Art in the Netherlands/Chapter VII

by Hippolyte Taine

IV

Whilst the Southern provinces, henceforth subject and Catholic, followed the Italian road in art, and represented on their canvasses the mythological epos of the grand and heroic nude figure, the provinces of the North, becoming free and Protestant, developed their life and art in another direction. The climate is more rainy and colder, and for this reason the presence of the nude is a rarer and less sympathetic thing. The Germanic race is chaster, and through this quality the mind is less inclined to appreciate classic art, as it was conceived of by the Italian renaissance. Life is more difficult, more laborious, and more economic; man, therefore, accustomed to effort, to forethought and to a methodical self-government, has more trouble in comprehending the fascinating dream of a sensuous and full-blown existence. We can imagine the Dutch citizen in his home after the day's toil at his business. His dwelling consists of small apartments, somewhat resembling the state-rooms of a ship; it would be a troublesome matter to suspend on the walls the large pictures decorating the saloons of an Italian palace; its owner's chief requirements are cleanliness and comfort; with these he is content and does not insist on decoration. According to the Venetian ambassadors, "they are so moderate that, even with the richest, one sees no unusual pomp or luxury. … They make no use of retainers or silken habits, very little silver-ware, and no tapestry in their houses; the household numbers a very few and is very limited. Outside and inside, in dress and in other matters, all maintain the true moderation of small fortunes, nothing superfluous being perceptible."^[1] When the Earl of Leicester came to take command in Holland in the name of Elizabeth, and Spinola arrived to negotiate peace for the King of Spain, their regal magnificence formed a striking contrast and even provoked scandal. The head of the republic, William the Taciturn, the hero of the age, wore an old mantle which a student would have pronounced threadbare, with a pourpoint like it, unbuttoned, and a woollen waistcoat resembling that of a bargeman. In the next century the adversary of Louis XIV., the grand pensioner John de Witt kept only one domestic; everybody could approach him; he imitated his illustrious predecessor, who lived cheek-by-jowl with "brewers and bourgeois." We find yet at the present day, in their social ways, many an indication of ancient sobriety. It is clear that with such characters there is but little room for the decorative and voluptuous instincts which elsewhere in Europe fashioned aristocratic show, and rendered comprehensible the pagan poesy of beautiful bodies.

The opposite instincts, in effect, predominate. Relieved of the drawback of the Southern provinces, Holland, at the end of the sixteenth century, suddenly and with extraordinary energy turns in the direction of its natural proclivities. Primitive inclinations and faculties appear with the most striking results; they are not a new birth, but simply a revelation. Good observers had detected them a hundred and fifty years before. "Friesland is free," said Pope Æneas Sylvius,^[2] "lives in her own fashion, will not endure foreign empire, and has no desire to dominate over others. The Frieslander does not hesitate to face death in behalf of liberty. This spirited people, used to arms, of large and robust frames, calm, and intrepid in disposition, glories in her freedom notwithstanding that Philip, Duke of Burgundy, proclaims himself lord of the country. They detest military and feudal arrogance, and tolerate no man who seeks to raise his head above his fellows. Their magistrates are elected annually by themselves, and are obliged to administer public matters with equity. … They severely punish licentiousness among women … They scarcely admit an unmarried priest lest he should corrupt the wife of another, regarding continence as a difficult thing and beyond the natural powers." Every Germanic conception of state, marriage and religion are here visible in germ, and forecast the final flowering of the republic and of Protestantism. Subjected to trial by Philip II. they offer to sacrifice beforehand "their lives and their property." A small population of traders, lost on a mud-heap at the extremity of an empire more vast and more feared than that of Napoleon resisted, subsisted and increased under the weight of the colossus who tried to crush her. Their sieges are all admirable; citizens and women, supported by a few hundreds of soldiers, arrest an entire army before ruined ramparts, the best troops in Europe, the greatest generals and the most skilful engineers; and this remnant of emaciated people, after feeding on rats, boiled leaves and leather for months, determine, rather than surrender, to place the infirm in the centre of a square and go forth to die in the intrenchments of the enemy. The details of this war must be read in order to realize the extent to which man's patience, coolness and energy may be carried.^[3] On the sea a Dutch vessel is blown up rather than strike its flag, while their voyages of discovery, colonization and conquest, in Nova Zembla, India and Brazil, by the way of the Straits of Magellan, are as magnificent as their combats. The more we demand of human nature the more she gives; her faculties are exalted in their exercise, while the limits to her power of doing and suffering are no longer perceptible. Finally, in 1609, after thirty years warfare, the cause is won. Spain recognizes their independence, and during the whole of the seventeenth century they are to play a most prominent part in the affairs of Europe. No power can make them yield, neither Spain during a second war of twenty-seven years, nor Cromwell, nor Charles II., nor England combined with France, nor the fresh and formidable power of Louis XIV.; after three wars their ambassadors are all to be seen in humble and fruitless entreaty at Gertruydenberg, and the grandpensioner Hemsius, is to become one of the three potentates to control the destinies of Europe.

Internally their government is as good as their external position is exalted. For the first time in the world conscience is free and the rights of the citizens are respected. Their state consists of a community of provinces voluntarily united, which, each within its own borders, maintains with a degree of perfection unknown till then the security of the public and the liberty of the individual. "They all love liberty," says Parival in 1660; "no one among them is allowed to beat or abuse another, while the women servants have so many privileges their masters, even, dare not strike them." Full of his admiration, he repeatedly insists on this wonderful respect for human personality. "There is not to-day a province in the world which enjoys so much liberty as Holland, with so just a harmony that the little cannot be imposed upon by the great, nor the poor by the rich and opulent … The moment a seignior brings into this country any serfs or slaves they are free; yes, and the money he laid out in their purchase is lost … The inhabitants of a village having paid what they owe are as free as the inhabitants of a city … And above all each is king in his own house, it being a very serious crime to have done violence to a bourgeois in his own domicile." Everybody can leave the country when he pleases, and take all the money he pleases with him. The roads are safe day and night even for a man traveling alone. The master is not allowed to retain a domestic against his will. Nobody is troubled on account of his religion. One is free to say what he chooses, "even of the magistrates," and to denounce them. Equality is fundamental. "Those who hold office obtain consideration rather through fair dealing than advance themselves over others by a proud bearing." A nation like this cannot fail to be prosperous: when man is both just and energetic the rest comes to him as surplus. At the beginning of the War of Independence the population of Amsterdam was 70,000; in 1618 it was 300,000. The Venetian ambassadors reported that people swarmed in the streets every hour of the day as at a fair. The city increased two-thirds; a surface equal to the size of a man's foot was worth a gold ducat. The country is as good as the city. Nowhere is the peasant so rich and so able to derive advantage from the soil; one village possesses four thousand cows; an ox weighs two thousand pounds. A farmer offers his daughter to Prince Maurice with a dowry of one hundred thousand florins. Nowhere are industrial pursuits and manufactures so perfect; cloths, mirrors, sugar-refineries, porcelain, pottery, rich stuffs of silk, satin and brocade, iron-ware and ship-rigging. They supply Europe with half of its luxuries and nearly all its transportation. A thousand vessels traverse the Baltic in quest of raw material. Eight hundred boats are engaged in the herring fishery. Vast companies monopolize trade with India, China and Japan; Batavia is the centre of a Dutch empire; at this moment, 1609, Holland on the sea and in the world is what England was in the time of Napoleon. She has a marine of one hundred thousand sailors; in war time she can man two thousand vessels; fifty years after she maintains herself against the combined fleets of France and England; year after year the great stream of her success and prosperity is seen to increase. But its source is yet more bountiful than the stream itself; that which sustains her is an excess of courage, reason, abnegation, will and genius; "this people," say the Venetian ambassadors, "are inclined to labor and industry to such a degree that no enterprise is too difficult for them to succeed in … They are born for work and for privation, and all are doing something, some one way and some another." Much production and light consumption is the mode of growth of public prosperity The poorest, "in their small and humble habitations," have all necessary things. The richest in their fine houses avoid the superfluous and ostentation; nobody is in want, and nobody abuses; every one is employed with his hands or his mind. "All things are made profitable," says Parival; "there are none, even to those who gather ordure out of the canals who do not earn half-a-crown a day. Children even who are learning their trades almost earn their bread at the start. They are so inimical to bsd government and to indolence that they have places in which the magistrates imprison idlers and vagabonds, also those who do not properly attend to their business - the complaints of wives or family relations being a sufficient warrant, and in these places they are obliged to work and earn their subsistence whether they will or not." The convents ire transformed into hospitals, asylums and homes for orphans, the former revenues of lazy monks supporting invalids, the aged, and widows and children of soldiers and sailors lost in war. The army is so efficient that any of its soldiers might serve as captain in an Italian army, while no Italian captain would be admitted in it as a common soldier. In culture and instruction, as well as in the arts of organization and of government, the Dutch are two centuries ahead of the rest of Europe. Scarcely a man, woman or child can be found who does not know how to read and write (1609). Every village has a public school. In a bourgeois family all the boys read Latin and all the girls French. Many people write and converse in several foreign languages. It is not owing to simple precaution, to habits of laying up and calculations of utility, but they appreciate the dignity of science. Leyden, to which the States-General propose a recompense, after its heroic defense, demands a University; no pains are spared to attract to it the greatest savans of Europe. The States themselves unite, and through Henry IV. cause letters to be sent to Scaliger, who is poor and a professor, begging him to honor the city with his presence; no lessons will be required of him; they merely wish him to come and converse with the erudites, direct their efforts, and allow the nation to participate in the fame of his writings. Under this regime Leyden becomes the most renowned school in Europe; she has two thousand students; philosophy hunted out of France finds refuge there; during the seventeenth century Holland is the first of thoughtful countries. The positive sciences here find their native soil, or the land of their adoption. Scaliger, Justus Lepsius, Saumaisius, Meursius, the two Heinsius, the two Dousa, Marnix de Ste-Aldegonde, Hugo Grotius and Snellius preside over learning, laws, physics and mathematics. The Elzevirs carry on printing. Lindshoten and Mercator furnish instruction to travellers and develop geographical science. Hooft, Bor and Meteren write the history of the nation. Jacob Cats provides its poetry. Theology, which is the philosophy of the day, takes up, with Arminius and Gomar, the question of grace, and, even in the smallest villages, agitates the minds of peasants and bourgeois. The Synod of Dordrecht at length in 1609 constitutes the œcumenical council of the Reformation. To this primacy of speculative intellect add that of practical genius: from Barnevelt to De Witt, from William the Taciturn to William III., from Heemskerck the admiral to Von Tromp and De Ruyter, a sequence of superior men are at the head of art and business matters. It is under these circumstances that the national art appears. All the great original painters are born in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century, after grave danger had passed away, when the final victory was assured, when man, sensible of great things accomplished, points out to his children the onward path which has been cleared by his vigorous arm and stout heart. Here, as elsewhere, the artist is the offspring of the hero. The faculties employed in the creation of a real world, now that the work is accomplished, reach beyond and are employed in the creation of an imaginary world. Man has done too much to go back to school; the field spread out before him and around him has been peopled by his activity; it is so glorious and so fecund he can long dwell upon and admire it; he need no longer subdue his own thought to a foreign thought: he seeks and discovers his own peculiar sentiment; he dares to confide himself to it, to pursue it to the end, to imitate nobody, to derive all from himself, to invent with no other guide but the voiceless preferences of his own senses and his own affections. His inner forces, his fundamental aptitudes, his primitive and hereditary instincts drawn out and fortified by experience continue to operate after his experience, and, when they have formed a nation they form an art.

Let us consider this art. It manifests through colors and forms all the instincts that have just appeared in actions and in works. So long as the seven provinces of the North and the ten provinces of the South formed but one nation they had but one school of art. Engelbrecht, Lucas of Leyden, John Schoreel, the elder Heemskerck, Corneille of Harlem, Bloemaert and Goltzius paint in the same style as their contemporaries of Bruges and Antwerp. There is not as yet a distinct Dutch school, because there is not as yet a distinct Belgian school. At the time when the War of Independence begins the painters of the North are laboring to convert themselves into Italians like the painters of the South. After the year 1600, however, there is a complete change in painting as in other things. The rising sap of the nation gives predominance to the national instincts. Nudities are no longer visible: the ideal figure, the beautiful human animal living; in full sunshine, the noble symmetry of limbs and attitude, the grand allegoric or mythological picture is no longer adapted to Germanic taste. Calvanism, moreover, which now rules, excludes it from its temples, and amidst this population of earnest and economic laborers there is no seigneunal display, no widespread and grandiose epicureanism which, elsewhere, in the palaces and in proximity to luxurious silver, liveries and furniture, demands the sensual and pagan canvas. When Amelia of Solm desires to raise a monument in this style to her husband, the stadtholder Frederic Henry, she is obliged to send to Orangesaal for the Flemish artists Van Thulden and Jordaens. To these realistic imaginations and amidst these republican customs, in this land where a shoemaking privateer can become vice-admiral, the most interesting figure is one of its own citizens, a man of flesh and blood, not draped or undraped like a Greek, but in his own costume and ordinary attitude, some good magistrate or valiant officer. The heroic style is suited to but one thing, the great portraits which decorate the town-halls and public institutions in commemoration of services rendered. We see, in fact, a new kind of picture make its appearance here, the vast canvas on which are displayed five, ten, twenty and thirty full-length portraits as large as life, hospital directors, arquebusiers on target excursions, syndics assembled around a table, officers offering toasts at a banquet, professors giving clinical lectures, all grouped according to their pursuits, and all presented to view with the costume, arms, banners, accessories and surroundings belonging to their actual life; it is a veritable historical picture, the most instructive and most impressive of all, where Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Govaert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, Theodore de Keyser and John Ravenstein depict the heroic age of their nation, where sensible, energetic and loyal heads possess the nobleness of power and of conscience, where the fine costume of the renaissance, the scarfs, the buff vests, the frills, the lace collars, the pourpoints and the black mantles throw their gravity and brilliancy around the solid portliness of the stout forms and frank expressions of the faces, where the artist, now through the virile simplicity of his means, now through the strength of his convictions, becomes the equal of his heroes.

Such is painting for the public; there now remains painting for private life, that which decorates the houses of individuals, and which, in its dimensions as well as subjects, conforms to the condition and character of its purchasers. "There is no bourgeois so poor," says Parival, "who does not liberally indulge his taste this way." A baker pays six hundred florins for a single figure by Van der Meer of Delft. This, alone; with a neat and agreeable interior, constitutes their luxury; "they do not grudge money in this direction, which they rather save on their stomachs." The national instinct re-appears here the same as revealed in the first epoch with John Van Eyck, Quintin Matsys, and Lucas of Leyden; and it is emphatically the national instinct, for it is so deep and so active that, even in Belgium, in close proximity to mythological and decorative art, it runs through the Breughels and Teniers like a small brook alongside of a broad river. It exacts and provokes the representation of man as he is and life as it is, both as the eye encounters them, citizens, peasants, cattle, shops, taverns, rooms, streets and landscapes. There is no need to transform them in order to ennoble them; they are satisfied if they are worthy of interest. Nature, in herself, whatever she may be, whether human, animal, vegetable or inanimate, with all her irregularities, minutiae and omissions, is inherently right, and, when comprehended, people love and delight to contemplate her. The object of art is not to change her, but to interpret her; through sympathy it renders her beautiful. Thus understood, painting may represent the housekeeper spinning in her rural cot, the carpenter planing on his work-bench, the surgeon dressing a rustic's arm, the cook spitting a chicken, the rich dame washing herself; all sorts of interiors, from, the hovel to the drawing-room; all sorts of types, from the rubicund visage of the deep drinker to the placid smile of the well-bred damsel; every scene of refined or rustic life a card-party in a gilded saloon, a peasant's carouse in a bare tavern, skaters on a frozen canal, cows drinking from a trough, vessels at sea, the entire and infinite diversities of sky, earth, water, darkness and daylight. Terburg, Metzu, Gerard Dow, Van der Meer of Delft, Adrian Brouwer, Schalcken, Franz Mieris. Jan Steen, Wouverman, the two Ostades, Wynants, Cuyp, Van der Neer, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Paul Potter, Backhuysen, the two Vanderveldes, Philip of Kœnig, Van der Heyden, and how many more! There is no school in which artists of original talent are so numerous. When the domain of art consists, not of a small summit, but of the wide expanse of life, it offers to each mind a distinct field; the ideal is narrow, and inhabited only by two or three geniuses; the real is immense, and provides places for fifty men of talent. A tranquil and pleasing harmony emanates from all these performances. We are conscious of repose in looking at them. The spirit of the artist, like that of his figures, is in equilibrium; we should be quite content and comfortable in his picture. We realize that his imagination does not go beyond. It seems as if he, like his personages, were satisfied with mere living. Nature appears to him excellent; all he cares for is to add some arrangement, some tone side by side with another, some effect of light, some choice of attitude. In her presence he is like a happy-wedded Hollander in the presence of his spouse; he would not wish her otherwise: he loves her through affectionate routine and innate concordance; at the utmost his chief requirement of her will be to wear at some festival her red frock instead of the blue one. He bears no resemblance to our painters, expert observers taught by esthetic and philosophic books and journals, who depict the peasant and the laborer the same as the Turk and the Arab, that is to say, as curious animals and interesting specimens; who charge their landscapes with the subtleties, refinements and emotions of poets and civilians in order to rid themselves of the mute and dreamy revery of life. He is of a more naïve order; he is not dislocated or over-excited by excessive cerebral activity; as compared to us he is an artizan; when he takes up painting he has none other than picturesque intentions; he is less affected by unforeseen and striking detail than by simple and leading general traits. His work, on this account, healthier and less poignant, appeals to less cultivated natures, and pleases the greater number. Among all these painters, two only - Ruysdael, in spiritual finesse and marked superiority of education, and Rembrandt especially, in a peculiar structure of the eye and a wonderfully wild genius - developed, beyond their age and nation, up to the common instincts which bind the Germanic nations together and pave the way for modern sentiments. The latter, constantly collecting his materials, living in solitude and borne along by the growth of an extraordinary faculty, lived, like our Balzac, a magician and a visionary in a world fashioned by his own hand and of which he alone possessed the key. Superior to all painters in the native delicacy and keenness of his optical perceptions, he comprehended this truth and adhered to it in. all its consequences that, to the eye, the essence of a visible object consists of the spot (tache), that the simplest color is infinitely complex, that every visual sensation is the product of its elements coupled with its surroundings, that each object on the field of sight is but a single spot modified by others, and that, in this wise, the principal feature of a picture is the ever-present, tremulous, colored atmosphere into which figures are plunged like fishes in the sea. He rendered this atmosphere palpable, and revealed to us its mysterious and thronging population; he impregnated it with the light of his own country - a feeble, yellow illumination like that of a lamp in a cellar; he felt the mournful struggle between it and shadow, the weakness of vanishing rays dying away in gloom, the tremulousness of reflections vainly clinging to gleaming walls, the sum of that vague multitude of half-darks which, invisible to ordinary gaze, seem in his paintings and etchings to form a submarine world dimly visible through an abyss of waters. On emerging from this obscurity the full light, to his eyes, proved a dazzling shower; he felt as if it were flashes of lightning^ or some magical effulgence, or as myriads of beaming darts. He found accordingly, in the inanimate world the completest and most expressive drama, all contrasts and all conflicts, whatever is overwhelming and painfully lugubrious in night, whatever is most fleeting and saddest in ambiguous shadow, whatever is most violent and most irresistible in the irruption of daylight. This done, all that remained was to impose the human drama on the natural drama: a stage thus fashioned indicates of itself its own characters. The Greeks and Italians had known of man and of life only the straightest and tallest stems, the healthy flower blooming in sunshine; he saw the root, everything which crawls and moulders in shadow, the stunted and deformed sprouts, the obscure crowd of the poor, the Jewry of Amsterdam, the slimy, suffering populace of a large city and unfavorable climate, the bandy-legged beggar, the bloated idiot, the bald skull of an exhausted craftsman, the pallid features of the sick, the whole of that grovelling array of evil passions and hideous miseries which infest our various civilizations like worms in a rotten plank. Once on this road he could comprehend the religion of grief, the genuine Christianity; he could interpret the Bible as if he were a Lollard; he could recognize the eternal Christ as present now as formerly, as living in a cellar or tavern of Holland as beneath a Jerusalem sun; the healer and consoler of the miserable, alone capable of saving them because as poor and as miserable as themselves. He too, through a reaction, was conscious of pity; by the side of others who seem painters of the aristocracy he is of the people; he is, at least, the most humane; his broader sympathies embrace more of nature fundamentally; no ugliness repels him, no craving for joyousness or nobleness hides from him the lowest depths of truth. Hence it is that, free of all trammels and guided by the keen sensibility of his organs, he has succeeded in portraying in man not merely the general structure and the abstract type which answers for classic art, but again that which is peculiar and profound in the individual, the infinite and indefinable complications of the moral being, the whole of that changeable imprint which concentrates instantaneously on a face the entire history of a soul and which Shakespeare alone saw with an equally prodigious lucidity. In this respect he is the most original of modern artists, and forges one end of the chain of which the Greeks forced the other; the rest of the masters, Florentine, Venetian and Flemish, stand between them; and when, nowadays, our over-excited sensibility, our extravagant curiosity in the pursuit of subtleties, our unsparing search of the true, our divination of the remote and the obscure in human nature, seeks for predecessors and masters, it is in him and in Shakespeare that Balzac and Delacroix are able to find them.

A blooming period like this is transient for the reason that the sap which produces it is exhausted by its production. Towards 1667, after the naval defeats of England, slight indications show the growing change in the manners, customs and sentiments which had stimulated the national art. The prosperity is too great. Already, in 1660, Parival, speaking of this, grows ecstatic in every chapter; the companies of the East and West Indies declare dividends to their stockholders of forty and fifty per cent. Heroes become citizens; Parival notices the thirst for gain among those of the highest class. And more, "they detest duels, contentions and quarrels, and commonly assert that well-off" people never fight." They want to enjoy themselves, and the houses of the Great, which the Venetian ambassadors early in the century find so bare and so simple, become luxurious; among the leading citizens there are found tapestries, high-priced pictures and "gold and silver-plate." The rich interiors of Terburg and Metzu show us the new-found elegance the light silk dresses, velvet bodices, the gems, the pearls, the hangings honey-combed with gold, and the lofty chimneys with marble columns. Ancient energy relaxes. When Louis XIV. invades the country in 1672 he finds no resistance. The army has been neglected; their troops are disbanded; their towns surrender at the first blow; four French cavaliers take Muyden which is the key to the floodgates; the States-General implore peace on any terms. The national sentiment degenerates, at the same time, in the arts. Taste becomes transformed. Rembrandt in 1669 dies poor, almost without anybody's knowledge: the new-found luxury is satisfied with foreign models obtained from France and Italy. Already, during the most flourishing epoch, a number of painters had gone to Rome to paint small figures and landscapes; Jan Both, Berghem, Karl Dujardin, and many others - Wouvermans himself - form a half-Italian school alongside of the national school. But this school was spontaneous and natural; amid, the mountains, ruins, structures and rags of the South the vapory whiteness of the atmosphere, the geniality of the figures, the mellow carnations, the gayety and good humor of the painter denote the persistency and freedom of the Dutch instinct, On the other hand, we see at this moment this instinct becoming enfeebled under the invasion of fashion. On the Kaisergracht and the Heeregracht rise grand hotels in the style of Louis XIV., while the Flemish painter who founded the academic school, Gerard de Lairesse, comes to decorate them with his learned allegories and hybrid mythologies. The national art, it is true, does not at once surrender; it is prolonged by a succession of masterpieces up to the first years of the eighteenth century: at the same time the national sentiment, aroused by humiliation and danger, excites a popular revolution, heroic sacrifices, the inundation of the country, and all the successes which afterwards ensue. But these very successes complete the ruin of the energy and enthusiasm which this temporary revival had stimulated. During the whole of the war of the Spanish succession, Holland, whose stadtholder became King of England, is sacrificed to its ally; after the treaty of 1713 she loses her maritime supremacy, falls to the second rank of powers, and, finally, still lower; Frederic the Great is soon able to say that she is dragged in the wake of England like a sloop behind a man-of-war. France tramples on her during the war of the Austrian succession; later, England imposes on her the right of search and deprives her of the coast of Coromandel. Finally, Prussia steps in, overwhelms the republican party and establishes the stadtholdership. Like all the weak she is hustled by the strong, and, after 1789, conquered and reconquered. What is worse she gives up and is content to remain a good commercial banking-house. Already in 1723 her historian, John Leclerc, a refugee, openly ridicules the valiant seamen who, during the War of Independence, blew themselves up rather than strike their flag.^[4] In 1732, another historian declares that "the Dutch think of nothing but the accumulation of riches." After 1748 both the army and the fleet are allowed to decline. In 1787 the Duke of Brunswick brings the country under subjection almost without striking a blow. What a distance between sentiments of this cast and those of the companions of William the Taciturn, De Ruyter and Von Tromp! Hence it is that, through an admirable concordance, we see picturesque invention terminating with practical energy. In ten years after the commencement of the eighteenth century all the great painters are dead. Already for a generation a decline is manifest in the impoverished style, in the more limited imagination and in more minute finish of Franz Mieris, Schalcken, and the rest. One of these, Adrian Van der Werf, in his cold and polished painting, his mythologies and nudities, his ivory carnations, his impotent return to the Italian style, bears witness to the Dutch oblivion of native tastes and its own peculiar genius. His successors resemble men who attempt to speak with nothing to say; brought up by masters or famous parents, Peter Van der Werf, Henry Van Limborch, Philip Van Dyck, Mieris the younger, and another the grandson, Nicholas Verkolie, and Constantine Netscher repeat sentences they have heard, but like automatons. Talent survives only among painters of accessories and flowers - Jacques de Witt, Rachel Ruysch and Van Huysum - in a small way, which requires less invention and which still lasts a few years, similar to a tenacious clump of bushes on a dry soil whereon all the great trees have died. This dies in its turn, and the ground remains vacant. It is the last evidence of the dependence which attaches individual originality to social life, and proportions the inventive faculties of the artist to the active energies of the nation.

Notes

1. Motley's "United Netherlands," Vol. IV. p. 551. Report of Contarini, 1609.
2. Cosmographia, p. 421
3. Among others the capture of Bois-le-Duc by Héraugière and sixty nine volunteers.
4. "This good captain belonged to those who die for fear of dying. If God forgives such people it is because they are out of their mind."