CHAPTER VI
Modern Types. More Thought and Activity Comes to Woman. Application of the Golden Rule In Character and Art. Enlightenment Means Progress.
Every key in art or music has its relative minor, and beauty finds its relative minor in pathos.
It is a long step from the Renaissance to nineteenth century art. Our subject demands long steps, for human evolution is slow, requiring several generations in earlier centuries to produce a marked change. The painters of the Renaissance depicted "holy" characters, virgins, madonnas, and saints evolved from sinners, and seemed to realize that appealing beauty developed from the spiritual within. We know how right they were.
There were other women in Holland than burgomasters' wives; women who could not afford to dress in elegance, or pay for paintings of any sort; women absorbed in the problems of keeping soul and body together, gleaning happiness from home love and the sunshine between cloud shadows.
Joseph Israels seems to stand as the connecting link between the past and present art of Holland. Himself of the lowly, his boyhood snatches of youth and joy, led him to paint the fleeting happinesses of childhood; barefoot on the shore gathering shells, sailing their crude boats, or filling baskets with sea weed and mussels, happy in the sunshine for a little, before returning to the fisherman's hut. He painted young girls "Knitting in the Sun"; fish-wives sorting the "Catch" from the beached boats; women in short skirts, sabots, and flaring white bonnets weeding long rows of flowers or vegetables—their every-day toil.
As Israels went on through the years, his heart and brush struck with more fullness into minor chords of life; ruggedness and rags, tenderness and tears, sorrow and suffering were dominant harmonies on many a canvas that has taught the world of life, of sympathy, and love.
Look again. In the hill country of France a shepherd's daughter tending her father's sheep. Rumors of war and injustice came to her uneducated mind, and unlocked a secret door of her heart. Loyalty abode there and awoke at sound of an unseen message. Jeanne d'Arc followed the voice and France was saved. Jeanne was sacrificed, a burnt offering for her country.
Was woman's soul enlarging? More and more we find woman entering into the world's work and into history; more and more has she entered into art
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