Ireland and France, and he became an accomplished athlete and by no means an indifferent scholar. Having come to London in 1652 he was rightly suspected of sympathizing with the exiled royalists, and in 1655 was put into prison by Cromwell; after his release about a year later he went to Holland and married a Dutch lady of good family, accompanying Charles II. to England in 1660. In 1661 Butler became a member of both the English and the Irish Houses of Commons, representing Bristol in the former and Dublin University in the latter House; and in 1662 was made an Irish peer as earl of Ossory. He held several military appointments, in 1665 was made lieutenant-general of the army in Ireland, and in 1666 was created an English peer as Lord Butler; but almost as soon as he appeared in the House of Lords he was imprisoned for two days for challenging the duke of Buckingham. In 1665 a fortunate accident had allowed Ossory to take part in a big naval fight with the Dutch, and in May 1672, being now in command of a ship, he fought against the same enemies in Southwold Bay, serving with great distinction on both occasions. The earl was partly responsible for this latter struggle, as in March 1672 before war was declared he had attacked the Dutch Smyrna fleet, an action which he is said to have greatly regretted later in life. Whilst visiting France in 1672 he rejected the liberal offers made by Louis XIV. to induce him to enter the service of France, and returning to England he added to his high reputation by his conduct during a sea-fight in August 1673. The earl was intimate with William, prince of Orange, and in 1677 he joined the allied army in the Netherlands, commanding the British section and winning great fame at the siege of Mons in 1678. He acted as deputy for his father, who was lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and in parliament he defended Ormonde’s Irish administration with great vigour. In 1680 he was appointed governor of Tangier, but his death on the 30th of July 1680 prevented him from taking up his new duties. One of his most intimate friends was John Evelyn, who eulogizes him in his Diary. Ossory had eleven children, and his eldest son James became duke of Ormonde in 1688.
See T. Carte, Life of James, duke of Ormonde (1851); and J. Evelyn, Diary, edited by W. Bray (1890).
OSSORY (Osraighe), an ancient kingdom of Ireland, in the
south-west of Leinster. The name is preserved by dioceses
of the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church. The
kingdom of Ossory was founded in the 2nd century A.D., and its
kings maintained their position until 1100.
OSTADE, the name of two Dutch painters whose ancestors were settled at Eyndhoven, near the village of Ostaden. Early in the 17th century Jan Hendricx, a weaver, moved from Eyndhoven to Haarlem, where he married and founded a large family. The eldest and youngest of his sons became celebrated artists.
1. Adrian Ostade (1610–1685), the eldest of Jan Hendricx’s sons, was born and died at Haarlem. According to Houbraken he was taught by Frans Hals, at that time master of Adrian Brouwer. At twenty-six he joined a company of the civic guard at Haarlem, and at twenty-eight he married. His wife died in 1640 and he speedily re-married, but again became a widower in 1666. He took the highest honours of his profession, the presidency of the painters’ gild at Haarlem, in 1662. Among the treasures of the Louvre collection, a striking picture represents the father of a large family sitting in state with his wife at his side in a handsomely furnished room, surrounded by his son and five daughters, and a young married couple. It is an old tradition that Ostade here painted himself and his children in holiday attire; yet the style is much too refined for the painter of boors, and Ostade had but one daughter. The number of Ostade’s pictures is given by Smith at three hundred and eighty-five, but by Hofstede de Groot (1910) at over 900. At his death the stock of his unsold pieces was over two hundred. His engraved plates were put up to auction, with the pictures, and fifty etched plates—most of them dated 1647–1648—were disposed of in 1686. Two hundred and twenty of his pictures are in public and private collections, of which one hundred and four are signed and dated, while seventeen are signed with the name but not with the date.
Adrian Ostade was the contemporary of David Teniers and Adrian Brouwer. Like them he spent his life in the delineation of the homeliest subjects—tavern scenes, village fairs and country quarters. Between Teniers and Ostade the contrast lies in the different condition of the agricultural classes of Brabant and Holland, and the atmosphere and dwellings that were peculiar to each region. Brabant has more sun, more comfort and a higher type of humanity; Teniers, in consequence, is silvery and sparkling; the people he paints are fair specimens of a well built race. Holland, in the vicinity of Haarlem seems to have suffered much from war; the air is moist and hazy, and the people, as depicted by Ostade, are short, ill-favoured and marked with the stamp of adversity on their features and dress. Brouwer, who painted the Dutch boor in his frolics and passion, imported more of the spirit of Frans Hals into his delineations than his colleague; but the type is the same as Ostade’s. During the first years of his career Ostade displayed the same tendency to exaggeration and frolic as his comrade, but he is to be distinguished from his rival by a more general use of the principles of light and shade, and especially by a greater concentration of light on a small surface in contrast with a broad expanse of gloom. The key of his harmonies remains for a time in the scale of greys. But his treatment is dry and careful, and in this style he shuns no difficulties of detail, representing cottages inside and out, with the vine leaves covering the poorness of the outer walls, and nothing inside to deck the patchwork of rafters and thatch, or tumble-down chimneys and ladder staircases, that make up the sordid interior of the Dutch rustic of those days. The greatness of Ostade lies in the fact that he often caught the poetic side of the life of the peasant class, in spite of its ugliness, and stunted form and misshapen features. He did so by giving their vulgar sports, their quarrels, even their quieter moods of enjoyment, the magic light of the sungleam, and by clothing the wreck of cottages with gay vegetation.
It was natural that, with the tendency to effect which marked Ostade from the first, he should have been fired by emulation to rival the masterpieces of Rembrandt. His early pictures are not so rare but that we can trace how he glided out of one period into the other. Before the dispersion of the Gsell collection at Vienna in 1872, it was easy to study the steel-grey harmonies and exaggerated caricature of his early works in the period intervening between 1632 and 1638. There is a picture of a “Countryman having his Tooth Drawn,” in the Vienna Gallery, unsigned, and painted about 1632; a “Bagpiper” of 1635 in the Liechtenstein Gallery at Vienna; cottage scenes of 1635 and 1636, in the museums of Karlsruhe, Darmstadt and Dresden; and “Card Players” of 1637 in the Liechtenstein palace at Vienna, which make up for the loss of the Gsell collection. The same style marks most of those pieces. About 1638 or 1640 the influence of Rembrandt suddenly changed his style, and he painted the “Annunciation” of the Brunswick museum, where the angels appearing in the sky to Dutch boors half asleep amidst their cattle, sheep and dogs, in front of a cottage, at once recall the similar subject by Rembrandt and his effective mode of lighting the principal groups by rays propelled to the earth out of a murky sky. But Ostade was not successful in this effort to vulgarize Scripture. He might have been pardoned had he given dramatic force and expression to his picture; but his shepherds were only boors without much emotion, passion or surprise. His picture was an effect of light, as such masterly, in its sketchy rubbings, of dark brown tone relieved by strongly impasted lights, but without the very qualities which made his usual subjects attractive. When, in 1642, he painted the beautiful interior at the Louvre, in which a mother tends her child in a cradle at the side of a great chimney near which her husband is sitting, the darkness of a country loft is dimly illumined by a beam from the sun that shines on the casement; and one might think the painter intended to depict the Nativity, but that there is nothing holy in all the surroundings, nothing attractive indeed except the wonderful Rembrandtesque transparency, the brown tone, and the admirable keeping of the minutest parts. Ostade was more at home in a similar effect applied to the commonplace incident of the “Slaughtering of a Pig,” one of the masterpieces of 1643, once in the Gsell collection. In this and similar subjects of previous and succeeding years, he returned to the homely subjects in which his power and wonderful observation made him a master. He does not seem to have gone back to gospel illustrations till 1667, when he produced an admirable “Nativity,” which is only surpassed as regards arrangement and colour by Rembrandt’s “Carpenter’s Family” at the Louvre, or the
