the name by which it is still known.
Although the etched Landscape of Rembrandt,
in its singular union of simplicity and learning, in
the close, uncustomary alliance of Style with per-
sonal impression, stands well-nigh alone, and suffices
as the basis of a reputation as great as Titian's,
Claude's, or Poussin's and one which now, with
only slight and temporary declension, has endured
for two hundred years we have yet to give con-
sideration to his triumph in that branch of Art
with which, in the mind of the average educated
person, he is more generally identified I mean
Portraiture : which means to some the taking of
superficial likeness, and to some the revelation of
character.
REMBRANDT 139
For this reason and that, every industrious and
thoughtful, as well as every careless, student of
pictorial Art, has his own favourites in Portraiture :
there is our pride in Reynolds, our joy in Gains-
borough, our wonder at the magic of Velasquez,
our steady confidence in truth when Holbein is the
draughtsman, our grave and brooding satisfaction
over the august portraiture of the Venetians. But
Rembrandt unites men's suffrages carries with him
even those who admire most warmly this painter's
unswerving veracity and that one's fluent grace.
And as one thinks what was the human material
which furnished elements for the creations of Rem-
brandt the old men and the women and the youths
of Amsterdam one thinks all the more, how exalted
was the vision, and yet how firmly with his feet on
earth stood the man to whom it was vouchsafed !
Over and over again, the needle, as the brush, of
Rembrandt, has been occupied with a face which
had no beauty at all events no formal beauty
that we should desire him. He has given it interest
and dignity dignity without a touch of the artificial
or pretentious ; the dignity of the individual soul
in its best hours. He did this more or less at all
times, but he did it more markedly in his later time
than in his earlier ; for, wonderful as was the com-
140 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
pleteness of Rembrandt's art within its self-set limits
in even his earliest time, he had, in common with
most of the greatest of creative and critical intel-
lects, that gift of long development, of steady pro-
gression. Rembrandt was no juvenile prodigy. As
time passed, as experience gathered, as misfortunes
saddened at all events in certain lonely hours
the spirit of a man of whom upon the whole indeed
it may be said, he
' rose distinct
Above slave-sorrows, to his chariot linked,'
Rembrandt's command of the instruments of his
employment became only more complete, if also
his method was more summary. More and more
sonorous were the notes he uttered, and the vox
huniana stop, which is absent in colder craftsmen,
sounded with increased frequency and more assured
appeal.
Of course in Portraiture, though he succeeds
always, he succeeds best when his themes are the
best. With the exception of ' Clement de Jonghe,'
with the exception of ' Lutma/ with the exception
perhaps of ' Jan Six ' etched by him many years
before he wrought the noble painted portrait which
is owned still by a descendant of its sitter (Mr.
Six van Hillegom of Amsterdam) Rembrandt is
REMBRANDT 141
most profoundly interesting, most penetrating, most
sympathetic, when it is this or that member of
his own family who serves as his model. Once
or twice at least he portrayed the features of
his son ; several times those of his mother, whom
in the ' Mere de Rembrandt au voile noir ' he
records in an hour of austere and guarded medi-
tation, as in the ' Head of a Woman lightly
etched ' he records her in the relaxation of social
ease. Many times, in drawing, print, and picture,
he portrayed his wife, Saskia in moods that seemed
to vary with his own : now perched upon his knee,
in the Dresden canvas of almost aggressive buoy-
ancy and self-satisfaction ; now demure and pretty,
in a Berlin drawing ; now radiant and almost stately
in the ' Great Jewish Bride,' so it is said though I
find least witness of her here now the healthy,
blameless animal of Mrs. Joseph's golden canvas ;
now the sick, worn woman, with vitality gone, eye
dimmed, life surely ebbing, of the lovely and pathetic
little etching which Sir Seymour Haden was, I think,
the first to christen ' The Dying Saskia.'
But oftener than he depicted any member of his
family and oftener much than he thought fit to
give expression to the cordial youthful face and
ample contours of Hendrickje Stoffels, the agreeable
142 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
consolation of his age he had recourse to his own
countenance. In the great series of what the Ger-
mans call ' self-portraits ' we may trace the changes
in his air from spirited youth to burdened years.
To-day he is comely, clean, and fit. To-morrow,
after a night of revelry, it may be for from few
human experiences did Rembrandt, any more than
Goethe, stand aside he is haggard and ' to pieces.'
Then he is proud in cap and feather ; he buckles on
his sword. Or, aged a little, he paints himself in
loose gown, palette in hand, it may be, and mahl-
stick at his side. Then, heavy and stooping, baggy
below the eyes, with mouth tender yet saddened,
trouble has come upon him from all the ends of
the earth. He totters, scarcely yet irresolute, but
weighed down certainly by years and sorrows ; his
wife long gone ; his fame obscured ; his means
narrow ; and, save for the sustaining power of his
art, and one hopes, at least, for the consolation of
one deep affection, anxiety in all his hours. We will
not leave him like this though like this we find him
in Lord Iveagh's immortal picture, and in one or two
representations of kindred character in Vienna and
at St. Petersburg. We will leave him happy in his
drawing. It is an etching of scarcely surpassable
interest, existing in many ' States ' a print to be
REMBRANDT 143
avoided in the later, which are flat and expression-
less ; to be cherished in all the earlier, of which the
first is rarest and most vigorous. See its slashing
directness. With blow to left and blow to right, so
to say it, on the copper, he hacks his way triumph-
antly and speedily to his goal. He is the master of
all methods. Here, as in so much besides, he has
been broad and rapid. In the ' Burgomaster Six'
which has something of the quality of a mezzotint
how tender and how slow ! In the ' Clement de
Jonghe ' the printseller of Amsterdam how large
yet subtle ! He is the master of many an instru-
ment. We can apply to him the phrase, and the
implied eulogy, of Robert Browning he ' blows
through brass,' but he can ' breathe through silver.'
(Pall Mall Magazine, December 1898.)
DUTCH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
DRAWINGS
THE drawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools,
and of all Schools besides, have these sources of
interest, always admitted they reveal to us, as
studies must, the personal thought of the master in
his theme, and they may often be identified as pre-
parations for some long recognised picture with
whose history we are henceforth to be the better
acquainted. But some among the drawings of the
Dutch School, though coming late indeed in the
procession of the world's Art, are still the earliest
to possess for us that different and self-contained
interest which belongs to work done for its proper
sake, itself realising the intention with which it was
begun, and so, in the first form in which it comes
down to us, at once final and complete.
The School of Holland that northern School
to which at last, in the great Seventeenth Century,
supremacy in Art had moved was perhaps the first
to adequately feel the value of those immediate
144
DUTCH DRAWINGS 145
impressions which the Italians and the early Flemish
had recognised chiefly to control, to alter, to enlarge.
And in the many methods of their Art, the masters
of Holland sought to perpetuate for the beholders of
their work the impressions which to themselves who
recorded them had perhaps been as fleeting as vivid.
Sketches in oil, sketches in water-colour, sketches in
chalk, in bistre, and with the reed pen, and sketches
with the etching needle these all, in the hands of
the great Dutchmen, were not merely studies for
themselves, but possessions for their public, just as
expressive and interesting as work more prolonged
and elaborate. Therefore the amount of finish which
each of such finished sketches received was not the
important matter : with the greatest artists the
amount was often but small : they knew that the
important matter was the sufficiency of finish its
capacity for conveying to one mind the impression
received by another.
And it is characteristic of Dutch Art, and especi-
ally of Dutch Landscape Art, that it had no period of
painful and tentative labour, like that during which
the art of earlier schools had had to struggle slowly
towards freedom of expression. Profiting no doubt
by the experience of the Past, and the recent Past
especially of Bruges and of Leyden, it gained almost
K
146 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
at once the power of finish always expressive, always
economical, yet often very swift and summary. The
work of its earliest masters Roghman say, and Van
Goyen has neither pettiness of manipulation when
it is most delicate, nor uncertainty when it is most
rapid. The signs of an art mature and masculine
economy of means, decision of hand are promptly
upon it. Roghman, it appears, made few pictures,
but many drawings. There are five-and-twenty
in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. His drawings
must have been acceptable to the public of his day,
and they show that a public then existed capable of
the intelligent interpretation of the work of an artist
who left much to be interpreted. Van Goyen, if he
did not make many drawings, painted many pictures
with at least as marked an economy of means as he
has used in the few drawings we know. His science
of large design and the expressive completeness of
his gradations of tone, enabled him often in picture
and drawing alike to dispense with the easier attrac-
tion of various colour, so that even a modern master
of colour, Theodore Rousseau, was wont to hold him
up as a model to his own pupils.
Van Goyen travelled, and Roghman travelled, but
their art, like that of Rembrandt their younger and
greater contemporary, who remained at home con-
DUTCH DRAWINGS 147
tinued to be not an imported art, but an art of the
soil ; and it was only at a later period that the
experience of travel, and the contact with an art
very different from their own, were to bring to the
Dutchmen a new method with a false ideal. There
was first the true Dutch time, rich and fertile a
time in which Van Goyen painted, with a seeming
monotony always delicately varied, the long river
banks, the low-lying towns, and the great high skies
of Holland ; in which Cuyp fixed interest on the
common aspects of the afternoon fields, steaming in
moist sunshine ; in which Adrian van Ostade passed
from the vulgarities of the alehouse to the skilfully
rendered charm of the cottage door and the bench
in the sunlight ; in which Jan Steen perfected him-
self in as keen and comprehensive a knowledge of
the world of men as Art has ever displayed ; and in
which Rembrandt contentedly imaged Dutch life
and landscape, always with nearly equal vigour,
nearly equal artistic precision, though at one time
in a style that formed the style of Gerard Dow and
at another in one that was inherited by Philip de
Koningh or by Nicholas Maas.
There were various local centres for these various
workers and their works. Leyden itself was a centre
the birthplace of Rembrandt, the birthplace of
148 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
Van Goyen. The Hague became a centre, and Van
Goyen removed to it ; Amsterdam a centre, and
Rembrandt was a leader there. But Haarlem was
the favourite, and probably because of the privileges
that belonged to the Guild of St. Luke St. Luke,
the painters' patron saint which was established in
that town. The Guild of St. Luke at Haarlem has
left us valuable records not indeed the raciest, but
certainly among the most trustworthy we can hope
to have access to upon Dutch Art, which has wanted
always, and wants to-day, a trustworthy general
historian. Laurens Van der Winne (as the Dutch
writer, M. van der Willigen, tells us, in his Artistes
d 'Harlem), towards the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury, made a list of one hundred and seventy-four men
who in his time were all reputed as good painters,
and whom he had personally known. His son, in
1702, after the father's death, noted that of these
only sixteen were then living ; and the grandson,
possessing himself of manuscript books and account-
books of the period, was able to enlarge the list of
early members of the Guild, and to add to our know-
ledge of its laws. ' No one without the pale of the
Society could sell or introduce his pictures. Many
painters thus found themselves obliged to join the
brotherhood in order to enjoy its advantages. Every
DUTCH DRAWINGS 149
year two sales were announced by the officer of the
Society ; each member could bring to the sale
whatever he desired to sell.' ' Many painters were
attracted to the town/ for lesser or longer periods ;
but, though many painters contributed to the Guild,
' it appears/ writes the Haarlem citizen, ' that they
did not all live here.' Notwithstanding the advan-
tages of the Guild, the profession of painting was not
lucrative for the many. Even the busiest and most
prolific artists, like Wouvermans, were debtors some-
times to men who befriended them. Others were so
indigent that they must needs be excused their pay-
ment of the yearly moneys to the brotherhood. In
1661, Frans Hals, the greatest of the Haarlem
masters, found himself in this circumstance. Haar-
lem, since his death, has happily delighted to honour
him.
The art of Holland, like the national life, saw
many vicissitudes during that eventful Seventeenth
Century ; and the second half of the century brought
changes of taste and fashion, which cast for a while
into the shade even such supreme art as the art of
Rembrandt. Leaders of social opinion were not
proof against the attractions of the work of Both
and Berghem, which sacrificed so much that it might
gain, as it did gain, the outland charm of southern
150 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
colour and southern light ; and the friend of Rem-
brandt, Jan Six, as one of many, showed himself in
the later years of the century a convert to that
newer and brilliant but bastard art. By the time
that Cuyp and Wynants had died old and Adrian
Van de Velde had died young when the seven-
teenth century was entering its fourth quarter
there remained among the home-bred landscape
painters hardly one to hold his own against the
newer fashion. Hobbema, it is true, worked on,
with great and patient fidelity, but he worked
unregarded and died poor.
And in other branches of Art, after this time, the
school declined. William Van de Velde and Back-
huysen the two great painters of the sea and the
fleet had had a worthy precursor in Renier Zeeman,
but they had no worthy successors. The best
painters of gentle life and of the life of the tavern
were falling away. In the comparatively humble
but yet delightful field of ' still life,' only, could the
early years of the Eighteenth Century surpass the
achievements of fifty years before. The admired
painter of flowers, Jan Van Huysum whose draw-
ings are seen in large numbers at the British
Museum, and whose work is known, perhaps, at its
best and boldest in his drawings then arose. He
DUTCH DRAWINGS 151
was one of a whole family of flower and fruit
painters ; and not the only one who gave some
excuse for the ecstasy of a French novelist who was
also a connoisseur. Balzac declared of him that his
work would hardly be paid for if it were covered
with diamonds. But Michael, his kinsman, was
perhaps almost as worthy of that praise. To their
work succeeded, far on in the Eighteenth Century,
the vulgar mimicry of Van Os, with the colours of
the chromo-lithograph. And as to Landscape Art
that, free once more from Italian influence, was
indeed natural and Dutch again in its aim, with Van
Stry especially ; but in its practice it insisted rather
upon the importance of detail than upon the value
of effect. Jacob Cats carried to its last length the
trivial elaboration which had become the fashion of
his day. The virtue had gone out of Dutch Art,
and Dutch Art faded imperceptibly into modern
painting.
It was one of the characteristics of the great men
of the Renaissance, that they tried many arts and
were masters of many. It was one of the charac-
teristics of the Seventeenth Century Dutchmen, that
they tried many branches of Art, and were masters
of all that they tried. Supreme in technicalities
of painting and in technicalities of etching, they
152 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
were the first to use with any large effect the
medium of water-colour, and their use of that, in a
manner not tentative and occasional, like Diirer's,
but often familiar and accomplished as our own (of
our great last generation), is shown by many draw-
ings. Coloured sketches assigned to Rembrandt,
doubtless on good foundation, are in the collections
of the British Museum and of M. J. De Vos, a
veteran collector at Amsterdam ; and on our Bur-
lington Club walls not to speak of the wonderful
pen drawings, so decisive at once and free is a
sketch of a city gate, from the collection of Sey-
mour Haden, a sketch in which line counts for
little, and the effect is sought and gained by tender
gradations of tinting in monochrome. Probably
of the same period are the two drawings in which
Philip De Koningh, who in landscape came nearest
to Rembrandt, has used his orange-browns with
subtle variation, to portray his wonted effects of
infinite distance.
Colour, or it may be a wash of sepia, used by
Rembrandt and by De Koningh chiefly to suggest
distance or tone, is used by Berghem more often to
suggest the pleasantness and warmth of sunlight,
which were so precious to him, and were the charm
of his art. His artificial but agreeable landscape of
DUTCH DRAWINGS 153
ordered valley and well-disposed mountain and
happy peasant of the opera, is represented notably
by one of the many splendid drawings belonging
to Malcolm of Poltalloch a delicately coloured
design, airy and sunny almost as De Koningh's best
paintings, and to be noticed, not only for the
extreme rarity of such work in water-colour at that
time and by that master, but also for its foretaste
of the subtlety with which our own great art of
water-colour learned, so many generations after-
wards, to reach atmospheric effects.
But it was in the painting of interiors that the
resources of the art of water-colour were used most
fully by the Dutchmen, and they were used only
most fully in the old age of Berghem, and after the
death of Rembrandt, when Adrian van Ostade,
himself now old, had come from Haarlem to
Amsterdam, and they were used best by that
master of ignoble conception and often repulsive
work. The special virtues of Ostade accomplished
management of light and shade, and faultless com-
position of mean subjects an instinct, that is, for
the spacing out, the perfectly balanced rilling, the
never crowding, of his given area of paper or canvas
have long ago been acknowledged ; and his sense
of beauty in colour and beauty in grouping, and
154 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
beauty indeed sometimes in line, in inanimate
things, has gone far to atone for that vulgar
indifference to charm of figure and face, common
indeed to many of the Dutchmen, but Ostade's to
an exceptional degree. Drawings of Mr. Malcolm's
and Mr. Cook's show him, once for all, the con-
summate practitioner of a branch of art, the pre-
cedence in which the invention of which, almost
our own country has liked to claim. Rich and
mellow, tender and luminous, beyond all that has
thus far been acknowledged, was the best work of
Ostade in his old age, in the English art of water-
colour. Dusart followed him in elaboration of work,
but not at all in felicitous adaptation of the means
to the end.
There are naturally certain masters rightly famed
for their work in oil painting, who are seen at a
disadvantage in drawings, whether by pen or chalk
or washes of colour. It is not all who gave to their
smaller designs, with whatever purpose of immediate
sale, completion so brilliant and expressive as that
which we see, for instance, in a little red chalk
drawing of Wouvermans a group of figures, horses
and dogs a sharply finished work, exquisite in its
possession of every quality for which the master
may be praised. Again, some men dependent on
DUTCH DRAWINGS 155
glow of colour or gradations of tone beyond the
art of limited material, or at least beyond their
command of it Cuyp, for instance might be judged
hardly by drawings. The pleasantness of Cuyp is
not in his drawings.
And then there are the great masters of one
generation, who have not been great masters at all
in another : their excellence, seen late, escaped the
appreciation of their contemporaries or of their
immediate successors. Fashions in art change, and
Van der Heist, exalted by Sir Joshua above Rem-
brandt, drops later to his proper place. Each age,
we may be sure, has something right in its criticism :
the great Sir Joshua himself, who thought that
' Bruges afforded but scanty entertainment to a
painter/ Bruges, with its masterpieces of the
sacred art of Memling had the keenness to see the
style and the beauty under the orgies of Jan Steen.
But to this inevitable variation and inconstancy of
taste is due, alas ! much permanent loss things
that were treasures once being now not to be
guarded, or things of no account until now, being
treasures for to-day. And the loss is felt most
surely in the case of drawings so short a period of
neglect being enough to destroy them. It may be
that certain artists unrepresented in collections, or
156 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
represented inadequately, drew very little. All did
not multiply studies with the fertility of William Van
de Velde ; but all must have drawn, and the work
of some is missing to us. The flying sheets of long
unvalued artists, on which Hobbema pencilled the
forms of many trees, with a patient precision which
in modern art only Crome has equalled on which
Wynants drew his narrow path, wandering over
the sandhills or by the side of the farm on which
Jan Steen caught the rare girl's prettiness and the
last subtleties of vivacious gesture on which De
Hooch or Metsu drew tenderly faces of grave
quietude, absorbed in daily and common occupa-
tion these flying sheets, one fears, were dust and
refuse two hundred years ago.
(Introduction to Burlington Club Catalogue, April 1878.)
VELASQUEZ AT THE NEW
GALLERY
A COLLECTION of Spanish Art at the New Gallery
contains such representation as it has been possible
to acquire of Murillo, Ribera, and Zurbaran
and even of the artists of our own century : Goya,
Madrazo, Fortuny but nothing that vies for a
moment in attractiveness and vitality with the
work of Velasquez. Unfortunately, it does not
include two of the most important of those can-
vases of Velasquez which have a resting-place in
England Mr. Bankes's priceless 'document' (for
it is that and something besides), the first study,
we mean, at Kingston Lacy, for the great Madrid
picture of ' Las Meninas,' and the yet more im-
portant, because the even more exceptional and
more perfected picture, the astonishing 'Venus/
whose home for many years has been at a small
country house upon the borders of two counties in
the North. The sketch the oil sketch, for Vel-
asquez never made preparatory drawings the
167
158 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
sketch of ' Las Meninas ' would have recalled
appropriately the composition, and conveyed some-
thing of the character of a mature masterpiece
whose actual presence can never be looked for here ;
and the recumbent ' Venus ' would have shown an
almost austere artist winning for once an easy
triumph in the treatment of a luxurious theme,
more properly, or more habitually, Titian's. But,
as it is, the representation of Velasquez, in Regent
Street, affords ground for study. We could wish,
for our own part, that decorative, even symmetrical,
arrangement had been discarded, and that the
master's works, as far as they are here, had been
seen close together, with no distracting juxtaposi-
tion of paintings of a secondary rank. To have
ranged the Velasquez canvases in order of date