Although Gerard Honthorst (“Gerard of the Night”) was born as early as
1590, and was a pupil of Blomaert, he may he relegated to the period
of decline. Almost invariably he resorted to the trick of lighting the
figures in his pictures, whether he was painting religious subjects,
portraits, or conversation-pieces, with a candlelight effect. This
habit he had acquired in Italy by studying the style of Caravaggio. Of
his five pictures here, the best is perhaps the _Portrait of Charles
Louis, Duke of Bavaria_ (No. 2410), of 1640. His _Concert_ (No. 2409),
painted sixteen years earlier, is an ill-balanced and overloaded
composition.
Such artists as Abraham Hondius, who paints a _Man Selling Pigeons_
(No. 2407A); Karel de Moor, who was a pupil of G. Dou, and gives
us an insignificant _Dutch Family_ (No. 2477); Eglon van der Neer,
whose name is signed on a small panel, _A Man Selling Pigeons_ (No.
2485); Egbert van Heemskerck, whose _Interior_ (No. 2393) is in the La
Caze collection; Jan Verkolie, whose _Interior_ (No. 2602) has been
engraved; H. van Limborch, whose _Pleasures of the Golden Age_ (No.
2446) was in the collection of Louis XVI.; Louis de Moni, the painter
of a _Family Scene_ (No. 2476); and Willem van Mieris, a replica of
whose _Soap Bubbles_ (No. 2473) is at The Hague,—all these mediocre
painters are the despair of the critic, and afford merely momentary
entertainment for the curious.
It is apparent that by this period the art of Holland was marked
by mechanical inventions, the surface of these eighteenth-century
paintings being highly fused and metallic in appearance. The four
panels of Adriaen van der Werff (1659-1722), which include an
unpleasant _Magdalene in the Desert_ (No. 2617) and a repulsive
_Dancing Nymph_ (No. 2619), are characteristic examples of his
monotonous art. The _Disembarkation of Cleopatra_ (No. 2441) and the
_Hercules between Vice and Virtue_ (No. 2443) of Gerard de Lairesse
(1640-1711), have the enamel-like smoothness and meaningless expression
of academic art, although they have their usefulness as museum pieces.
It is a remarkable fact that the Louvre does not contain a single
example of the revival of art in Holland in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century.