DUTCH GENRE
The tendency toward genre painting began before the separation of the
Holland Free State from the Spanish Netherlands. Pieter Brueghel the
Elder, who died in Brussels in 1570, is regarded as the leader of the
group of painters who depicted the life of the people, particularly in
open-air surroundings. His work, for example, and that of one of his
pupils, Lucas van Valckenborch, make a very lively showing in one of the
galleries of the Art-History Museum in Vienna. Here, in a number of
canvases of considerable size, crowded with figures, are pictured scenes
of peasants, merrymaking, harvesting, engaged in a vintage festival, or
skating and sleighing, while there is even a representation of rich folk
enjoying a picnic in a park. These painters and their contemporaries in
similar subjects are to be reckoned in the Flemish School. But there is
one, Pieter Aertz, surnamed “Long Pieter,” who, although he died in
1575, before any separation from Flanders was dreamed of, may be
considered as a forerunner of distinctly Dutch genre, since he was born
in Amsterdam and lived there for the greater part of his life. An
interesting example of his work, _The Egg Dance_, is in the Rijks
Museum. The scene is a kitchen, opening into a garden, and the floor is
scattered with various articles--a bowl, a shoe, onions and eggs--among
which a young man is jauntily dancing, while a group beside the hearth
applauds. As far as the character and spirit of the scene go, the
picture is thoroughly representative of the older kind of genre, which
portrays the type rather than the individual, and numerous little
episodes massed into a group, rather than a single incident or phase of
life wrought out completely. For this becomes the tendency of the later
and distinctively Holland genre, which, as the technical motives of the
artists grew in refinement and possibly as the taste of the public
became more refined, resulted in the subjects being drawn more and more
from the home life of the well-to-do and fashionable. By this time the
genre pictures have ceased to represent an amusing picture-book of
manners and customs; they have in a sense lost their interest of
subject, the matter of which they treat counting for very little in
comparison with the charming manner of the treatment.
The three greatest masters of Holland genre, Vermeer, Terborch, and Jan
Steen, must be considered separately. Meanwhile we will summarize the
method and manner of some of the most important among the able but
lesser artists.
ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE
VAN OSTADE, who was a pupil of Hals and later became influenced by
Rembrandt, stands midway between the earlier and the later motives of
genre. His favorite and, on the whole, most characteristic subjects are
groups of peasants reveling or squabbling in the kitchens or around the
doors of inns. The figures are squat and lumpish, curiously like
animated roly-poly puddings, only redeemed from commonness by the limpid
coloring and the suave, facile manner of the brushwork that he had
derived from Hals. Sometimes, however, he selects a few figures and
gives them an individual characterization. In fact, the latter pictures,
as well as his groups of peasants, show a remarkable affinity to
Brouwer’s treatment of similar subjects. For this eccentric and original
artist, an “Adonis in rags,” as he has been called, a refined painter of
coarse themes, though Flemish by birth, seems to have come under the
influence of Frans Hals, lived in Haarlem and Amsterdam, and was really
in his art representative of the Holland School of genre. Van Ostade,
therefore, must have known him and may well have been affected by his
example. At any rate, the character and spirit of his earlier pictures
correspond with those of Brouwer’s, though the latter’s work exhibits a
more refined artistic sense. In time, however, Van Ostade came under the
Rembrandtesque manner; the thinness of his painting develops into a
richer impasto, the feeling of the composition becomes larger, the
choice of subject more distinguished, and his treatment more studied and
sympathetic, while the tone is warmer and more luminous in consequence
of the shrewder use of chiaroscuro. Later his manner again changes to
one of extreme refinement, almost finical. The surface, to use an
expressive French word, _léché_, seems licked into glossiness; the tone
has become cold and grayish; the compositions are more studied but less
picturesque; yet the colors have an extraordinary transparency. The
whole canvas has less the air of intimate observation than of something
wrought over in the studio.
These three phases of Van Ostade’s development can be studied side by
side in the examples of his work in the Gallery of The Hague.
Representative of his first manner is _Peasants’ Holiday_, painted in
163-(the last figure is undecipherable); of the second, _Marriage
Proposal_, which belongs to the period between 1650 and 1655; and of the
third manner, _Peasants in an Inn_ and _The Fiddler_, painted
respectively in 1662 and 1673.
Van Ostade died in Haarlem in 1685. Among his pupils were his brother
Isaac van Ostade (1621-1649), Cornelis Bega (1620-1664), and Cornelis
Dusart (1660-1704). The last named inherited a great number of his
master’s studies and sketches, which he worked upon and finished. These
after Dusart’s death were sold as his own, a fact which helps to explain
the similarity of his style to that of Adriaen van Ostade. Bega often
imitated the latter’s choice of subject, and also with some success his
manner of gray tonality, but his colors lack transparency, and the flesh
parts are dry and brickish. The outdoor scenes of Isaac van Ostade,
alive with figures in characteristic action, are exceedingly interesting
as pictures of the “passing show” of Dutch life. Lastly, it is to the
credit of Adriaen van Ostade that he was the teacher of, or at least
exercised considerable influence over, Jan Steen during the latter’s
sojourn in Haarlem. But the manner of his own pictures is that of the
earlier genre which preceded the great School of Holland.
[Illustration: PEASANTS ROUND A HEARTH ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
GERARD (GERRIT) DOU
THIS artist, born in Leyden, 1613, and dying there in 1675, spent his
whole life in his native city, helped to found its Guild of St. Luke,
and influenced several other genre painters. Among the latter were
Gabriel Metsu, Godfried Schalcken, Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland, and
Frans van Mieris the Elder, who handed on the tradition of the Leyden
School to his son, Willem van Mieris. Dou himself had enjoyed the
influence of Rembrandt, in whose studio he worked during the three years
preceding the master’s move to Amsterdam in 1631. But before this time
he had been instructed by his father, who was a painter on glass, and by
Bartholomeus Dolando, an engraver. Dou’s own matured style very
remarkably reflects both the earlier and the later experiences of his
training. While he learned to feel his subject in the manner of
Rembrandt, he contrived also to see it with a precise eye for detail and
to render it with the nicety of a painter on glass or of one who uses
the burin. He was an impeccable draftsman and a good composer, so long
as the subject contained only a few figures and was treated in a small
size. For large canvases and the handling of a complicated composition
his style was altogether too minute in character. On the other hand, his
color is always harmonious, though in some works inclined to an
excessive polish; and the chiaroscuro, skilfully applied, is, when the
subject permits, very charmingly expressive of the sentiment. He devoted
himself to the representation of interiors and, as we have seen,
adopted the device of showing them through an arch or beyond a
lambrequin, formed of a heavily draped curtain, frequently also
representing one or more figures at a window with the obscurity of the
room behind them. In thus adapting Rembrandt’s principle of chiaroscuro
to the rendering of the physical phenomenon of a concave space more or
less immersed in shadow, no one was more skilful than Dou. To give depth
and quality to the obscurity of the distance and especially of the
ceiling, he would hang a chandelier or lantern in the middle distance
and catch the light upon it. Similarly, he would place some objects in
the foreground to bring the latter forward, and then between these two
foci of secondary light concentrate or scatter the main group of figures
in highest illumination.
The two finest examples of his skill in thus building up a composition
of values of light are _The Young Mother_, in the gallery of The Hague,
and _The Dropsical Woman_ of the Louvre. The former, because of its
charming sentiment, is Dou’s most popular picture; but the other, in
consequence of the superior simplicity and concentration of its
composition, the comparative breadth of its treatment and fuller
richness of color and quality of chiaroscuro, is without much doubt his
masterpiece. However, another example which approaches it very closely
is _A Lady at her Toilet_, in the Munich Gallery. Dou’s interest in
chiaroscuro led him to experiment with so-called night-pieces, where the
gloom of the interior is illuminated by a candle that makes a central
spot of brilliance, fitfully reflected in a partially diffused glow.
Such are _An Old Woman who has Lost her Thread_ and the _Young Man and
Girl in a Cellar_, both in the Dresden Gallery; while the most elaborate
and famous example is _The Night School_ of the Rijks Museum, somewhat
damaged by time, in which there are five separate points of varying
degrees of illumination.
In a picture in the Dresden Gallery Dou has represented himself at work
in his studio, a bare and homely room, lighted by a large window on the
left. This window, with slight differences of shape and size, appears in
many of his works, occupying a similar position; while, even when it is
not shown, its effect is noticeable in the artist’s tendency to light
his compositions from the left. Another instance of his tendency to
repetition of motive may be traced in the frequency with which he used
over and over again the same piece of furniture or object of furnishing.
For example, in a still-life (No. 1708) in the Dresden Gallery appears
the same candle-stick that is introduced in a number of other pictures.
The point is interesting as showing the way in which Dou artificially
arranged his subject-matter; and he was followed in this respect as in
others by all the genre painters. Each had his particular motive of
composition and freely repeated it; his particular bit of costume or
article of furnishing that with variations of arrangement he used
repeatedly. Holland genre, in fact, ceased almost from its beginning to
be a direct representation of actual domestic life. It was based upon
the latter, but the artist reserved a complete liberty of selection and
arrangement. He was not intent upon illustrating the life, and only
borrowed hints from it to assist him in creating a picture of his own
invention. It is a point to be observed by the modern public, which is
apt to resent, as shallow in motive and uninteresting in subject, a
picture which has been designed mainly or solely as a picture; that is
to say, for the beauty of form, color, light, and tone that may be
expressed in a composition of objects, arbitrarily brought together for
this purpose. Such an attitude on the part of an artist is, however,
thoroughly justified by the example of the Holland School of genre,
which it is the fashion to-day to admire so generously.
NICOLAES MAES
SOME may criticize this placing of Maes among the lesser artists of
genre. Bode ranks him with Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch among the “great
genre painters of Holland,” and adds that “there is scarcely any pupil
of Rembrandt’s who approaches the great master so nearly as Maes does in
this series of pictures.” He is alluding to _Dreaming_, or, as it is
sometimes called, _A Reverie_, a young girl gazing out of a window, and
to _Asking a Blessing_, in the Rijks Museum; to _The Young
Card-Players_, in the National Gallery, and to _Nurse_ and _Children
with Goat-Carriage_, in a private collection; and also to certain
pictures of old women, such as the one owned by Mr. John G. Johnson of
Philadelphia, that was recently seen in the Exhibition of Dutch Art in
the Metropolitan Museum. In all of these pictures the figures are
life-size, and, to quote Bode, “one weakness is common to all of them:
that they present simple motives on a large canvas with rough execution
and without the powerful
[Illustration: OLD WOMAN SPINNING NICOLAES MAES
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
and individual language with which Rembrandt renders similar genre
pieces.”
The truth of this criticism seems to be sufficient of itself to exclude
Maes from the ranks of the great genre painters, whose works are great
of their kind just because these painters so admirably fitted the size
of their pictures to the scope of their intention and their powers, and
wrought their canvases to the highest pitch of a personally inspired
technical perfection. This became the ideal of Holland genre and remains
its chief distinction; and Maes only attains to it in his smaller
canvases, such as the two examples of _An Old Woman Spinning_, in the
Rijks Museum, and _An Old Woman Peeling Apples_ (the spinning-wheel near
her), in the Berlin Gallery, and _The Cradle_ and _The Dutch Housewife_
of the National Gallery. The period of these small genre pictures,
beginning about 1655 and lasting for ten years, represents the
high-water mark of Maes’s artistic career.
In his earlier period he shows a preference for red, juxtaposed with
black and less frequently with yellow, that continues to characterize
his work. But at first, as in _The Dreamer_, it is the brightness of hue
that seems to attract him. He has bathed the red shutter and the girl’s
figure and the leaves and fruit of the apricot-tree, that grows beside
the window from which she leans, in a warm sunlight, and the latter,
blended with soft shadows, glows upon her face and hands. All the
several textures are rendered with admirable veracity, and a resemblance
to life, that would be startling but for the quiet, pensive expression
of the girl’s figure that pervades the canvas. The picture attracts and
charms, but does it hold one’s interest? Scarcely, if you come back to
it after seeing the more imaginative treatment of chiaroscuro in the
_Card-Players_ of the National Gallery; and still less, if you compare
it with one of Maes’s smaller genre pictures in the Rijks Museum; for
example, _An Old Woman Spinning_ (No. 1504). Here the red reappears in
the table-cloth, and the black spot is made by her head against the
drabbish white of the wall, but the yellow is disguised in her
olive-green dress, which shows the whitish-gray sleeves of the
undergarment. It is a cooler scheme of color, more restrained yet
richer, and it is lighted without any striking contrasts of chiaroscuro.
Instead, the humble apartment is permeated with a dimly luminous
atmosphere, out of which certain parts of the composition emerge into
clearness, while the rest is veiled in half-tones and shadow. The
picture is extraordinarily real, exquisite in technique, and deeply
moving in its suggestion of the half-lights of existence among the aged
and the poor. The secret is, that what was experiment or assertion in
the larger canvas has here become the free expression of the artist’s
simple and sincere sentiment. Sentiment and expression are united in a
natural and complete equipoise.
During the last twenty-five years of his life Maes seems to have gained
a rather scanty subsistence by painting portraits. Some of these are of
high merit; the _Portrait of a Man_, for example, in the Fine Arts
Museum at Budapest, which represents a gray-haired and bearded man, with
black velvet cap and black coat edged with brown fur, sitting in a
red-backed chair. Thus it repeats the artist’s favorite color-scheme,
and moreover,
[Illustration: OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATION GABRIEL METSU
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
in its grave, tender rendering of old age, preserves the fine sentiment
of his best period. But such noble characterization of humanity is rare
with him, for, impelled by need and very likely by the taste of his
public, he became an imitator of Van Dyck’s elegance. With Maes this
elegance became pinchbeck, his fine ladies and gentlemen being very
cheap imitations of their models.
GABRIEL METSU
BORN in Leyden in 1630, the son of a painter, Gabriel Metsu was one of
the precocious talents of the Holland School, for in his sixteenth year
he helped to form the Guild of St. Luke in his native city. For the
purpose of studying his art, his brief career of thirty-seven years (he
died in 1667) may be conveniently divided into two parts, preceding or
following the year 1655, in which he moved to Amsterdam and came under
the direct influence of Rembrandt. But it would appear from his own
early pictures, that even during his life in Leyden he had by some means
obtained a knowledge of this master’s work. Metsu’s actual teacher,
according to Houbraken, had been Dou, though his own work shows no
direct trace of the latter’s influence. On the other hand, that of Hals
is apparent. Meanwhile he experimented for himself and produced several
pictures which, like _The Blacksmith_, in the Rijks Museum, are founded
on the motive of a workshop, lighted fitfully by a forge and scattered
with tools. In fact, as Bode says, the work of his early period is
distinguished by “restless composition, hurried movement, and careless
treatment.”
Moving to Amsterdam, he became one of the group that circled round
Rembrandt, and at first was directly influenced by Maes, and perhaps by
Rembrandt himself; witness his _Old Woman in Meditation_ of the Rijks
Museum and his fine portrait of an old lady in the Berlin Gallery. Then
almost at a jump he reaches an individual style of his own. It grows out
of his attitude toward the subjects that--with occasional exceptions of
marketing scenes, such as the two pictures respectively of a man and of
a woman selling poultry, in the Dresden Gallery, and the _Vegetable
Market_ of the Louvre--he now favors. They are intimate presentations of
the graciously prosperous life of the middle-class burghers, before
extravagance and ostentation had eaten their way into Dutch society.
That his art thus settled to a distinct purpose may be partly attributed
to the fact that the artist himself settled down to domestic life,
marrying Isabella Wolff, April 1, 1663. A picture in the Dresden
Gallery, dated two years earlier, _Lovers at Breakfast_, shows himself
and the lady sitting side by side, one of his arms about her shoulders
and the other lifted as he holds a tall wine-glass. It is curiously
interesting in its resemblance and difference to Rembrandt’s picture of
himself and Saskia that hangs in an adjoining gallery of the same
museum.
The style which Metsu formed for himself is in accordance with the
character and treatment of the subjects to which he now devoted himself.
He abandons the Rembrandtesque principle of chiaroscuro, for there is no
mystery or depth of sentiment in his point of view. He is frankly and
simply interested in the genial externals of his subject; yet something
of the Maes influence still affects his outlook. He sees the comfort and
happiness of the home life and reflects it in the composure and refined
orderliness that now pervade his compositions. Devoting himself to the
simplest and directest way of presenting the subject, he avoids all
striving after effect and secures a quietly balanced ensemble, wherein
every figure and object is rendered with sureness of drawing, regard for
the beauty of local color, and the utmost perfection of truthful
realization. The date at which Metsu thus found himself is placed about
1660, and the picture in the Metropolitan Museum, _A Music Party_, dated
1659, serves to mark the transition. Its composition is still inclined
to be “restless”; but the treatment, far from being “careless,” is
distinguished by a very sincere feeling for the objective beauty of the
salient details, while at least one figure, that of the cavalier on the
right, exhibits the concentrated repose of movement which became one of
the most delightful elements of Metsu’s art. It is seen developed
throughout the whole composition in Mr. J. P. Morgan’s _Visit to the
Nursery_, where, notwithstanding the sprightliness of feeling that
animates the figures, each of them has its own plastic individuality of
self-contained movement. Every detail has a perfection of finish that is
never finical or at the expense of the unity of the whole. The hands and
heads have a special distinction of fluent modeling and of exquisite
expression. These qualities, combined with richness of local color,
characterize the pictures of the sixties, as may be seen in the examples
in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the galleries of
Dresden, Amsterdam, and The Hague. Toward the end of this ten years of
highest production Metsu’s pictures grow stiffer in composition, colder
in color, and harder in their surfaces. The beginning of this change is
noticeable in the portrait group of _The Family Geelvink_, in the Berlin
Gallery, and characterizes also some of his latest genre subjects.
Probably the cause was failing health, for toward the end of his life he
suffered from the effects of a bungled operation.
PIETER DE HOOCH
PIETER DE HOOCH, the son of a butcher, was born in Rotterdam in 1630,
being therefore the same age as Metsu and two years older than Maes and
Vermeer. With these last two he has been ranked by some critics, who
consider that the trio represents the high-water mark of Holland genre.
With Maes’s claim to this distinction one has ventured to disagree, and
may also dispute De Hooch’s for somewhat the same reason. The latter’s
best period was confined to ten years, 1655-1665, and outside of that,
especially toward the end of his life, he did some quite indifferent
work.
Houbraken makes the statement that his teacher was Nicolaes Berchem. It
is accepted as a fact, the presumption being that Berchem at the time
was living in Amsterdam, in which case De Hooch would have become
acquainted with Rembrandt’s style. That it did not affect him,
immediately at any rate, is evident from his early work, which
represents lively scenes of soldiers and young girls, painted rather in
the manner of Dirck Hals or Duyster. It is possible, however, that even
thus early the Rembrandt influence may have been operating upon him, as
upon so many of the painters in Amsterdam at that time, by drawing his
attention to problems of light, which eventually became the
characteristic of his art.
From 1653, for two years, he served as “painter and footman” to Justus
de la Grange, a rich merchant adventurer, with whom he lived both in
Haarlem and The Hague. Then he married a girl from Delft and moved to
that city, his name appearing among the members of its guild from 1655
to 1657. It was now that he came in touch with Vermeer, whose example
helped to bring out all that was best in him. His pictures now became
veritable poems of light, wrought with extraordinary conscientiousness
and to a high pitch of refinement. He paints the courtyards of city
houses, aglow in bright sunshine, cool rooms opening into warmly lighted
ones, the vista often terminating in a street or canal. Always the
varieties of light are rendered with delightful naturalness and in a way
that gives a special charm to every detail which the light illumines. He
is not very skilful in the representation of figures, but a master in
the art of placing them. They and every object in the scene not only
occupy their respective planes with absolute justness, but the position
assigned to them has been selected with an unerring eye for decorative
effect. Moreover, no artist has been so successful in rendering what
visitors to Holland rarely fail to observe--the propriety and
cleanliness of the Dutch home, and the sentiment that seems to attach
to every object in it and around it. Among the loveliest of these
interiors is No. 426 in the Munich Pinakothek; _The Mother_, in the
Berlin Gallery; _The Interior_ of the National Gallery; _The Pantry_ and
_The Interior_, in the Rijks Museum, and an _Interior_ in the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts; while two notable outdoor scenes are the National
Gallery’s _A Dutch Courtyard_ and the _Family Group_ of the Berlin
Gallery. All these and others that might be cited belong to the period
between 1655 and 1665. But the enthusiasm which these arouse is sadly
dashed by many examples of his later manner, which are disconnected or
restless in composition, hot in color rather than luminous, and heavy in
the shadows, while others are marred by excessive hardness of surface
and triteness of overwrought detail. The latest date that appears on any
of his paintings is 1677, wherefore it is surmised that De Hooch’s death
occurred about this time.
FRANS VAN MIERIS THE ELDER
OF the painters bearing the name Van Mieris the most considerable was
Frans van Mieris, surnamed the Elder, to distinguish him from his
grandson, Frans van Mieris the Younger. Between them came Willem van
Mieris, and the merit of the three as artists corresponds with the order
of their succession.
The elder Frans, born at Leyden in 1635, became a pupil of Gerard Dou,
though, like the latter, he had first been taught by a painter on glass.
The earliest part of his career was still within the best period of
Holland genre, but before he died in 1681 the decline was come; and it
was to this that his son and pupil, Willem, succeeded. Willem’s pictures
are still clever but tricky, hard and glossy in texture, trivial and
often silly in motive. As for his son, Frans the Younger, he belongs to
the decadence, and the Dutch consider his pictures of no merit. There
was still another Mieris, Jan by name, the brother of Willem, who,
however, lived mostly abroad and died at the age of thirty in Rome.
Frans the Elder was popular in his own day and continued to be held in
high esteem by collectors of the eighteenth century. He has been ranked
with Metsu, but not with justice to the latter, for some of his work
betrays that pettiness of motive and method which marked the decadence
of genre and has been aptly called the “snuff-box” style. On the other
hand, he had his moments of more genuine artistry, when he would paint a
picture that even in comparison with Metsu is acceptable. These are
chiefly to be found in the galleries of Munich, Vienna, and St.
Petersburg. Among the Munich examples is _The Sick Woman_; she seems to
have sunk to the floor in a faint and is being tended by an old woman,
while a doctor in the shaded background is holding up a bottle of
cordial to the light and gazing at it--a figure very familiar in Dutch
genre. Unfortunately the subject suggests Jan Steen and the superior
_esprit_ with which he would have treated it. The lady wears a reddish
jacket trimmed with white fur, and the same garment reappears in _The
Oyster Breakfast_. Here a girl is seated at a table holding an oyster in
one hand and a wine-glass in the other. The picture represents the
finer side of Van Mieris, though it is surpassed by another example in
the Munich Gallery, _The Girl Before a Mirror_, which possesses the
quality that has suggested the coupling of this artist’s name with that
of Metsu.
In the Art-History Museum of Vienna is _A Lady and Her Doctor_, in which
he stands feeling her pulse as she sits beside a bed. It is
sentimentally imagined, but extremely clever in a superficial way, the
fabrics being imitated with extraordinary skill. Far more satisfactory
is _Cavalier in a Shop_. On the right of the foreground is a mass of
sumptuously colored stuffs, but the man’s costume and the jacket of the
woman, who stands at a table offering something to his notice, are of
black velvet. Beside her is a curtain of ashy purple, and the color of
the background of the dim interior is a darkish olive, the whole forming
a tonal scheme of subdued richness. But the cavalier is chucking the
woman under the chin, her coy smile responding to his smile of amorous
complacency, while an old man out of the shadow of the ingle-nook
watches them. It is this sort of thing, coupled with the skill in
imitating textures, that especially commended this artist to the taste
of the eighteenth century.
* * * * *
THE decline of genre reflects the changed conditions of Holland society.
For the old ideal of liberty had given way to one of money and the power
that comes in its train. Statesmen, soldiers, and patriots had been
succeeded by self-seeking politicians and ambitious tradesmen, who
disdained to be burghers and aspired to the luxury and ostentation of
merchant princes. “Taste” now became the shibboleth, and it was a taste
that aped
[Illustration: LADY AT THE CLAVICHORD CASPAR NETSCHER
DRESDEN GALLERY]
the standards and manners of the French, whose influence became more and
more powerful in Holland as the seventeenth century drew to a close.
Gerard de Lairesse, a painter of Flemish extraction, who settled in
Amsterdam in the sixties, helped to establish the vogue of “taste.” He
had a considerable following of students and _dilettanti_ to whom he
expounded his views on art, assailing the vulgarity of such as Hals, and
advocating the courtly style by which the theme is “ennobled.” He
himself introduced the fashion for historical pictures, vapid and
theatrical; and these qualities, interpreted in a minute and precise
style, found their way into genre. The Dutch interiors became
transformed into palatial chambers, decked with columns, amid which the
inmates strut and pose with affectation of superior elegance and
refinement. Such are the genre pictures of Caspar Netscher. Now and
then, as in _A Lady at the Clavichord_ of the Dresden Gallery, his
motive and execution remind us that he had the privilege of being a
pupil of Terborch; but these moments are rare. Usually his pictures are
but petty and meretricious echoes of the great days of genre. Nor are
his portraits less trivial. They are numerously represented in the Rijks
Museum and other galleries, suggesting the popularity that he enjoyed
and also explaining it; for, with few exceptions, they exhibit the
shallowness and display of a society that, like the jackdaw in the
fable, has borrowed the plumes and is aping the manners of the peacock.
The same is true of the portraits of Godfried Schalcken, who also
indulged in genre that supplemented the poverty of the artistic motive
by the mild humor of its subjects. To these names of the decadence may
be added that of Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland.
Before completing the story of Dutch genre with a separate notice of
Terborch, Jan Steen, and Vermeer, allusion must be made to the “society
pictures.” Their prototype appears in Flemish painting, in such canvases
of fashionable life as we have already noted by Lucas van Valckenborch.
The Dutch development of this motive, however, produced smaller
canvases, very carefully composed, with superior quality of color and
skilful rendering of detail. The leader in this class of picture was
Dirck Hals (1591-1656), who was a pupil of his brother Frans; and it is
the latter’s corporation pictures that became the model for
corresponding groups of “society people,” banqueting, engaged in
concerts, or disporting themselves in garden-parties. Dirck’s pictures
are bouquets of gay color, animated with lively and characteristic
action, and, notwithstanding their slightness of motive and
superficiality of technique, form attractive spots in the galleries of
Europe. He, like the rest of the society painters, varied these subjects
with others of an unfashionable and sometimes coarse description,
involving the amusements of the soldiery on furlough or in the intervals
of peace. Willem Cornelisz Duyster, who died in 1635, painted creditably
both these kinds of picture; and two other names, frequently met with in
the galleries and not unacceptably, are Palamedesz (1601-1673) and
Pieter Codde (1600-1678).
[Illustration: THE DESPATCH GERARD TERBORCH
HAGUE MUSEUM]