III

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.

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.:—

To this may possibly be addedThe 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 Spinningof 1652 is not followed by any dated piece that at all rivals it.The Cobblerof 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

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 ofthe 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: whileThe Painter in His Studio(B. 32) is in the tenth and last state, andPeasant 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, andThe 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 Reckoningis 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.

Fig. 9—Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34.

Ostade’s etched work is, considered as etching, unequal. Sometimes, as for instance inThe Cobbler(B. 27), the first biting was not a success; at other times, as in theMan Laughing(B. 4), theSaying Grace(B. 34), or theFiddlers(B. 45), the plate has been over-bitten. The plate which Bartsch callsLa 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 thePlayers 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. TheSpectacle-seller(B. 22, Fig. 1), for instance, is an admirable composition, and the

etching rich. TheHumpbacked Fiddler(B. 44, Fig. 7), and theMan 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

Fig. 10.—The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26.

best, let us notice one which is unlike any of the others. This isThe 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 imperturbableantiquity—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.

InThe 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 inThe 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 isThe 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, theDance 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 andsordid. 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 forPunch. 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.

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

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’sChild 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 instanceThe 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 BartschLe 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.

Theseventeenth 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.

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

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 hopelessstruggle 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 representingTobias 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 theTobias and the Angel. It was re-worked by Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt’s work as aFlight 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 ownTobias 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 hascalled 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

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.

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

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 nota 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

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 mistthrough 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 theGrassy 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.

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 oftena 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

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 toReynard the Fox. But most readers will probably find the chief interest of the artist to lie in his relations with a greater man, Ruisdael.

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 beautifulView of Haarlemat 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 toidentify 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 theShore 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 famousJews’ Burying-placeat 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:

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