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From Blackwood's Magazine. REMBRANDT AND THE DUTCH SCHOOL.1

the Vatican chapels; as the masterpieces of Raphael and Correggio attracted crowds of worshippers to the shrines they adorned, so the gorgeous pageants which were the pride of Venice in its palmy days suggested subjects for the brushes of the Titians and Tintorettos. Mutatis mutandis, it was much the same in Spain; for the Spanish monarchs, through their politics and zeal for their religion, were always

THE range of the painter's art is infinite. There is the art which is the expression of the sublime and the conception of the ideal; the art which reflects the charms of nature; the art which is the handmaid of history and biography; and the art which is the more or less realistic interpretation of contemporary life and manners. There are the paintings which should be left in close relations with Italy. to their appropriate resting-places over

The Dutch School, on the other the high altars of stately cathedrals hand, may be said to have created and churches, in the refectories of con- itself. No doubt it reflected the influvents or in the reception-halls of pal-ences of the Renaissance, as the arctic aces ; and there are the paintings which icebergs reflect the cold rays of the seem destined for quiet domestic inte- same sun which is diffusing its warn riors, and which grow upon us as the lustre on the slopes of the Riviera. friendly familiars of our solitude. But the real Dutch Renaissance was For, after all, the collections in the when the struggling and persecuted great public and private galleries, al- people shook off the foreign yoke, and though their value is inappreciable and found themselves at the close of the their interest inexhaustible, are essen- war of liberation in a position to make tially heterogeneous and incongruous. money and enjoy life. It is undeniable The gems are there and the sparkle that the Dutchman has a genius for may be undimmed; but they are so art as for commerce. But even when many jewels torn from their settings. the Dutch traffickers began to be merIn the rough and inadequate classifica- chant princes, the conditions were tion we have indicated by way of illus-greatly against the Dutch painter.. tration, there is no difficulty in defining When all around him were making forthe place of the Dutch School. There tunes or living comfortably by trade, are ambitious exceptions which serve the commodities he produced ruled low to prove the rule, but it is essentiaily in the market. He had neither the local, dramatic, and realistic; were we habit nor the means of travelling, and to express its characteristics and con- thus his genius was thrown back upon ditions in a word, we should say it was itself. Moreover, his temperament was self-contained. The great artists of rather prosaic and practical than rothe Italian Renaissance, for example, mantic and imaginative. His surroundrevived and regenerated the traditions ings were quiet and tame, though they they had inherited from Greece and had a quaint picturesqueness of their Rome from aesthetic paganism and own. He lived among polders and the devotion of primitive Christianity; dreary sand dunes, and looked out they breathed the atmosphere of culture and refinement; they flourished under the patronage of the Church they glorified, and of princes who rivalled each other in the cultivated splendors of their courts. Nor were the southern republics less favorable to the arts. As Michael Angelo's majestically Titanic genius decorated the ceilings of

1 Rembrandt, sa Vie, son Euvre, et son Temps. Par Emile Michel, Membre de l'Institut. Paris: Libraire Hachette et Cie. 1893.

upon meadows traversed by canals and drenched in the reeking sea-fogs. We naturally associate lively sensibilities with brightness and sunshine, and the Dutch scenery is depressing as the climate. The flat monotony of the rural landscape was only broken by the sails of the windmills, or by the tall spires of the village churches, which often scarcely touched the sea-level. The consequence was that these isolated and independent Dutchmen founded a

school of their own. In so far as they | in case of there being any mischance merely painted what they saw, their in the matter, he generally took care, realism was marvellous; and within like Rembrandt, to multiply presentcertain definite limits, with almost ments of himself. invisible shortcomings, they even ex- But, after all, the demand for porIcelled in the sublime. As for the rise traits was necessarily restricted; and, and rapid growth of the school, it is moreover, the veritable artistic genius unparalleled in art-history. Almost refused to work always for lucre in entirely home-educated, but eminently the same regular grooves. Then the conscientious and laborious, they soon painter turned his attention to domestic became masters of coloring and tech- decoration. The Dutch of all classes, nique. In little more than a single from the patricians of Amsterdam and generation the school had attained its the Hague to the cattle-breeders of highest level. Circumstances, as well Friesland and the fishermen of the as their naturally artistic temperament, Zuyder Zee, still delight to adorn the indicated or enforced the choice of the walls of their living-rooms with china subjects. The man who lived by the that is often invaluable, and engravbrush or the graving-tools was bound to ings that are generally indifferent. sell his pictures or etchings. The Hol- The well-to-do townsfolk in the Dutch landers, who were simple in their Renaissance had taken to purchasing tastes and homely in their habits, had pictures. What they most appreciated adopted the Reformed religion. There were the faithful reproductions of the was little demand, as in the superb familiar scenes they loved. So we have edifices of Catholic Flanders, for Cru- the delightful reflections of that peacecifixions, Transfigurations, or Descents ful and industrious life which has from the Cross. The patrons of the scarcely altered appreciably at the prespainters were the wealthy guilds and ent day. There was a quai-corner or a municipal corporations, or private indi- canal bridge, with the bright brass viduals in comfortable circumstances. knockers on the house doors, the little It is to the patronage of the guilds that mirrors at each side of the parlor winmodern connoisseurs are indebted for dows, and the hay-barge lying at its such masterpieces as the miscalled moorings, with the bargeman smoking "Night-watch" of Rembrandt, or Van on the caboose. There were the bustle der Helst's "Congress of Munster." in the open-air bourse and the bargainThe scientific societies and the univer- ing in the open-air fish-market. Then sities suggested such technical subjects the literally realistic turned to the realas the famous "Lesson of Anatomy." istically humorous. The Dutchmen of And as the prominent personages in the seventeenth century were far from these great paintings were painted being generally licentious, but they from the life, so the fashion had arisen were gross; the matrons were not among the private burghers of be- given to blushing, and the men would queathing their portraits to their fami- shake their sides at coarse buffoonery. lies. In England we are apt to talk So we have the village Kirmess and contemptuously of the gifted artist who the suburban fairs; the boors smoking takes to portrait-painting as "going in and drinking in the wayside alehouses; for pot-boilers." In Holland the por- and the troopers halting for refreshtrait-painting at first, and for long, was ment, and flirting with the rustic belles. the highest, as it was the most profit- Even Rembrandt, in his younger days. able, branch of the profession. It ap- must be condemned as a flagrant ofpealed strongly to the ambition of the fender against our notions of decency. aspirant, for it was by the portraits of There are side-scenes and byplay in statesmen and merchants, which would some of the best of his works which be carefully preserved as heirlooms, would be pronounced most offensive that he might best hope to immortalize now, were they not sanctified by his himself. And, with Dutch forethought memory. We doubt not that Teniers

and Ostade and their confrères drew the country is laid down in grass; and shrieks of laughter by their grotesque if they have a passionate attachment to studies of unsophisticated surgery; the anything besides finance and comboor having his tooth drawn by the merce, it is for ornamental gardening. blacksmith's forceps, and the patient The dream of the Dutchman is malabeing cut for the stone by the razor of rious retirement to a summer-house the village barber. More soberly droll overhanging a stagnant canal, where were the quaint domestic romances of, he inhales the odors of his jonquils and Gerard Dou, the sarant in spectacles admires the blaze of his tulip-beds bemusing over a case with a skinny finger tween the puffs of his pipe and the sips on the pulse, or the wrinkled beldame of his schiedam. Scott credits even the bending over her spindle, while the truculent Dirk Hatteraick with the granddaughter, seated demurely in the dream of retiring to a blooming garten background, lends an ear to the lover's like a burgomaster. Thus there could whispers. Those artists who multiplied be no more suitable embellishment of a their pet subjects, addressed themselves rural lust-haus than paintings of flowerhabitually to the popular taste. Assur-beds and flowers, and that gave an imedly they aimed low, but they had well measured their powers, and they invariably hit the mark. Now and then there was an exception like Terburg, who, without attempting original conception, struck into a line of his own. Terburg's pictures seem to have been meant for the boudoir and the fashionable beauty; and there were very few boudoirs or ladies of fashion in the Holland of his day. He left comparatively few of his works, and when any one of them comes into the market, it fetches a fancy price. In one respect they are worth any money that may be given for them. No Dutchman has a more exquisite command of delicate technique; and not even Vandyke, when draping his corpses in their shrouds, shows so marvellous a gift for handling whites in contrast with all shades of complexion. The gloss of Terburg's white satins and the shimmer of his brocades are inimitable. Yet at the best it seems to us the prostitution of fine art to the glorification of the haberdasher and milliner. When Worth was at the height of his fame in imperial Paris, he might have appropriately hung a Terburg over his chimneypiece, with the certainty, besides, of having made an excellent in

vestment.

From the scents of the boudoir and the full-flavored atmosphere of the fishmarket, it is pleasant to turn to the landscape and marine pictures. The Dutch are born seamen; great part of

pulse to the fashion of flower-painting. Not even Sneiders and Honde-Koeter, in their studies of dead game and lively poultry, are more true to the tints and the forms than the most famous of the flower-painters. We do not know that the farmers and graziers were ever great patrons of art. But the wealthy merchants of Amsterdam and Rotterdam had their country estates, and the stock they raised for the dairy or the butcher was bound to be represented on the walls of the city mansions. No animal painter has ever surpassed Paul Potter. He lived fast and died young, but happily he made the most of his brief span, and worked with the brilliant indefatigability of the Dutchman. He is best known by his "Young Bull" at the Hague, which was rescued for Holland at the Congress of Vienna, after it had been stolen by that intelligent connoisseur Napoleon. We should never have known how rich even England was in Potters had it not. been for the exhibitions of the old masters at Burlington House. And, by the way, there is a little Potter at Bearwood, which would be worth any money in reason to any millionaire if it ever were sent to the hammer. Yet in those pictures the characteristic Dutch realism is almost exaggerated. Our English cattle - painters always seem to us, as a rule, to assume that their beasts have had every attention. They might have been fattened at the Home Farm at Windsor, or if High