Dordrecht and Utrecht
By water to Dordrecht--Her four rivers--The milkmaid
and the coat of arms--The Staple of Dort--Overhanging
houses--Albert Cuyp--Nicolas Maes--Ferdinand Bol--Ary
Scheffer--G.H. Breitner--A Dort carver--The Synod of
Dort--"The exquisite rancour of theologians"--_La Tulipe
Noire_--Bernard Mandeville--The exclusive Englishman--The
Castle of Loevenstein--The escape of Grotius--Gorcum's taste
outraged--By rail to Utrecht--A free church--The great storm
of 1674--Utrecht Cathedral--Jan van Scorel--Paul Moreelse--A
too hospitable museum.
Dordrecht must be approached by water, because then one sees her as
she was seen so often, and painted so often, by her great son Albert
Cuyp, and by countless artists since.
I steamed from Rotterdam to Dordrecht on a grey windy morning, on a
passenger boat bound ultimately for Nymwegen. We carried a very mixed
cargo. In a cage at the bows was a Friesland mare, while the whole
of the deck at the stern was piled high with motor spirit. Between
came myriad barrels of beer and other merchandise.
The course to Dordrecht (which it is simpler to call Dort) is up the
Maas for some miles; past shipbuilding yards, at Sylverdyk (where is
a great heronry) and Kinderdyk; past fishermen dropping their nets
for salmon, which they may take only on certain days, to give their
German brethren, higher up the river, a chance; past meadows golden
with marsh marigolds; past every kind of craft, most attractive of
all being the tjalcks with their brown or black sails and green-lined
hulls, not unlike those from Rochester which swim so steadily in the
reaches of the Thames about Greenwich. The journey takes an hour and
a half, the last half-hour being spent in a canal leading south from
the Maas and ultimately joining Dort's confluence of waters.
It is these rivers that give Dort her peculiar charm. There is a
little café on the quay facing the sunset where one may sit and lose
oneself in the eternally interesting movement of the shipping. I
found the town distracting under the incessant clanging of the tram
bell (yet grass grows among the paving-stones between the rails);
but there is no distraction opposite the sunset. On the evening that
I am remembering the sun left a sky of fiery orange barred by clouds
of essential blackness.
Dort's rivers are the Maas and the Waal, the Linge and the Merwede;
and when in 1549 Philip of Spain visited the city, she flourished
this motto before him:--
Me Mosa, me Vahalis, me Linga Morvaque cingunt
Biternam Batavæ virginis ecce fidens.
The fidelity, at least to Philip and Spain, disappeared; but the four
rivers still as of old surround Dort with a cincture.
I must give, in the words of the old writer who tells it, the pretty
legend which explains the origin of the Dort coat of arms: "There is an
admirable history concerning that beautiful and maiden city of Holland
called Dort. The Spaniards had intended an onslaught against it, and
so they had laid thousands of old soldiers in ambush. Not far from it
there did live a rich farmer who did keep many cows in his ground,
to furnish Dort with butter and milk. The milkmaid coming to milk
saw all under the hedges soldiers lying; seemed to take no notice,
but went singing to her cows; and having milked, went as merrily
away. Coming to her master's house, she told what she had seen. The
master wondering at it, took the maid with him and presently came to
Dort, told it to the Burgomaster, who sent a spy immediately, found it
true, and prepared for their safety; sent to the States, who presently
sent soldiers into the city, and gave order that the river should be
let in at such a sluice, to lay the country under water. It was done,
and many Spaniards were drowned and utterly disappointed of their
design, and the town saved. The States, in the memory of the merry
milkmaid's good service to the country, ordered the farmer a large
revenue for ever, to recompense his loss of house, land, and cattle;
caused the coin of the city to have the milkmaid under her cow to
be engraven, which is to be seen upon the Dort dollar, stivers, and
doights to this day; and so she is set upon the water gate of Dort;
and she had, during her life, and her's for ever, an allowance of
fifty pounds per annum. A noble requital for a virtuous action."
Dort's great day of prosperity is over; but once she was the richest
town in Holland--a result due to the privilege of the Staple. In
other words, she obtained the right to act as intermediary between
the rest of Holland and the outer world in connection with all the
wine, corn, timber and whatever else might be imported by way of
the Rhine. At Dort the cargoes were unloaded. For some centuries she
enjoyed this privilege, and then in 1618 Rotterdam began to resent
it so acutely as to take to arms, and the financial prosperity of
the town, which would be tenable only by the maintenance of a fleet,
steadily crumbled. To-day she is contented enough, but the cellars
of Wyn Straat, once stored with the juices of Rhenish vineyards,
are empty. The Staple is no more.
Dort is perhaps the most painted of all Dutch towns, and with reason;
for certainly no other town sits with more calm dignity among the
waters, nor has any other town so quaintly medieval a canal as that
which extends from end to end, far below the level of the streets,
crossed by a series of little bridges. Seen from these bridges it is
the nearest thing to Venice in all Holland--nearer than anything in
Amsterdam. One may see it not only from the bridges, but also from
little flights of steps off the main street, and everywhere it is
beautiful: the walls rising from its surface reflected in its depths,
green paint splashed about with perfect effect, bright window boxes,
here and there a woman washing clothes, odd gables above and bridges
in the distance.
Dordrecht's converging facades, which incline towards each other
like deaf people, are, I am told, the result not of age and sinking
foundations, but of design. When they were built, very many years ago,
the city had a law directing that its roofs should so far project
beyond the perpendicular as to shed their water into the gutter, thus
enabling the passers-by on the pavement to walk unharmed. I cannot
give chapter or verse for this comfortable theory; which of course
preceded the ingenious Jonas Hanway's invention of the umbrella. In a
small and very imperfect degree the enactment anticipates the covered
city of Mr. H.G. Wells's vision. A Dutch friend to whom I put the
point tells me that more probably the preservation of bricks and
mural carvings was intended, the dryness of the wayfarer being quite
secondary or unforeseen.
Dort's greatest artist was Albert Cuyp, born in 1605. His body
lies in the church of the Augustines in the same city, where he
died in 1691--true to the Dutch painters' quiet gift of living and
dying in their birthplaces. Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude,
but it is not a good description. He was more human, more simple,
than Claude. The symbol for him is a scene of cows; but he had great
versatility, and painted horses to perfection. I have also seen good
portraits from his busy brush. Faithful to his native town, he painted
many pictures of Dort. We have two in the National Gallery. I have
reproduced opposite page 30 his beautiful quiet view of the town in
the Ryks Museum. Dort has changed but little since then; the schooner
would now be a steamer--that is almost all. The reproduction can
give no adequate suggestion of Cuyp's gift of diffusing golden light,
his most precious possession.
Another Dort painter, below Albert Cuyp in fame, but often above him,
I think, in interest and power, is Nicolas Maes, born in 1632--a
great year in Dutch art, for it saw the birth also of Vermeer of
Delft and Peter de Hooch. Maes, who studied in Rembrandt's studio,
was perhaps the greatest of all that master's pupils. England, as has
been so often the case, appreciated Maes more wisely than Holland,
with the result that some of his best pictures are here.
But one must go to the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam to see his finest work
of all--"The Endless Prayer," No. 1501, reproduced on the opposite
page. We have at the National Gallery or the Wallace Collection no
Maes equal to this. His "Card players," however, at the National
Gallery, a free bold canvas, more in the manner of Velasquez than of
his immediate master, is in its way almost as interesting.
To "The Endless Prayer" one feels that Maes's master, Rembrandt,
could have added nothing. It is even conceivable that he might have
injured it by some touch of asperity. From this picture all Newlyn
seems to have sprung.
According to Pilkington, Maes gave up his better and more
Rembrandtesque manner on account of the objection of his sitters to
be thus painted. Such are sitters!
Dordrecht claims also Ferdinand Bol, the pupil and friend of Rembrandt,
and the painter of the Four Regents of the Leprosy Hospital in the
Amsterdam stadhuis. He was born in 1611. For a while his pictures were
considered by connoisseurs to be finer than those of his master. We
are wiser to-day; yet Bol had a fine free way that is occasionally
superb, often united, as in the portrait of Dirck van der Waeijen at
Rotterdam, to a delicate charm for which Rembrandt cared little. His
portrait of an astronomer in our National Gallery is a great work,
and at the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam his "Roelof Meulenaer," No. 543,
should not be missed. Bol's favourite sitter seems to have been
Admiral de Ruyter--if one may judge by the number of his portraits
of that sea ravener which Holland possesses.
By a perversity of judgment Dort seems to be more proud of Ary Scheffer
than of any of her really great sons. It is Ary Scheffer's statue--not
Albert Cuyp's or Nicolas Maes's--which rises in the centre of the
town; and Ary Scheffer's sentimental and saccharine inventions fill
three rooms in the museum. It is amusing in the midst of this riot
of meek romanticism to remember that Scheffer painted Carlyle. Dort
has no right to be so intoxicated with the excitement of having given
birth to Scheffer, for his father was a German, a mere sojourner in
the Dutch town.
The old museum of Dort has just been moved to a new building in the
Lindengracht, and in honour of the event a loan exhibition of modern
paintings and drawings was opened last summer. The exhibition gave
peculiar opportunity for studying the work of G. H. Breitner, the
painter of Amsterdam canals. The master of a fine sombre impressionism,
Breitner has made such scenes his own. But he can do also more tender
and subtle things. In this collection was a little oil sketch of a
mere which would not have suffered had it been hung between a Corot
and a Daubigny; and a water-colour drawing of a few cottages and a
river that could not have been strengthened by any hand.
Another artist of Dort was Jan Terween Aertz, born in 1511,
whose carvings in the choir of the Groote Kerk are among its chief
glories. It is amazing that such spirit and movement can be suggested
in wood. That the very semblance of life can be captured by a painter
is wonderful enough; but there seems to me something more extraordinary
in the successful conquest of the difficulties which confront an artist
of such ambition as this Dort carver. His triumph is even more striking
than that of the sculptor in marble. The sacristan of Dort's Groote
Kerk seems more eager to show a brass screen and a gold christening
bowl than these astounding choir stalls; but tastes always differ.
By the irony of fate it was Dort--the possessor of Terween's carving
of the Triumph of Charles V. (a pendant to the Triumph of the Church
and the Eucharist)--that, in 1572, only a few years after the carving
was made, held the Congress which virtually decided the fate of Spain
in the Netherlands. Brill had begun the revolution (as we shall see in
our last chapter), Flushing was the first to follow suit, Enkhuisen
then caught the fever; but these were individual efforts: it was the
Congress of Dort that authorised and systematised the revolt.
The scheme of this book precludes a consecutive account of the great
struggle between Holland and Spain--a struggle equal almost to that
between Holland and her other implacable foe, the sea. I assume in
the reader a sufficient knowledge of history to be able to follow
the course of the contest as it moves backwards and forwards in these
pages--the progress of the narrative being dictated by the sequence
of towns in the itinerary rather than by the sequence of events in
time. The death of William the Silent, for example, has to be set forth
in the chapter on Delft, where the tragedy occurred, and where he lies
buried, long before we reach the description of the siege of Haarlem
and the capture of De Bossu off Hoorn, while for the insurrection of
Brill, which was the first tangible token of Dutch independence, we
have to wait until the last chapter of all. The reader who is endowed
with sufficient history to reconcile these divagations should, I think,
by the time the book is finished, have (with Motley's assistance)
a vivid idea of this great war, so magnificently waged by Holland,
which lowers in the background of almost every Dutch town.
A later congress at Dort was the famous Synod in 1618-19, in which
a packed house of Gomarians or Contra-Remonstrants, pledged to
carry out the wishes of Maurice, Prince of Orange, the Stadtholder,
affected to subject the doctrines of the Arminians or Remonstrants to
conscientious examination. These doctrines as contained in the five
articles of the Arminians were as follows, in the words of Davies,
the historian of Holland: "First, that God had resolved from the
beginning to elect into eternal life those who through his grace
believed in Jesus Christ, and continued stedfast in the faith; and,
on the contrary, had resolved to leave the obstinate and unbelieving
to eternal damnation; secondly, that Christ had died for the whole
world, and obtained for all remission of sins and reconciliation with
God, of which, nevertheless, the faithful only are made partakers;
thirdly, that man cannot have a saving faith by his own free will,
since while in a state of sin he cannot think or do good, but it is
necessary that the grace of God, through Christ, should regenerate and
renew the understanding and affections; fourthly, that this grace is
the beginning, continuance, and end of salvation, and that all good
works proceed from it, but that it is not irresistible; fifthly,
that although the faithful receive by grace sufficient strength to
resist Satan, sin, the world, and the flesh, yet man can by his own
act fall away from this state of grace."
After seven months wrangling and bitterness, at a cost of a million
guelders, the Synod came to no conclusion more Christian than that
no punishment was too bad for the holder of such opinions, which
were dangerous to the State and subversive of true religion. The
result was that Holland's Calvinism was intensified; Barneveldt
(who had been in prison all the time) was, as we shall see, beheaded;
Grotius and Hoogenbeets were sentenced to imprisonment for life; and
Episcopius, the Remonstrant leader at the Synod, was, together with
many others, banished. Episcopius heard his sentence with composure,
merely remarking, "God will require of you an account of your conduct
at the great day of His judgment. There you and the whole Synod will
appear. May you never meet with a judge such as the Synod has been
to us."
Davies has a story of Episcopius which is too good to be omitted. On
banishment he was given his expenses by the States. Among the
dollars given to Episcopius was one, coined apparently in the Duchy of
Brunswick, bearing on the one side the figure of Truth, with the motto,
"Truth overcomes all things"; and on the reverse, "In well-doing fear
no one". Episcopius was so struck with the coincidence that he had
the coin set in gold and carefully preserved.
It is impossible for any one who has read _La Tulipe Noire_ not to
think of that story when wandering about Dort; but it is a mistake to
read it in the town itself, for the Great Alexandre's fidelity to fact
will not bear the strain. Dumas never wore his historical, botanical,
geographical and ethnographical knowledge more like a flower than
in this brave but breathless story. In Boxtel's envy we may perhaps
believe; in Gryphon's savagery; and in the craft and duplicity of the
Stadtholder; but if ever a French philosopher and a French grisette
masqueraded as a Dutch horticulturist and a Frisian waiting-maid they
are Cornelius van Baerle and his Rosa; and if ever a tulip grew by
magic rather than by the laws of nature it was the tulipe noire. No
matter; there is but one Dumas. According to Flotow the composer,
William III. of Holland told Dumas the story of the black tulip at
his coronation in 1849, remarking that it was time that the novelist
turned his attention to Holland; but two arguments are urged against
this origin, one being that Paul Lacroix--the "Bibliophile Jacob"--is
said, on better authority, to have supplied the germ of the romance,
and the other (which is even better evidence), that had the stimulus
come from a monarch Dumas would hardly have refrained from saying so
(and more) in the preface of the book.
Cornelius de Witt, whose tragedy is at the threshold of the romance,
was apprehended at Dort, on his bed of sickness, and carried thence
to the Hague, to be imprisoned in the Gevangenpoort, which we shall
visit, and torn to pieces by the populace close by.
Another literary association. From Dort came the English cynical writer
Bernard Mandeville, born in 1670, author of _The Fable of the Bees_,
that very shrewd and advanced commentary upon national hypocrisies--so
advanced, indeed, that several of the more revolutionary of the
thinkers of the present day, whose ideas are thought peculiarly modern,
have not really got beyond it. After leaving Leyden as a doctor of
medicine, Mandeville settled in England, somewhen at the end of the
seventeenth century, and became well known in the Coffee Houses as
a wit and good fellow.
We are a curious people when we travel. At Dort I heard a young
Englishman inquiring of the landlord how best to spend his Sunday. "One
can hardly go on one of the river excursions," he remarked; "they
are so mixed." And the landlord, with a lunch at two florins, fifty,
in his mind, which it was desirable that as many persons as possible
should eat and pay for, heartily agreed with him. None the less it
seemed well to join the excursion to Gorinchem; and thence we steamed
on a fine cloudy Sunday, the river whipped grey by a strong cross
wind, and the little ships that beat up and passed us, all aslant. At
Gorinchem (pronounced Gorcum) we changed at once into another steamer,
a sorry tub, as wide as it was short, and steamed to Woudrichem
(called Worcum) hoping to explore the fortress of Loevenstein. But
Loevenstein is enisled and beyond the reach of the casual visitor,
and we had therefore to sit in the upper room of the Bellevue inn,
overlooking the river, and await the tub's deliberate return, while
the tugs and the barges trailed past. Save for modifications brought
about by steam, the scene can be now little different from that in
the days when Hugo Grotius was imprisoned in the castle.
The philosopher's escape is one of the best things in the history of
wives. Two ameliorations were permitted him by Maurice--the presence
of the Vrouw Grotius and the solace of books. As it happened, this
lenience could not have been less fortunately (or, for Grotius, more
fortunately) framed. Books came continually to the prisoner, which,
when read, were returned in the same chest that conveyed his linen to
the Gorcum wash. At first the guard carefully examined each departing
load; but after a while the form was omitted. Grotius's wife, a woman
of no common order (when asked why she did not sue for her husband's
pardon, she had replied, "I will not do it: if he have deserved it let
them strike off his head"), was quick to notice the negligence of the
guard, and giving out that her husband was bedridden, she concealed
him in the chest, and he was dumped on a tjalck and earned over to
Gorcum. While on his journey he had the shuddering experience of
hearing some one remark that the box was heavy enough to have a man
in it; but it was his only danger. A Gorcum friend extricated him;
and, disguised as a carpenter armed with a footrule, he set forth
on his travels to Antwerp. Once certain that Grotius was safe, his
wife informed the guard, and the hue and cry was raised. But it was
raised in vain. At first there was a suggestion that the lady should
be retained in his stead, but all Holland applauded her deed and she
was permitted to go free.
The river, as I have said, must be still much the same as in Grotius's
day; while the two towns Gorcum and Worcum cluster about their noble
church towers as of old. Worcum is hardly altered; but Gorcum's railway
and factories have enlarged her borders. She has now twelve thousand
inhabitants, some eleven thousand of whom were in the streets when,
the tub having at length crawled back with us, we walked through them
to the station.
Odd how one nation's prettiness is another's grotesque. My companion
was wearing one of those comely straw hats trimmed with roses which
we call Early Victorian, and which the hot summer of 1904 brought
into fashion again on account of their peculiar suitability to keep
off the sun. In England we think them becoming; upon certain heads
they are charming. But no head must wear such a hat at Gorcum unless
it would court disaster. The town is gay and spruce, bright as a new
pin; the people are outrageous. I suppose that the hat turned down at
the precise point at which, according to Gorcum's canons of taste,
it should have turned up. Whatever it did was unpardonable, and
we had to be informed of the solecism. We were informed in various
ways; the men whistled, the women sniggered, the girls laughed, the
children shouted and ran beside us. The same hat had been disregarded
by the sweet-mannered friendly Middelburgians; it had raised no smile
at Breda. At Dordrecht, it is true, eyes had been opened wide; at
Bergen-op-Zoom mouths had opened too; but such attention was nothing
compared with Gorcum's pains to make two strangers uncomfortable.
As it happened, we had philosophy, and the discomfort was very
slight. Indeed, after a while, as we ran the gauntlet to the station,
annoyance gave way to interest. We found ourselves looking ahead for
distant wayfarers who had not yet tasted the rare joy which rippled
like a ship's wake behind us. We waited for the ecstatic moment when
their faces should light with the joke. Sometimes a mother standing
at the door would see us and call to her family to come--and come
quickly, if they would not be disappointed! Women, lurking behind
Holland's blue gauze blinds, would be seen to break away with a hasty
summoning movement. Children down side streets who had just realised
their exceptional fortune would be heard shouting the glad tidings to
their friends. The porter who wheeled our luggage was stopped again
and again to answer questions concerning his fantastic employers.
In course of time--it is a long way to the station--we grew to feel
a shade of pique if any one passed us and took no notice. To bulk
so hugely in the public eye became a new pleasure. I had not known
before what Britannia must feel like on the summit of the largest of
the cars in a circus procession.
I am convinced that such costly and equivocal success as the
British arms achieved over the Boers had nothing to do with Gorcum's
feelings. The town's æsthetic ideals were honestly outraged, and it
took the simplest means of making its protest.
We did not mean to wait at the station; having left our luggage there,
we had intended to explore the town. But there is a limit even to the
passion for notoriety, and we had reached it, passed it. We read and
wrote letters in that waiting-room for nearly three hours.
At Gorcum was born, in 1637, Jan van der Heyden, a very attractive
painter of street scenes, combining exactitude of detail with rich
colour, who used to get Andreas van der Velde to put in the figures. He
has a view of Cologne in the National Gallery which is exceedingly
pleasing, and a second version in the Wallace Collection. I shall
never forget his birthplace.
We came into Utrecht in the evening. At Culemberg the country begins
to grow very green and rich: smooth meadows and vast woods as far
as one can see: plovers all the way. The light transfiguring this
scene was exactly the golden light which one sees in Albert Cuyp's
most peaceful landscapes.
When I was last on this journey the time was spring, and the sliding,
pointed roofs of the ricks were at their lowest, with their four poles
high and naked above them, like scaffolding. But now, in August,
they were all resting on the top pegs, a solid square tower of hay
beneath each; looking in the evening light for all the world as if
every farmer had his private Norman church.
The note of Utrecht is superior satisfaction. It has discreet verdant
parks, a wonderful campanile, a University, large comfortable houses,
carriages and pairs. Its cathedral is the only church in Holland
(with the exception of the desecrated fane at Veere) for the privilege
of entering which I was not asked to pay. I have an uneasy feeling
that it was an oversight, and that if by any chance this statement
meets an authoritative eye some one may be removed to one of the
penal establishments and steps be taken to collect my debt. But so
it was. And yet it is possible that the free right of entrance is
intentional; since to charge for a building so unpardonably disfigured
would be a hardy action. The Gothic arches have great beauty, but it is
impossible from any point to get more than a broken view on account of
the high painted wooden walls with which the pews have been enclosed.
The cathedral is only a fragment; the nave fell in, isolating the
bell tower, during a tempest in 1674, and by that time all interest
in churches as beautiful and sacred buildings having died out of
Holland, never to return, no effort was made to restore it. But it
must, before the storm, have been superb, and of a vastness superior
to any in the country.
I find a very pleasant passage upon Holland's great churches, and
indeed upon its best architecture in general, in an essay on Utrecht
Cathedral by Mr. L.A. Corbeille. "Gothic churches on a grand scale
are as abundant in the Netherlands as they are at home, but to find
one of them drawn or described in any of the otherwise comprehensive
architectural works, which appear from time to time, is the rarest of
experiences. The Hollanders are accused of mere apishness in employing
the Gothic style, and of downright dulness in apprehending its import
and beauty. Yet a man who has found that bit of Rotterdam which beats
Venice; who has seen, from under Delft's lindens on a summer evening,
the image of the Oude Kerk's leaning tower in the still canal,
and has gone to bed, perchance to awake in the moonlight while the
Nieuwe Kerk's many bells are rippling a silver tune over the old
roofs and gables; who has drunk his beer full opposite the stadhuis
at Leyden, and seen Haarlem's huge church across magnificent miles
of gaudy tulips, and watched from a brown-sailed boat on the Zuider
Zee a buoy on the horizon grow into the water-gate of Hoorn; who
knows his Gouda and Bois-le-duc and Alkmaar and Kampen and Utrecht:
this man does not fret over wasted days."
Mr. Corbeille continues, later: "Looking down a side street of
Rotterdam at the enormous flank of St. Lawrence's, and again at
St. Peter's in Leyden, it seems as if all the bricks in the world
have been built up in one place. Apart from their smaller size,
bricks appear far more numerous in a wall than do blocks of stone,
because they make a stronger contrast with the mortar. In the laborious
articulation of these millions of clay blocks one first finds Egypt;
then quickly remembers how indigenous it all is, and how characteristic
of the untiring Hollander, who rules the waves even more proudly
than the Briton, and has cheated them of the very ground beneath his
feet. And if sermons may be found in bricks as well as stones, one has
a thought while looking at them about Christianity itself. Certainly
there is often pitiful littleness and short-comings in the individual
believer, just as each separate brick of these millions is stained
or worn or fractured; and yet the Christian Church, august and
significant, still towers before men; even as these old blocks of
clay compile vastly and undeniably in an overpowering whole."
Among a huddle of bad and indifferent pictures in the Kunstliefde
Museum is a series of four long paintings by Jan van Scorel (whom
we met at Rotterdam), representing a band of pilgrims who travelled
from Utrecht to Jerusalem in the sixteenth century. Two of these
pictures are reproduced on the opposite page, the principal figure
in the lower one--in the middle, in white--being Jan van Scorel
himself. The faces are all such as one can believe in; just so, we
feel, did the pilgrims look, and what a thousand pities there was
no Jan van Scorel to accompany Chaucer! These are the best pictures
in Utrecht, which cannot have any great interest in art or it would
not allow that tramway through its bell tower. In the reproduction
the faces necessarily become very small, but they are still full of
character, and one may see the sympathetic hand of a master in all.
Jan van Scorel was only a settler in Utrecht; the most illustrious
citizen to whom it gave birth was Paulus Moreelse, but the city has,
I think, only one of his pictures, and that not his best. He was
born in 1571, and he died at Utrecht in 1638. His portraits are very
rich: either he had interesting sitters or he imparted interest to
them. Opposite page 40 I have reproduced his portrait of a lady in
the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam, which amongst so many fine pictures one
may perhaps at the outset treat with too little ceremony, but which
undoubtedly will assert itself. It is a picture that, as we say,
grows on one: the Unknown Lady becomes more and more mischievous,
more and more necessary.
The little Archiepiscopal Museum at Utrecht is as small--or as
large--as a museum should be: one can see it comfortably. It has many
treasures, all ecclesiastical, and seventy different kinds of lace;
but to me it is memorable for the panel portrait of a woman by Jan
van Scorel, a very sweet sedate face, beautifully painted, which one
would like to coax into a less religious mood.
Utrecht is very proud of a wide avenue of lime trees--a triple avenue,
as one often sees in Holland--called the Maliebaan; but more beautiful
are the semi-circular Oude and Nieuwe Grachts, with their moat-like
canals laving the walls of serene dignified houses, each gained by
its own bridge.
At the north end of the Maliebaan is the Hoogeland Park, with a
fringe of spacious villas that might be in Kensington; and here is
the Antiquarian Museum, notable among its very miscellaneous riches,
which resemble the bankrupt stock of a curiosity dealer, for the most
elaborate dolls' house in Holland--perhaps in the world. Its date is
1680, and it represents accurately the home of a wealthy aristocratic
doll of that day. Nothing was forgotten by the designer of this
miniature palace; special paintings, very nude, were made for its
salon, and the humblest kitchen utensils are not missing. I thought
the most interesting rooms the office where the Major Domo sits at
his intricate labours, and the store closet. The museum has many
very valuable treasures, but so many poor pictures and articles--all
presents or legacies--that one feels that it must be the rule to
accept whatever is offered, without any scrutiny of the horse's teeth.