixty-three years, and worked hard.</p>
-
-<h3>III</h3>
-
-<p>Who that has seen it can forget the portrait of Paul Potter by his
-friend Van der Helst? The most beautiful portrait of that accomplished
-painter, it has also an impalpable attraction that comes wholly from the
-sitter, and of the many choice pictures in that choice gallery of the
-Hague, the Mauritzhuis, its charm is not the least enduring.</p>
-
-<p>The picture was painted in 1654, when Potter was already near death. A
-certain drooping of the eyelids, a pallor of the face, indicate the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66">{66}</a></span>
-fatigue which was overmastering his powers. He was not yet thirty when
-he died, but his production had been immense. And in him, as sometimes
-happens, Nature, as if by a kind of anticipation, had brought the inborn
-gift to early flower, a compensation in some sort to the world for its
-early loss.</p>
-
-<p>It was at Enkhuisen, a village on the extreme point of jutting land</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_024">
-<a href="images/ill_028.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_028.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 24.&mdash;The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. 1.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">that looks out upon the Zuider Zee, that Paul Potter was born, Nov. 20,
-1625. But only his early boyhood was passed there, for in 1631 his
-father Pieter, also a painter, removed to Amsterdam. From his father the
-boy first learnt to draw, and perhaps from him also inherited the love
-of animals which was so strong in him. M. van Westrheene, in his life of
-Potter, conjectures that he was influenced by two artists, Aelbert
-Klomp<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67">{67}</a></span> and Govert Camphuisen, who painted pictures of the kind that
-Potter made famous. But these men appear to have begun painting too late
-for this to have been possible. Dr. Bredius thinks Claes Moeyart was a
-more likely source of influence. It is known also that at a certain
-period, about 1642, Potter was in the studio of Jacob de Wet at Haarlem.
-But whoever may have taught him, his early ripeness and the strong
-sincerity of his nature assure us that Potter derived little from any
-teacher. With vivid preferences, a habit of subtle observation, and an
-extraordinary skill of hand, he would have been content to repeat no
-master’s formulas, however popular. His first signed picture and his
-first signed etching bear the same date, 1643. He was eighteen years
-old. The etching (B. 14) shows already skill in grouping and a hitherto
-unknown knowledge in etching of animal forms. Its fault is over-much
-elaboration. Three years later Potter was at Delft, and there in 1647,
-at the age of twenty-two, painted his most famous picture, <i>The Young
-Bull</i>, now at the Hague. It was one of the pictures carried off by
-Napoleon, and of all those masterpieces from all countries which were
-restored by France in 1815, this was esteemed the second in value. Since
-then its fame has fallen, but with all its obvious demerits it has
-suffered more&mdash;to borrow an expression applied by Mr. Swinburne to
-Byron’s Address to Ocean in <i>Childe Harold</i>&mdash;from praise than from
-dispraise. In 1649 Potter removed to the Hague, and it was here that he
-met his wife, Adriana Balcheneynde, daughter of an architect in that
-town. They were married in the following year. His marriage did not stop
-the artist’s ceaseless industry, but rather increased it by his desire
-to provide for his household. Thinking perhaps to find more patrons
-there than at the Hague, he was induced by Dr. Tulp, the professor of
-anatomy, famous from Rembrandt’s picture, to come to Amsterdam. In a
-letter by a Frenchman who was in Amsterdam at this time, looking for
-pictures on behalf of Queen Christina of Sweden, we have a glimpse of
-Potter in his studio, working with prodigious assiduity. The Frenchman
-found Potter at work on a painting which had already cost him five
-months of continuous toil. “Rien ne se peut voir plus curieusement
-fait,” says the Frenchman. When we consider that the painter produced
-considerably over one hundred pictures in his brief life, it is amazing
-to realise his powers of work. He was only to live two years longer.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68">{68}</a></span></p>
-
-<h3>IV</h3>
-
-<p>The etched work of Potter that has come down to us consists of eighteen
-plates; not many, considering how prolific he was as a painter, but all
-the plates are important.</p>
-
-<p>Taking them in chronological order, we have first the etching already
-spoken of, done when the artist was only eighteen, <i>The Cowherd</i> (B.
-14). In 1649, six years after its original execution, the plate was
-reduced in length by Potter and the new date affixed. A reedy hollow,
-with a pool, was substituted for the group of three cows at the left;
-and an alteration was also made in the feet of one of the cows
-descending the hill on the right. The etching, we know, was popular.
-For, after it had been cut down, it was issued by at least three
-publishers in turn; by F. de Wit, by P. Schenk, and by an anonymous
-publisher who effaced the two former names. Probably in the first
-instance it was issued by Potter himself, as was the series of cattle
-published in 1650.</p>
-
-<p>Full of skill in grouping and knowledge of form as this plate is, it is
-certainly inferior to the later etchings. Already, by the next year,
-Potter was able to produce a print, <i>The Shepherd</i> (B. 15) which
-surpasses it in every way, and which to more sound drawing adds a
-pastoral atmosphere of lightness and sunshine and repose.</p>
-
-<p>Berchem, Potter’s senior by five years, was at Haarlem in 1642, when
-Potter, as we know, was in De Wet’s studio. We may assume, therefore,
-that the two met. Perhaps it was in emulation of Berchem’s set of
-etchings, published in 1644, that Potter produced his <i>Cowherd</i> and
-<i>Shepherd</i>. If so, he succeeded in surpassing them.</p>
-
-<p>There now occurs an interval of some years in Potter’s etched work. His
-next publication, so far as we know, was the series of eight plates (B.
-1-8) representing cattle, and beginning with the fine <i>Bull</i> (Fig. 24).
-This title-piece is dated 1650, so that we may refer the production of
-the plates to 1649, and possibly the year or two immediately preceding.
-However, the fact that 1649 is the date of the revised <i>Cowherd</i> seems
-to point to Potter’s having resumed his interest in etching in that
-year, and to his having executed the whole set after the re-publication
-of that plate.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69">{69}</a></span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_025">
-<a href="images/ill_029.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_029.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 25.&mdash;Studies of a Dog. By Paul Potter. British
-Museum.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70">{70}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>He would hardly issue an immature work, when he had by him much more
-triumphant specimens of his skill.</p>
-
-<p>As studies of animals, these eight little plates are as good as they can
-be. But they are not more than studies. As we saw, it had become a
-fashion for artists to etch such studies, and so spread their fame among
-those who could not buy their pictures. This at once suggests the reason
-of Potter’s deficiency as an etcher. Strictly speaking, he was not an
-etcher at all. He used etching because it was the favourite medium for
-multiplying sketches of his time. But one feels that the burin would
-have been the apter instrument for that sure and cunning hand. There is
-a deliberation, a want of immediacy in these designs, that are not of
-the born etcher. Between the treatment of cattle in these etchings and
-their treatment in line-engraving by Lucas van Leyden there is no
-essential difference.</p>
-
-<p>But we must take things as they are, and as specimens of subtle and
-certain drawing, the plates are astonishing. The attitudes and movements
-of oxen have never been better given. But it is not in mere correctness
-of drawing that Potter excels his rivals. Berchem was only interested in
-animals so far as they helped him in the composition of a landscape, but
-with Potter they were the main interest, he loved them for themselves.
-And in expressing that vague inarticulate soul that is in the look of
-cattle, that mildness and acquiescence which are in their attitudes and
-motions, he is a master, greater than any.</p>
-
-<p>There is something in Dutch landscape, so open, tranquil, large, which
-seems to look for the presence of these peaceful creatures as its
-natural complement; their spirit is so entirely in harmony with the
-spirit of their pastures. Not accidental, perhaps, nor without its due
-effect, was the Dutch strain of blood in the American poet who seems to
-have first suggested in words what Potter expressed in art&mdash;</p>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain, or halt in the leafy shade,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What is it that you express in your eyes?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71">{71}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p>Like Whitman, Potter is possessed by the fascination of animals; he,
-too, “stands and looks at them long and long.” And with a feeling so
-reticent that its intensity escapes a superficial notice, he puts into
-these etched lines the breath that moves their bodies, and the dumbness
-that looks out of their eyes.</p>
-
-<h3>V</h3>
-
-<p>Two years after the publication of the cattle series, appeared the five
-larger plates of horses. These have less the air of being mere etched
-studies for pictures; they seem to have been made for their own sake,
-and make a kind of history, such as Tolstoi in the strange story of
-Kohlstomir has written; a kind of Horse’s Progress.</p>
-
-<p>The fourth (B. 12), the <i>Two Plough Horses</i>, is reproduced on Plate III.
-This and the <i>Horse Whinnying</i> (B. 10) seem to the writer the finest of
-the series, and the finest of all Potter’s etchings. The work is
-entirely simple and unaffected: there is immense skill, but no apparent
-consciousness of it, still less parade of it. Nothing adventitious is
-brought in, no artifice is used of setting or surrounding: bathed in
-light and air, on their own level pastures, the horses stand clearly
-outlined. But what a feeling of morning freshness, of careless and free
-joy, is in the breeze that tosses the mane of the whinnying horse, and
-makes him tremble with felt vitality! It is a triumph of the untamed
-energy of life. How different a picture from this of the two tired
-creatures, set free from their heavy labour at the plough, but no longer
-rejoicing in their freedom, except as a respite. By some magic of
-sympathy Potter makes us feel the ache of their limbs, stiff with
-fatigue, just as he expresses the patience in their eyes. Yet tender as
-is the feeling of the drawing, it is so restrained that “pity” seems a
-word out of place. It is rather the simple articulation by means of
-sensitive portrayal, of an else inarticulate pathos. Such drawing as
-this is in a true sense imaginative.</p>
-
-<p>The studies of dogs, reproduced in Fig. 25 are an admirable example of
-Potter’s gift. It is interesting to compare them with a drawing by
-Berchem, also in the British Museum, representing a hunting scene, with
-the boar at bay and dogs springing at him or struggling in the leash.
-Unfortunately, it has been impossible to find room for a reproduction
-of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72">{72}</a></span> it; but whoever looks at it will perceive at once a vital difference
-between such drawing and that of Potter’s. Berchem sketches the scene in
-a rapid, summary manner, using a few strokes only for each figure. It is
-Rembrandt’s method; but what a difference in the result! There is a
-sketch by Rembrandt of a lion springing at and seizing a man on
-horseback. Only a few lines are used, but the whole action of each
-figure is expressed perfectly. Berchem thinks to do the like, but his</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_026">
-<a href="images/ill_030.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_030.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 26.&mdash;The Cow. By Paul Potter. B. 3.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">lines are all just beside the truth. His mind, which has not sufficient
-love for things to brood upon their forms, is incapable of the swift act
-of sympathy necessary to seize their movement in action; and its power
-of reproduction, by nature probably a delicate and precise faculty, has
-been warped and blunted by the man’s satisfaction in his own cleverness,
-till it gives an inaccurate image.</p>
-
-<p>Berchem’s work is therefore false, and deserves to be called
-unimaginative. It convinces only the incompetent spectator of things.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73">{73}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Potter’s work is never false, and its imaginative quality is rather
-obscured than absent in his poorer productions. The fact is that, having</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_027">
-<a href="images/ill_031.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_031.jpg" height="550" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 27.&mdash;Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">given the vital image of an animal, he could not resist the temptation
-of adding to it non-essential facts. He had not that transcendent
-intelligence which instinctively practises the economy called “style.”
-But it<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74">{74}</a></span> was on the side of intelligence, certainly not of tenderness or
-sympathy, that he was lacking. He sat down to Nature’s feast, and the
-delight of his eyes seduced him.</p>
-
-<p>Before leaving this plate of the <i>Two Plough Horses</i>, we may notice a
-point which does not seem to have been remarked before, that there was
-apparently a kind of tradition of subjects among the animal painters and
-etchers. This plate was published, in the set of horses, in 1652. But in
-a set of etchings published the year before, 1651, by the artist Dirk
-Stoop, this identical subject appears. The horses stand towards the left
-of the plate in precisely the position of Potter’s horses.</p>
-
-<p>Stoop, though as good as many of the Dutch etchers, was no consummate
-draughtsman, and his horses are not to be compared with Potter’s. Yet
-they do not look in the least like a copy, while the dates
-discountenance such a supposition. If there be any direct relation
-between the two etchings it must have been Potter who took a hint from
-Stoop. But it seems equally likely to suppose that the subject, two
-plough-horses released from labour, was a traditional one. The life of
-cattle and horses does not offer more than a certain number of typical
-pictures, and hence the tendency of painters and etchers to repeat the
-same subject, always with an eye to improving on the best yet done; just
-as earlier painters would choose a <i>Saint Sebastian</i> as the typical
-subject in which to display their power of painting the human figure. In
-the same way Potter’s fifth etching of horses, where he depicts the
-forlorn death that overcomes the worn-out beast, has its prototype in a
-similar etching by Pieter de Laer, and the subject is repeated by Du
-Jardin.</p>
-
-<p>The etcher mentioned above, Dirk Stoop, Jed a wandering life, went to
-Lisbon, became painter to the Court there, and, being brought over to
-England with the Infanta, worked also in London. His etchings of horses
-and dogs are less good than those of the court <i>fêtes</i>, processions, and
-spectacles at Lisbon, at Hampton Court, and at London.</p>
-
-<h3>VI</h3>
-
-<p>If Potter did not produce many etchings himself, Marcus de Bye, who
-etched in most cases after Potter’s designs, was comparatively prolific.
-He produced over a hundred prints. Some of these,</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="plt_4">
-<a href="images/ill_032.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_032.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Ox and Sheep. From an etching by A. Van de Velde.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75">{75}</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="nind">purporting to be after drawings by Potter, are studies, not of cattle
-and sheep or horses, but of wild animals&mdash;lions, tigers, and wolves. If
-these could be taken as fairly representative of Potter’s work, we
-should have to infer that Potter was far less fortunate in his drawing
-of wild creatures than of tame. And it would be unlike Potter to have
-made such studies except from the life. De Bye, however, lost a great
-deal of the subtlety and life of his original in working from Potter’s
-sketches. Karel du Jardin is a more independent artist. Born at
-Amsterdam in 1622, he was trained in Berchem’s studio, but went to Italy
-still young. There he found De Laer’s pictures in great esteem, and
-developed a manner and a choice of subject very similar to his. Some
-time before 1656 he returned to Holland, and remained at the Hague till
-1659, when he removed to Amsterdam. There he painted some fine
-portraits, quite unlike his ordinary pictures in style, being stirred to
-emulation presumably by the superb Corporation pieces then produced
-there. In 1675 he started again for Italy, but died three years later in
-Venice.</p>
-
-<p>The British Museum possesses a red-chalk drawing of Du Jardin by
-himself. It is an agreeable portrait, but the face does not suggest much
-power.</p>
-
-<p>Though a pupil of Berchem, Du Jardin in his etchings follows Potter much
-more than that artist. Dr. Lippmann, in fact, speaks of him as “Schuler
-Potters,” but the expression must only mean a follower, not a pupil, of
-Potter.</p>
-
-<p>Twenty-four of Du Jardin’s etchings are dated, the dates being 1652,
-1653, 1655, 1656, 1658, 1659, 1660, and 1675. Only one piece belongs to
-the last year, while the other years have two, three, four, and five
-pieces each. So that, whenever the undated etchings were produced, the
-bulk of Du Jardin’s work on copper may safely be assigned to the eight
-years 1652-1660; that is to say, to the first years after his return to
-Holland, and possibly to the last year or two of his first stay in
-Italy. Most of the etchings are from sketches made in Italy. Fig. 27 is
-an example, and is a good specimen of Du Jardin as an etcher. There is
-nothing very original about such art, but its agreeable qualities will
-always give pleasure. Du Jardin, in his drawing and in his painting, has
-a light and happy touch; yet beyond such craftsman’s merits there is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76">{76}</a></span>
-little to be said for him. He seems to have painted and etched what was
-the fashion with a facile grace and commendable skill, but without any
-strong inborn love of the subjects he handled.</p>
-
-<p>As an etcher he is of the same order as Potter. A good many of the
-prints are pastoral landscapes; these are less good than those in which
-animals are the main subject. To turn from some of these small landscape</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_028">
-<a href="images/ill_033.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_033.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 28.&mdash;Pigs. By K. Du Jardin. B. 15.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">studies of Du Jardin’s, in which nothing is seized strongly while
-everything is made a little dull, to an etching of Rembrandt’s, say
-<i>Six’s Bridge</i>, is to receive a most vivid impression of Rembrandt’s
-immense superiority. Rembrandt’s light sketch is instinct with style; Du
-Jardin, in these prints at any rate, has no style at all. Such etchings
-as that of the pigs (Fig. 28) are of far higher quality.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77">{77}</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Another etcher from Amsterdam, Adriaen van de Velde, came strongly under
-Potter’s influence. Born in 1635-36 Van de Velde, like Du Jardin,
-studied with Berchem. It has sometimes been assumed that he, too,
-followed up his studies with a journey to Italy, but Dr. Bredius decides
-against this supposition. There is Italian scenery in many of Adriaen’s
-pictures, but there were plenty of fellow artists to borrow materials
-for such backgrounds from. And with him the landscape is never much more
-than a background. His interest lay more in his cattle and his figures
-than in their surrounding. It is known, indeed, that he inserted figures
-for several of the landscape painters, including Ruisdael and Hobbema.</p>
-
-<p>Van de Velde’s etchings are nearly all of cattle, and here he sometimes
-comes near Potter in drawing, while in management of the acid he is
-decidedly Potter’s superior. His earliest dated etching of 1653 is a
-large plate, which though not powerful has a real beauty. The cow which
-forms the centre of the composition is almost identical with that in the
-foreground of Potter’s <i>Cowherd</i>. Perhaps this was deliberate imitation,
-and if so, is evidence of the recognition Potter’s knowledge of animal
-form commanded, but it may equally well have been an accident. The whole
-plate is bathed in drowsy sunshine, with which the man asleep by the
-roadside, drawn with an admirable suggestion of repose, harmonises well.
-This print is one of those which must be seen in the silvery earliest
-state to be appreciated.</p>
-
-<p>The original design for this plate is in the British Museum. In the same
-collection is also the design for <i>The Cow Lying Down</i> (B. 2). On the
-same sheet of paper is a study of part of the cow in a slightly altered
-position, and this has been adopted in the etching. Except for this
-insignificant change, the two etchings are copied from the pencil
-studies with entire fidelity. And probably this was always Van de
-Velde’s practice, as it was with Potter and Du Jardin. It is, therefore,
-strictly speaking, incorrect to describe the drawings as being made for
-the etchings. The studies were etched simply that they might be
-multiplied.</p>
-
-<p>None of the studies of cattle, etched by the Dutch masters, surpasses
-Van de Velde’s set of three, numbered 11, 12, and 13 in Bartsch. The
-second is reproduced (Plate IV.). Potter never produced an effect so<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78">{78}</a></span>
-delicate and so rich in colour as Van de Velde in these three etchings.
-At the same time there is no ostentation of skill; rather there seems a</p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" id="ill_029">
-<a href="images/ill_034.jpg">
-<img src="images/ill_034.jpg" width="600" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
-<div class="caption"><p><i>Fig. 29.&mdash;A Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16.</i></p></div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="nind">kind of modesty in the workmanship that is winning. Equally excellent is
-the charming little study of a goat (Fig. 29).</p>
-
-<p>Van de Velde, if not a great artist, was a true one, and his early death
-at the age of thirty-seven was a loss to the art of Holland.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79">{79}</a></span></p>
-
-<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
-
-<p class="c"><a href="#A">A</a>,
-<a href="#B">B</a>,
-<a href="#C">C</a>,
-<a href="#D">D</a>,
-<a href="#E">E</a>,
-<a href="#F">F</a>,
-<a href="#G">G</a>,
-<a href="#H">H</a>,
-<a href="#K">K</a>,
-<a href="#L">L</a>,
-<a href="#M">M</a>,
-<a href="#N">N</a>,
-<a href="#O">O</a>,
-<a href="#P">P</a>,
-<a href="#R">R</a>,
-<a href="#S">S</a>,
-<a href="#T">T</a>,
-<a href="#U">U</a>,
-<a href="#V">V</a>,
-<a href="#W">W</a>,
-<a href="#Z">Z</a></p>
-
-<p class="nind">
-<a name="A" id="A"></a>Altdorfer, <a href="#page_12">12</a><br />
-
-Amsterdam Cabinet, Master of, <a href="#page_60">60</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="B" id="B"></a>Backhuysen, <a href="#page_53">53</a>, <a href="#page_54">54</a>, <a href="#page_55">55</a><br />
-
-Bartsch, <a href="#page_5">5</a>, <a href="#page_23">23</a><br />
-
-Bassano, <a href="#page_60">60</a><br />
-
-Bega, <a href="#page_26">26</a>, <a href="#page_31">31</a>, <a href="#page_32">32</a><br />
-
-Berchem, <a href="#page_60">60</a>, <a href="#page_63">63-65</a>, <a href="#page_68">68</a>, <a href="#page_71">71</a>, <a href="#page_72">72</a><br />
-
-Beresteyn, C. van, <a href="#page_50">50</a><br />
-
-Bleecker, <a href="#page_63">63</a><br />
-
-Bode, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_55">55</a>, <a href="#page_56">56</a><br />
-
-Both, A. <a href="#page_13">13</a><br />
-
-Both, J. <a href="#page_57">57</a>, <a href="#page_58">58</a>, <a href="#page_65">65</a><br />
-
-Bray, J. de, <a href="#page_18">18</a><br />
-
-Bredius, <a href="#page_8">8</a>, <a href="#page_37">37</a>, <a href="#page_63">63</a>, <a href="#page_67">67</a>, <a href="#page_77">77</a><br />
-
-Breenbergh, <a href="#page_57">57</a><br />
-
-Bronchorst, <a href="#page_56">56</a><br />
-
-Brouwer, <a href="#page_21">21</a><br />
-
-Bye, M. de, <a href="#page_74">74</a>, <a href="#page_75">75</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="C" id="C"></a>Cabel, A. van der, <a href="#page_48">48</a>, <a href="#page_58">58</a><br />
-
-Callot, <a href="#page_12">12</a>, <a href="#page_13">13</a><br />
-
-Campagnola, <a href="#page_35">35</a><br />
-
-Camphuisen, <a href="#page_67">67</a><br />
-
-Capelle, J. van de, <a href="#page_43">43</a>, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br />
-
-Caravaggio, <a href="#page_13">13</a><br />
-
-Claude, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_55">55</a>, <a href="#page_56">56</a>, <a href="#page_57">57</a><br />
-
-Constable, <a href="#page_49">49</a><br />
-
-Cornelis Cornelisz, <a href="#page_18">18</a><br />
-
-Crome, <a href="#page_49">49</a>, <a href="#page_50">50</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="D" id="D"></a>Du Jardin, <a href="#page_60">60</a>, <a href="#page_64">64</a>, <a href="#page_74">74</a>, <a href="#page_75">75</a><br />
-
-Dürer, <a href="#page_11">11</a>, <a href="#page_35">35</a>, <a href="#page_60">60</a><br />
-
-Dusart, <a href="#page_31">31</a>, <a href="#page_34">34</a><br />
-
-Dutuit, <a href="#page_24">24</a>, <a href="#page_26">26</a>, <a href="#page_38">38</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="E" id="E"></a>Elsheimer, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_14">14</a>, <a href="#page_37">37</a>, <a href="#page_55">55</a><br />
-
-Everdingen, A. van, <a href="#page_44">44-46</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="F" id="F"></a>Fyt, J., <a href="#page_62">62</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="G" id="G"></a>Genoels, <a href="#page_58">58</a><br />
-
-Glauber, <a href="#page_58">58</a><br />
-
-Goltzius, <a href="#page_18">18</a>, <a href="#page_39">39</a><br />
-
-Goudt, Count de, <a href="#page_37">37</a><br />
-
-Goya, <a href="#page_32">32</a><br />
-
-Goyen, J. van, <a href="#page_42">42</a>, <a href="#page_43">43</a><br />
-
-Gozzoli, <a href="#page_60">60</a><br />
-
-Groot, Hofstede de, <a href="#page_8">8</a><br />
-
-Grotius, <a href="#page_9">9</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="H" id="H"></a>Haeften, N. van, <a href="#page_31">31</a><br />
-
-Hals, D., <a href="#page_18">18</a><br />
-
-Hals, F., <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_18">18</a>, <a href="#page_20">20</a><br />
-
-Hamerton, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_30">30</a><br />
-
-Helst, B. van der, <a href="#page_65">65</a><br />
-
-Heusch, W. de, <a href="#page_58">58</a><br />
-
-Heyden, J. van der, <a href="#page_52">52</a>, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br />
-
-Hirschvogel, <a href="#page_12">12</a><br />
-
-Hobbema, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_49">49</a>, <a href="#page_50">50</a>, <a href="#page_77">77</a><br />
-
-Honthorst, <a href="#page_13">13</a><br />
-
-Hooch, P. de, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_9">9</a>, <a href="#page_28">28</a><br />
-
-Hopfer, <a href="#page_12">12</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="K" id="K"></a>Keene, <a href="#page_31">31</a><br />
-
-Klomp, <a href="#page_66">66</a><br />
-
-Koehler, <a href="#page_40">40</a><br />
-
-Koninck, P. de, <a href="#page_39">39</a><br />
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80">{80}</a></span><br />
-
-<a name="L" id="L"></a>Laer, P. de, <a href="#page_57">57</a>, <a href="#page_63">63</a>, <a href="#page_74">74</a><br />
-
-Lautensack, <a href="#page_12">12</a><br />
-
-Leblond, <a href="#page_39">39</a>, <a href="#page_40">40</a><br />
-
-Le Ducq, <a href="#page_5">5</a><br />
-
-Leech, <a href="#page_31">31</a><br />
-
-Leyden, Lucas van, <a href="#page_62">62</a>, <a href="#page_70">70</a><br />
-
-Lippmann, <a href="#page_43">43</a>, <a href="#page_75">75</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="M" id="M"></a>Matham, <a href="#page_42">42</a><br />
-
-Metsu, <a href="#page_9">9</a><br />
-
-Miel, <a href="#page_13">13</a><br />
-
-Moeyart, <a href="#page_62">62</a>, <a href="#page_67">67</a><br />
-
-Molyn, P. de, <a href="#page_42">42</a>, <a href="#page_43">43</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="N" id="N"></a>Naiwincx, <a href="#page_50">50</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="O" id="O"></a>Ostade, A. van, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_17">17-32</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="P" id="P"></a>Pater, Walter, <a href="#page_9">9</a>, <a href="#page_38">38</a><br />
-
-Patinir, <a href="#page_35">35</a>, <a href="#page_37">37</a><br />
-
-Picart, <a href="#page_25">25</a><br />
-
-Potter, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_60">60</a>, <a href="#page_62">62</a>, <a href="#page_63">63</a>, <a href="#page_65">65-75</a>, <a href="#page_77">77</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="R" id="R"></a>Rembrandt, <a href="#page_5">5</a>, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_15">15</a>, <a href="#page_24">24</a>, <a href="#page_28">28</a>, <a href="#page_38">38</a>, <a href="#page_63">63</a>, <a href="#page_72">72</a>, <a href="#page_76">76</a><br />
-
-Roghman, <a href="#page_50">50</a>, <a href="#page_52">52</a><br />
-
-Rousseau, Th., <a href="#page_49">49</a><br />
-
-Rubens, <a href="#page_11">11</a>, <a href="#page_14">14</a>, <a href="#page_15">15</a>, <a href="#page_35">35</a>, <a href="#page_60">60</a>, <a href="#page_61">61</a><br />
-
-Ruisdael, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_7">7</a>, <a href="#page_46">46-50</a>, <a href="#page_77">77</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="S" id="S"></a>Seghers, H., <a href="#page_36">36-40</a><br />
-
-Snyders, <a href="#page_60">60</a>, <a href="#page_62">62</a><br />
-
-Spinoza, <a href="#page_9">9</a><br />
-
-Steen, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_9">9</a><br />
-
-Stoop, <a href="#page_74">74</a><br />
-
-Swanevelt, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_48">48</a>, <a href="#page_58">58</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="T" id="T"></a>Terborch, <a href="#page_9">9</a>, <a href="#page_42">42</a><br />
-
-Theocritus, <a href="#page_62">62</a><br />
-
-Titian, <a href="#page_35">35</a><br />
-
-Tolstoi, <a href="#page_71">71</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="U" id="U"></a>Uden, L. van, <a href="#page_35">35</a><br />
-
-Uytenbroeck, M. van, <a href="#page_55">55</a>, <a href="#page_62">62</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="V" id="V"></a>Vadder, L. de, <a href="#page_35">35</a><br />
-
-Vandyck, <a href="#page_15">15</a><br />
-
-Velasquez, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_60">60</a><br />
-
-Velde, A. van de, <a href="#page_60">60</a>, <a href="#page_77">77</a>, <a href="#page_78">78</a><br />
-
-Velde, E. van de, <a href="#page_18">18</a>, <a href="#page_41">41</a><br />
-
-Velde, J. van de, <a href="#page_41">41</a>, <a href="#page_55">55</a><br />
-
-Velde, W. van de, <a href="#page_44">44</a>, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br />
-
-Verboom, <a href="#page_50">50</a><br />
-
-Vermeer, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_28">28</a><br />
-
-Vlieger, S. de, <a href="#page_43">43</a>, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br />
-
-Vosmaer, <a href="#page_17">17</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="W" id="W"></a>Waterloo, <a href="#page_5">5</a>, <a href="#page_38">38</a>, <a href="#page_48">48</a>, <a href="#page_50">50</a><br />
-
-Watteau, <a href="#page_9">9</a><br />
-
-Westrheene, van, <a href="#page_66">66</a><br />
-
-Wet, J. de, <a href="#page_67">67</a>, <a href="#page_68">68</a><br />
-
-Whitman, <a href="#page_70">70</a><br />
-
-Willigen, van der, <a href="#page_8">8</a>, <a href="#page_17">17</a><br />
-
-Wyck, <a href="#page_57">57</a><br />
-
-<br />
-<a name="Z" id="Z"></a>Zeeman, <a href="#page_53">53</a>, <a href="#page_54">54</a><br />
-</p>
-
-<div class="footnotes"><p class="cb">FOOTNOTES:</p>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The last figure is doubtful. It is 8 according to Bartsch
-and Dutuit, but may also be 9.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Manuel de l’Amateur d’Estampes</i>: par M. Eugene Dutuit.
-Vol. V. Paris. 1882.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> By all the older authorities the date is wrongly given as
-1625.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The <i>Tobias and the Angel</i> dates probably from about 1613,
-or a little later, as this was the date of de Goudt’s print.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Probably the engraving, since Seghers’ print is a reverse
-copy from this, but in the same sense as the picture.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> No. 236 in Middleton’s Catalogue.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> In the National Gallery.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Seghers has also been credited with the use of soft ground
-etching or of aquatint. Examination of the prints shows, however, that
-the effects in question were got either by using acid on the plate, or
-by working in dotted lines, not with the roulette but with the simple
-needle. In ascertaining these facts and in correcting some of his first
-impressions the writer has profited by the knowledge and the kind
-assistance of Mr. S. R. Koehler, Keeper of the Prints at Boston, U.S.A.,
-whose authority on such questions is well known.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> This assumes him to have been born 1631. Another date given
-is 1633.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> See <i>supra</i>: p. 41.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> A drawing of his is dated <i>Paris, 1623</i>. And according to
-Bertolotti he was in Rome by 1627.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Bredius gives the date as 1644.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Exhibited last winter (1895) at Burlington House by the
-Duke of Westminster.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Compare also a little-known piece of Whitman’s “The
-Ox-Tamer,” in <i>Autumn Rivulets</i>, which ends:
-</p>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I confess I envy only his fascination&mdash;my silent, illiterate friend,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.<br /></span>
-</div></div>
-</div>
-
-</div>
-
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