_Gerard Dou_ (Dutch: 1613-1675). _See 192._
This picture, as an acknowledged _chef d'oeuvre_ of the master, has
long been celebrated. It was purchased by Sir Robert Peel from the
Fonthill Collection in 1823 for £1270. Mrs. Jameson, on seeing the
picture at Sir R. Peel's, wrote: "All executed with such a nicety of
touch--such an inconceivable truth and minuteness of imitation--as to
render the picture a very miracle of art. A higher merit consists in
the admirable painting of the heads, especially that of the old woman,
which is full of life." "A wicker market-basket is a common homely
thing, but look at its presentment here--every polished, well-used
twig of it following the true undulations of form and colour, light
and shade, through the marvellous patience and skill of the vanished
Dutchman--and see if it does not produce an exquisite poetic tremor
by the thoughts it evolves. There is a dead image of the barnyard
cock which Mr. Darwin may compare with the barndoor fowl of to-day as
accurately as if it were photographed. His once fiery eye is glazed
and sightless as a dim pearl, his neck feathers ruffled but no longer
in anger or pride; his pale, amber-coloured legs helplessly and
ingloriously reversed, their impatient and masterful scratching among
his dames in the stubble over for ever; the glossy purples, greens,
and blacks of his tail-feathers rising sharp and delicate out of the
speckled hazes of colour which it required days and days to lay side
by side among the crushed and crowding plumes. The cock, the horologe
of Thorpe's light, crows no more to the answering hill-farms. He is
destined for the spit of the housewife who holds up the hare. But his
fate was glorious, for by what tens of thousands since the year 1650
or thereabouts have his perfections been admired and praised. It was
worth living for, and, to chanticleer, worth dying for, to become the
occasion of such a miracle of art" (Smetham's _Literary Works_, p. 240).