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Title: Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century

Author: Laurence Binyon

Release date: February 16, 2021 [eBook #64570]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ***

                            [Illustration]




                             DUTCH ETCHERS

                     _OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_

                                 _By_

                            LAURENCE BINYON

      _Of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum_

                            [Illustration]

                                LONDON
             SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND
                      NEW YORK, MACMILLAN AND CO.
                                 1895




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


_PLATES_

                                                                    PAGE

The Two Plough Horses.
From the etching by Paul Potter. B. 12                     _Frontispiece_

The Wife Spinning.
From the etching by A. Van Ostade. B. 31                     _to face_28

Sea Piece.
From the etching by L. Backhuysen. B. 4                         ” ”   52

Ox and Sheep.
From the etching by A. Van de Velde. B. 12                      ” ”   74


_ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT_

FIG.

1. The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29                              8

2. Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3                        10

3. Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade. British Museum       12

4. The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16                           14

5. Man and Woman Conversing. By Ostade. B. 37                         16

6. The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23                                         19

7. The Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44                           22

8. Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B. 42                     25

9. Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34                                     27

10. The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26                                      29

11. The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32                                        33

12. Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236                       36

13. The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236                       39

14. Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5                       42

15. Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75                         43

16. Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B. 96                  45

17. The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5                               49

18. The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der Heyden                   51

19. Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38                                54

20. Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh. B. 17                56

21. Landscape. By Both. B. 3                                          59

22. A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51                                          61

23. Title Piece. By Berchem. B. 35                                    64

24. The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. 1                                    66

25. Studies of a Dog. By Paul Potter. British Museum                  69

26. The Cow. By Paul Potter. B. 3                                     72

27. Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2                                      73

28. Pigs. By K. Du Jardin. B. 15                                      76

29. A Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16                                 78




DUTCH ETCHERS
OF
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY




INTRODUCTION


I

When, towards the close of the last century, Adam Bartsch began that
monument of his industry and patience, _Le Peintre Graveur_, he devoted
the first volumes of his twenty-one, not to the early engravers of
Germany or Italy, but to the Dutch etchers of the seventeenth century.
These were, in fact, the idols of the amateur of that day; and the
indiscriminate praises which Bartsch lavishes on mediocre artists, like
Waterloo or Le Ducq, sufficiently show how uncontested was their rank,
and how fashionable their reputation.

Since then their vogue has considerably declined. Rembrandt, of whom
Bartsch treated in a separate work, is perhaps more admired, more
studied than he ever was. His etchings, reproduced in more or less
accurate forms, are not only familiar to artists and to students, but,
to a certain extent, reach even the general public. But Rembrandt’s
glory has obscured the fame of his countrymen and contemporaries. Like
Shakespeare by the side of the lesser Elizabethans, he stands forth
alone and dazzling, and, though they enjoy a titular renown, they suffer
a comparative neglect.

Yet, if Rembrandt is by far the greatest, others are great also. The
following pages are designed to serve as a sort of introduction to the
more notable among these etchers, in the same way that Mr. Hamerton’s
monograph, the first of the present series of the _Portfolio_, was
intended as an introduction to the etched work of Rembrandt.

And first, let us warn the reader who is familiar perhaps with
masterpieces like the _Christ Healing the Sick_ and _Rembrandt Drawing
at a Window_, _Clement de Jonghe_, or _The Three Trees_, but who is not
yet acquainted with the etchings of Ostade and Paul Potter, not to
expect too much. Few of these lesser masters approach Rembrandt in the
specific qualities of the etcher: he is beyond them all in
draughtsmanship, far beyond them in the intensity of his imagination.
Yet the best of them must rank high.

It is his immensity of range which marks off Rembrandt, more even than
his transcendent powers, from the rest of the Dutch etchers. Not only
did his production exceed by far the most prolific among them, but he
touched on almost every side of life. Yet he was not the school in
epitome, as a hasty enthusiasm might affirm. With all his breadth of
sympathy, his insatiable curiosity, he was not quite universal. The life
of animals, the growth and beauty of trees, the motion of the
sea-waves--none of these attracted Rembrandt deeply. And here, to
supplement him, we have the work of men like Potter, Backhuysen,
Ruisdael, each developing his peculiar vein.

All of these etchers whom we have to consider are, however, independent
of Rembrandt and his influence. The Rembrandt school has been expressly
excluded from the present monograph. For, interesting as some of those
artists are, the first thought suggested by their work is that it
recalls Rembrandt: the second thought, that it is not Rembrandt. It is
their relation to their master that interests us rather than any
intrinsic excellence of their own.

Only the independent masters, therefore, are exhibited here; and from
these groups of etchers several of the greatest names in Dutch art are
absent. Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Vermeer of Delft, Hobbema, De Hooch--none
of these, so far as we know, has left a single plate. Adriaen Brouwer
etched a few; but they afford only the slightest indications of his
genius. And Albert Cuyp, who is the author of half a dozen small
etchings, showed in this line but little of his skill, and did not
apparently pursue it farther.

Yet the quantity of etched plates produced during this period in Holland
is immense, and most of the best work was published within the same two
or three decades. To take a single year, 1652, Potter’s studies of
horses, a set of cattle by Berchem, several plates by Du Jardin, one of
the finest pieces of Ostade, _La Fileuse_, appeared in it; while the
year following saw the publication of Adriaen van de Velde’s largest
etching, and Ruisdael’s _Three Oaks_ had been issued but three years
earlier. Rembrandt’s _Tobit Blind_ is dated 1651, and the _Three
Crosses_ 1653. This great fecundity has been necessarily a source of
some embarrassment to the writer; and though a number of minor men have
been omitted, several etchers have been included, whom for the sake of
completeness it was necessary to give some account of, but whom it is
hard to make interesting, and about whom enthusiasm is impossible.


II

Treating, as it does, of so considerable a number of masters, the
present monograph aims at indicating, as far as space would allow,
something of the relations between them, and at tracing the
interdependence of the various schools. To have taken the etchers
separately and considered their work apart, would have meant the
compilation of a tediously crowded catalogue.

But when once the masters are approached from the historical side, it is
impossible to treat them simply as etchers. It is as painters that they
influenced and were influenced. Consequently some account has had to be
taken of them as painters. And since some who produced little, and that
little not very remarkable, in etching, are yet of great significance as
artists, it has been impossible to treat each man simply on his merits
as an etcher. Hence, for instance, much more space has been devoted to
Ruisdael than the quality or the amount of his work on copper strictly
merits.

The lives of most of these artists have, till recently, rested on a
somewhat shifting foundation. Dates of birth and death have fluctuated
in various authors with easy rapidity. Of some, even now, nothing
certain is known.

But the researches of Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede de
Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved much,
disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To Dr.
Bredius’ _Meisterwerke der königlichen Gemälde-Galerie im Haag_, and

[Illustration: _Fig. 1.--The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29._]

still more to his _Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam_, the
writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to
acknowledge.

But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the
lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were
in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or
exchanged it only for a home a few miles off: Haarlem for Amsterdam, or
Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or spent some
years in France or Germany; but here the journey itself is sometimes
only a matter of inference from the painter’s works. Birth, marriage,
and death: there is little beyond these, and the dates of their
principal productions, to record about many of these men.

Of the whole social life of the Holland of that day we know practically
nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings not
survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this country
and its history! Most countries that have left us great art have left us
also great literature, and each is the complement of the other. The
marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their
incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recollections,
gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is the same
with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the
flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only
material we have for investigating and realising that movement.

There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in
seventeenth-century Holland; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland.
Besides the names of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not in
literature proper, not a single author’s name is familiar, nor any book
eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is certainly
not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch. Hence
a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies so
near us: a remoteness emphasised in England by the general ignorance of
the language.

When one looks at a picture by Watteau, one seems to be joining in the
conversation of those adorable ladies and their gallants; half
instinctively, one seems to divine the witty phrase, the happy
compliment that is on the speaker’s lips. But the conversations of Ter
Borch and of Metsu are mute and distant. We hear the jovial laughter of
Hals, but we cannot divine his jests and oaths. And Van de Velde’s merry
skating companies, and Ostade’s tavern-haunting peasants, and the family
groups in their gravely furnished rooms, rich with a sober opulence, of
De Hooch or of Jan Steen, all, in spite of their human touches and their
gaiety, affect us with a kind of haunting silence.

Mr. Pater, in one of the most finished and charming of his Imaginary
Portraits, _Sebastian van Storck_, called up a picture of the social
life of these times, very suggestive and delightful; but it was
noteworthy, how much of it was merely a reconstruction, in words, of
impressions from the contemporary pictures.

After all, however, our ignorance may not cost us much. We judge the
painters as painters, and by their works; we are not distracted by

[Illustration: _Fig. 2.--Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3._]

other circumstances about them, and that is an advantage. They may have
had theories about painting, but fortunately we do not know them, except
by inference from their practice.

And if seventeenth-century Holland has only expressed herself in
painting, she has known how to express herself with marvellous fulness.
Never before, and never perhaps since, has pictorial art been so
universally the speech of a nation; never has it been more various and
abundant. Instead of being the handmaid of religion or the adornment of
a court, it is now for the first time itself: full-blooded, active,
exuberant, scorning nothing, attempting everything. Modern with all the
added richness that the modern spirit allows in life and art, it
reflects the just pride and joy of a great nation arrived, through
incredible struggle and privation, at victory and peace.

Yet more wonderful even than this abundance is the fine tact, the
instinctive judgment, which guided such profuse creation.

For in all the great painters of Holland there is the same sure choice
of subjects proper to painting, the same sure avoidance of what does not
lend itself so much to painting as to some other expression of art.
Religious pictures in the old sense, pictures intended for churches,
were forbidden by the Protestant spirit. No court existed to patronise
the painters. Yet they seemed unconscious of being cut off from any
province. In the life around them they found overflowing material, and
their choice of subject was invariably simple, never a complex product
like the engravings of Dürer, half literary in their interest; never
anecdotic or moral. An excellent tradition was begun, which lasted
through the century.

Nor was this tradition due to the creative impulse of one man. There was
nothing in Holland parallel to the renovation, the re-creation rather,
of Flemish art by Rubens. Rembrandt came near the beginning, but he did
not start the period. One cannot say precisely how this great tradition
began; it seems as if the flowering time came all at once throughout the
country, with the mysterious suddenness of spring. Till the seventeenth
century, it was Italy from which Dutch artists took their inspiration,
but henceforward it is a native impulse. Only men of lesser importance
went to paint at Rome, and even then they took there more than they
brought away.


III

Considered as etchers, the Dutch masters range themselves somewhat
differently.

Only a few, seemingly, realised the specific capacities and limitations
of etching: the rest regarded it merely as a method of reproducing their
drawings, as an easier kind of engraving. This was probably the
conception of those who first applied acid to metal for the purpose of
reproducing designs, at the beginning of the sixteenth century: the art
had been formerly employed only in the damascening of swords or armour.
Albert Dürer is an exception; for, though he did not develop the method
far, he saw that it required a different kind of handling from that
suitable for the burin; and in his few etched plates the work is freer
and more open than that of his line-engravings.

The first men to use etching extensively were the Hopfer family of
Augsburg, who produced a great number of prints, chiefly decorative
designs.

It was employed in landscape by Altdorfer, Hirschvogel, Lautensack, and
others among the Little Masters. But these did little more than

[Illustration: _Fig. 3.--Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade.
British Museum._]

carry on the Nürnberg tradition of engraving, through another medium.
They had little or no influence on the Dutchmen.

A new and powerful stimulus, however, was to be given to etching with
the beginning of the seventeenth century, by the prolific and famous
French artist, Jacques Callot. Born in 1592, Callot produced a great
mass of work before his death in 1638, and his etchings, by which alone
he is known, had a great popularity in his lifetime. In 1624 he was
invited to Brussels by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, and was
commissioned by her to commemorate the Siege of Breda, an event which
also occasioned a masterpiece to Velasquez, the famous _Lances_ of
Madrid. Callot undoubtedly brought the art into prominence and favour in
the Netherlands. Yet of direct influence over either Flemings or
Dutchmen, Callot had little or none. His spirit was too essentially
French, his method too individual, for him to be imitated by men of such
different race and temperament.

In 1627, however, Callot met, at Nancy, Claude Lorraine, and probably
instructed him in etching. Claude left Nancy for Italy in the same year,
and in the following year etched his first plates. Between 1630 and
1663, he published a considerable number, among them some of exquisite
delicacy and beauty. And from these etchings many of the Dutchmen derive
their inspiration; and Claude is said to have employed men like
Swaneveldt, Andries Both, and Jan Miel for inserting figures in his
landscapes.

Another foreign master who exercised a widespread influence over the
Dutch etchers was the German, Adam Elsheimer. Traces of this influence
pervade the history of Dutch art, as Dr. Bode in his _Studien zur
Geschichte der hollädndischen Malerei_ has very fully demonstrated.

Elsheimer etched a few plates; but, with all deference to Dr. Bode’s
authority, we find it difficult to attach to them the importance which
he gives them. Through the etchings and engravings made from his
pictures Elsheimer was undoubtedly a source of inspiration to the
Dutchmen, but scarcely through the rare and by no means remarkable
plates which he etched himself.

The real importance of Elsheimer, and the secret of his fascination over
his contemporaries, lie in his fresh treatment of light and shade.
Problems of lighting occupied his contemporaries, Caravaggio and
Honthorst, but these devoted their skill chiefly to effects of double
lighting and strong contrast; it was the rendering of luminous shadow
and subtle tones of twilight that Elsheimer was the first to attack. In
this he is a forerunner of Rembrandt, who undoubtedly took suggestions
from him, and was helped by him in his own development of chiaroscuro.
Rembrandt cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of what
Elsheimer had done before him.

But Rembrandt was by no means the only Dutch master who profited by the
German’s art. The whole of the Italianised Dutch school at Rome, men
like Poelenburg for instance, felt his influence more or less strongly.
Nor was he without followers in the native school of landscape painters
and etchers in Holland, as we shall see when we come to them.

Elsheimer, in fine, though by no means a great painter, is of
considerable historical importance, and the admiration which he excited
in his

[Illustration: _Fig. 4.--The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16._]

own day can hardly be over-estimated. So great a man as Rubens admired
him so much that he had three of his landscapes on his walls, and made
copies from his paintings and designs.

This is the more remarkable, because Rubens rarely occupied himself with
the problems that fascinated Elsheimer. And while these problems were
of a kind to appeal to etchers, it was not on etching but on
line-engraving, an art admitting little scope for subtlety of
chiaroscuro, that Rubens cast his potent influence. Without using the
burin himself, he employed a number of brilliant engravers to reproduce
his designs, just as Raphael had employed Marc Antonio for the like
purpose. Even in our day, when public picture-galleries are numerous and
the distances between various capitals have so immensely shrunk, the
fame of the great painters rests still to a large extent on photographs
and engravings from their works; it is easy, therefore, to comprehend of
what capital importance it was for masters of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries to secure competent interpreters.

Line-engraving was admirably suited for the reproduction of pictures
like those of Rubens, with their large design and flowing sweep. And so
potent was Rubens’s example, that etching found in Belgium only a few
isolated, and with the single exception of Vandyck, unimportant
followers.

In Holland it was just the reverse. Perhaps it was the result of some
vital difference in temperament between the Flemings and the Dutchmen,
such as caused the one country to embrace the severer, soberer religion
of Protestantism, while the other clung to the more ancient creed of
Rome, with its strong appeal to the senses; at any rate, it seems
characteristic that line-engraving, with its capacity for reproducing
qualities of splendour and spacious action, should have found in Antwerp
its most effective, various, and brilliant exposition, while the
plainer, more self-contained, more intense spirit of the great Dutchmen
developed the more personal, intimate, subtle art of etching, as it had
never been developed before.

But Dutchmen, no less than Flemings, felt the need for reproducing their
designs, and here arose a difficulty. For etching is not, in spite of
modern successes, so well adapted to reproduction as line-engraving is.

As we have said, it was only a certain number of the Dutchmen who
divined this. Rembrandt, of course, perceived it; and though he spread
his fame by working steadily on copper as well as on canvas, he made his
etched work independent of his painting and never a simple reproduction
of pictures. Lesser men had not the intelligence to do as he did; and
many of the artists of whom we shall treat, though they produced fine
work on copper, cannot be esteemed true etchers.

We will begin our studies with one who was, beyond dispute, a born
etcher, Ostade.

[Illustration: _Fig. 5.--Man and Woman Conversing. By Ostade. B. 37._]




OSTADE AND HIS SCHOOL


I

Adriaen van Ostade was born in Haarlem, at the end of 1610. The
researches of Dr. Van der Willigen have placed this fact beyond doubt,
and the old tradition of his having been born at Lübeck must therefore
be set aside. In the baptismal register for December 10, 1610, there is
entered the name of Adriaen, son of Jan Hendricx, of Eyndhoven, and of
Janneke Hendriksen. On the 2nd of June, 1621, the birth of Isack, son of
the same parents, is recorded.

These dates have always been associated with the births of the brothers
Ostade, and there are other grounds for identifying them with the
Adriaen and Isack just mentioned.

Jan Hendricx was a weaver, and in consequence of the religious
persecutions of the time, left his native Eyndhoven, a village in North
Brabant, for Haarlem. This was some time before 1605, for in that year,
already a burgess of the town, he married. He had several children; and
in a document of 1650, two of them are mentioned as brother and sister
to Adriaen and Isack, who are thus proved to have been his sons. The
name of Ostade was taken from a hamlet close to Eyndhoven. Adriaen is
first mentioned with this surname as a member of the civic guard, in
1636.

Haarlem, M. Vosmaer has said, is in two things like Florence. It is a
city of flowers and a city of artists. Its archives show that from an
early time the arts flourished and were fostered there. Money was never
grudged for fine work in every branch of skilful industry, no less than
for good painting and good sculpture. The goldsmith, the potter, the
leather-worker, the stone-cutter, could find employment for their powers
and remuneration worth their skill. Haarlem was, in fact, a type of
those busy and prosperous cities where it seems that art thrives best;
for though art and commerce are often supposed to have a natural
disagreement, history shows them to have been the most apt companions.

But the city of Dierick Bouts, of Albert van Ouwater, of Jan Scorel, was
at the time of Ostade’s birth, in a condition even more favourable for
the production of fine work than it had been in the fifteenth and
following centuries. In 1573 occurred the famous siege by the Spaniards.
Those who had borne the burden of those terrible days were now growing
old; but the young generation received and handed on their heroic
memories, unembittered by thoughts of loss, suffering, or defeat. And
when, in 1609, peace came, and the United Provinces, acknowledged by
Spain, turned to enjoy their victorious repose, there was added the
sense of triumph to that of trials endured. It was the great time for
Holland. Her soldiers were famed as the finest in Europe. Her navy was
the most powerful, the best-manned. Her cities grew, and wealth poured
into them. A universal well-being pervaded the country, and a spirit of
joy and of expansion, like the glow of health, diffused itself in the
citizens.

It was natural that art, too, should feel this new influence. And in
Haarlem, where the siege had destroyed so much of the old town, and
modern buildings of warm red brick had sprung round the vast surviving
monument of the middle ages, the Groote Kerk of St. Bavon; in Haarlem
especially, a new spirit, intensely modern, began to possess the rising
painters. From art which lavished its parade of dexterity on the old
mythological fables, handled without heart or meaning, from the smooth
and pallid conventionalities of Cornelis Corneliszoon, and the
extravagant cleverness of Goltzius, these men turned to the life that
was around them. Among them were artists like Jan de Bray, Esaias van de
Velde, Dirk and Frans Hals. It was in the studio of Frans Hals that the
young Ostade learnt to paint. Already in 1616, Hals had painted his
superb group of the civic guard, and was now in the fulness of his
extraordinary power. The exuberant joy and energy, the confident
sincerity, the swift and certain touch, intimate with realities, that
marked Hals, were typical of the country and the time. Life--that is
the

[Illustration: _Fig. 6.--The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23._]

absolute necessity for such an artist: for him everything that has life
is a possible subject, a possible realm to conquer. A subject that he
cannot feel, as well as conceive, his instinct rejects at once. A great
pride of life is what characterises Hals’ pictures human life in all its
fulness he accepts: unhindered by the shrinkings of more fastidious
natures, he enjoys with a robust enjoyment.

It is the same also with Ostade; but the pupil was too individual an
artist to repeat his master. Ostade felt, perhaps, that he could never
rival those magnificent portrait-groups, and his own preferences, his
own gifts, led him to a different choice of subject.

Perhaps some who have seen Ostade’s pictures and found them coarse and
ignoble, have imagined the painter of them to be equally coarse and
ignoble-looking as his boors. His portrait shows him a man of somewhat
severe, keen countenance, in plain attire; a grave man, one would say,
with humour lurking in his gravity, as often happens; it is a portrait
that might be taken for that of an Englishman of the Commonwealth.
Ostade was, in fact, a well-to-do citizen of the middle class. His
collection of pictures, sold at his death in 1685, was, as we know from
the _Haarlem Gazette_, extensive; and the fact that it contained two
hundred of his own paintings, proves that he was, unlike so many of his
compeers, far removed from want.

Of Ostade’s life, apart from his production, we know almost nothing. He
was a member of the _Oude Schuts_, the ancient and honourable Company of
Arquebusiers. He was married twice; first, in 1636, to Machtelgen
Pietersen, who died in 1642; and again to a second wife, whose name is
not known, by whom he had a girl, Johanna Maria. This daughter married a
surgeon, Dirk van der Stoel, into whose hands Ostade’s etched plates and
proofs passed at his death.

In 1647 and 1661 Ostade is mentioned as a member of the government of
the Guild. In 1662, he was dean of the Guild. An incident of his earlier
years is of interest, as showing his liberal spirit. In 1642 he joined
Salomon Ruysdael, at a meeting of the Guild, in protesting against the
policy of protection, which inspired Haarlem Guild, like many others, to
oppose the importation of works of art from other towns or their sale in
Haarlem.

Ostade seems never to have travelled, like many of his countrymen,
beyond the borders of Holland, nor ever to have changed his home, except
from one street of Haarlem to another.

He died in 1685.

On an early afternoon of May his body was carried from his house in the
Kuis-straat to the Groote Kerk, a little company of his friends
following.


II

With most of the Dutch artists, etching was a subordinate
accomplishment, and their work on copper is but a less interesting
reflection of their work on canvas. This cannot be said of Ostade. As
with Rembrandt, his etched work is the complement, rather than a
supplement merely, of his painting. To the present writer, indeed, his
etchings have more interest than his pictures. The latter are numerous;
they may be seen in almost all galleries of importance, and the reader
is doubtless familiar with their characteristics. Delightful as they
often are, they do not rival those of Adriaen Brouwer, who was by four
years Ostade’s senior, and who, though born a Fleming, worked mostly in
Holland, and entered Hals’ studio at the same time. There are a few
plates attributed to Brouwer; but, if genuine, these show that he never
thoroughly mastered the technique of etching; none of them approaches
the least successful plates of Ostade. Brouwer as a painter, on the
other hand, surpasses beyond question all the painters of peasant life,
whether of Holland or of Flanders.

Ostade does not manage paint with the freedom of a great master, but his
drawing is always superb. The drawing reproduced (Fig. 3) is a
characteristic specimen. It is the end of a game of backgammon. The game
is won, but the defeated player refuses to accept his defeat without a
careful scrutiny. In the attitudes, the gestures of players and
onlookers, everything is vital; the moment is admirably caught.

There is an etching also of a game of backgammon, but it does not
directly illustrate the drawing.

Ostade did, however, make use of sketches for his etchings. There is in
the British Museum a sketch for _The Father of a Family_ (B. 33). A
comparison of this with the etched plate is interesting. There is a
certain affinity to Rembrandt in the manner of drawing; less summary and
swift, but masterful and free. And, like Rembrandt, Ostade does not use
his sketch as a finished thing, and copy it faithfully and minutely. His

[Illustration: _Fig. 7.--The Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44._]

interest in the subject has not died out; he is alert for a new posture,
a fresh touch, a livelier handling of some part of his design, that may
improve the whole. In this case the drawing, which is of a different
shape from the print and much broader, contains at the left the figure
of a man seated and cutting a loaf of bread on his knees. Ostade felt
that this figure disturbed the unity of the piece no less than the sense
of home seclusion, and he omitted it from his work on the copper. This
reveals the born etcher: one who works with directness, swiftness,
passion; whose needle takes the impulse of his thought immediately, who
never works in cold blood.


III

Let us now consider the etchings themselves. There are just fifty in
all, and nine or perhaps ten of the number are dated. The earliest date
is 1647, the latest 1678. Arranging the dated plates in order of time,
we get the following table. The references are to the numbers in
Bartsch, _Peintre-Graveur_, Vol. I.:--

1647.

The Hurdy-Gurdy Player. B. 8.
The Barn. B. 23.
The Family. B. 46.


1648.

The Father of the Family. B. 33.


1652.

The Wife Spinning. B. 31.


1653.

The Tavern Brawl. B. 18.
Saying Grace. B. 34.


1671.

The Cobbler. B. 27.


1678.[1]

The Child and the Doll. B. 16.

To this may possibly be added _The Humpbacked Fiddler_ (B. 44). Neither
Bartsch nor Dutuit appears to have noticed a date on this plate; but it
seems clear that it is there, following the signature, though obscured
by lines. The writer inclines to decipher it as 1631 or 1651; but it is
impossible to be positive on the point. These data would doubtless serve
many critics with material for constructing a chronological list of the
whole of the etchings. But this amusement shall be left to the reader.
The etchings, as a matter of fact, do not present any marked variety of
treatment. Ostade was not, like Rembrandt, a master of many styles; nor
did he develop any particular style by continually surpassing his own
successes. We can only say that he seems to have attained his greatest
mastery in a middle period, about 1650. _The Wife Spinning_ of 1652 is
not followed by any dated piece that at all rivals it. _The Cobbler_ of
1671, for instance, which was a failure in the first biting, betrays
also a certain languor of handling, very different from the
inexhaustible care and skill bestowed on the earlier plate.

This inference is confirmed by what we know of Ostade’s work on canvas.
His first period dates from 1630 to 1635; then follows a middle period
in which, influenced by Rembrandt, he adopted a warmer scheme of colour;
lastly, in a third period, he began to repeat himself and decline.

Beyond such general deductions it does not seem worth while to go. In
Rembrandt’s case the question of chronology is of extreme interest and
significance, but in Ostade there is no development to speak of, and to
labour after exhibiting it would be waste of time.

Next, as to the various states of the etchings. The reverence for first
states and rare states, common to collectors, has from their point of
view its own justification; but they are apt perhaps sometimes to
confuse the æsthetic value of a print with its market value. Artists, on
the other hand, are sometimes prone to dismiss the whole question of
states as tedious and absurd. It is, however, of great importance that
the etcher should be judged on his own merits and not on the merits, or
demerits, of other people. Ostade undoubtedly made alterations in his
plates during printing and thus created “states”; but many more states
were created after his death by other hands re-working the worn copper.

It is reasonable to suppose that the last state touched by the artist is
the one that he would wish to be taken as typical of his perfect work.

But the question arises: Which is the last state touched by the artist?

The work of later hands, added to a plate after the artist’s death, does
not concern us; but the development of the etching up to that state when
the artist leaves it as a finished thing, must interest us greatly. How
are we to decide?

In the case of Ostade, we are helped a little by external data. As we

[Illustration: _Fig. 8.--Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B.
42._]

have seen, the plates were sold at his death in 1685. We know also that
they were sold again by their new possessor, Dirk van der Stoel,
Ostade’s son-in-law, in 1686; and eight years later again, in 1694. What
state they were in then we can only conjecture: but we may infer
something from what we know to have been their state in 1710 or a little
later.

In the year just mentioned a French engraver, Bernard Picart, arrived in
Holland; and some time after his arrival he published a collection of
the etched work of Ostade and of his pupil Bega. The book of Ostade’s
etchings was bought, perhaps on its publication, by Hans Sloane: and
through him it has passed into the possession of the British Museum.
Whoever examines it will notice at once the inequality of the plates:
some are worn and harshly retouched, some are passable, a few are even
good. Something of this is due to the delicately-worked plates, giving
out sooner than those more coarsely etched. Probably also some were more
in demand than others. Thus, to take a few examples: while _The Painter
in His Studio_ (B. 32) is in the tenth and last state, and _Peasant
Paying His Reckoning_ (B. 42) is in the seventh or last but one, _The
Dance in the Tavern_ (B. 49) is in the fourth out of seven states in
all, and _The Empty Jug_ (B. 15) in the fourth out of eight states in
all. And several of the smaller plates are still in the second state.

In determining therefore the extent to which later hands have worked on
the etchings, each must be considered separately. Only in a few cases,
probably, are those in Picart’s edition still in the condition left by
the master himself; and most seem to have been retouched more than once.
Every one will judge for himself the precise point at which new work
comes in: and opinion will always differ on such questions. As Ostade
was not always successful in his first biting, the second state is
generally the most representative. _Peasant Paying His Reckoning_ is a
very different thing in Picart’s edition from the brilliant second state
of the same etching.

The student of Ostade will find Dutuit’s book[2] indispensable: it
contains all that was known of the etchings and their different
impressions up to the year of its publication. And the author’s own
collection was perhaps unrivalled. Nevertheless, it is not perfect. The
states are described with an extraordinary superfluity of detail, and
the one or two differentiating circumstances are buried in a mass of
irrelevant description. Verification is therefore a matter of time and
labour.

There are also a few states still undescribed. Still, for those who have
an appetite for “states,” Dutuit is very satisfying.

[Illustration: _Fig. 9--Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34._]


IV

Ostade’s etched work is, considered as etching, unequal. Sometimes, as
for instance in _The Cobbler_ (B. 27), the first biting was not a
success; at other times, as in the _Man Laughing_ (B. 4), the _Saying
Grace_ (B. 34), or the _Fiddlers_ (B. 45), the plate has been
over-bitten. The plate which Bartsch calls _La Fileuse_ (_The Wife
Spinning_. B. 31) [Plate I.], is one which represents very fully some of
Ostade’s characteristic excellences as an etcher. It is a fine example
of his success in bathing his subject in atmosphere. One feels the quiet
afternoon warmth upon the cottage-front, as the woman who spins feels
it, as the child feels it, as the two basking pigs feel it. That
softness of air, which in our northern climate gives even to the near
trees a kind of impalpable look, and which seems to clothe things with
itself--that is what Ostade has sought to render with mere etched lines;
and he has triumphed over immense difficulties. His figures detach
themselves with a wonderful reality, with no hard brilliancy, no
superfluous shadows. There is a fine absence of cleverness in such quiet
mastery of means.

More remarkable still is the little plate (B. 42) which is reproduced in
Fig. 8. The amount of knowledge, of feeling for light and shadow, of
subtle and sure draughtsmanship in this small etching is astonishing.
The problem of painting daylight as it is diffused in a room through the
window, which, of all painters in the world, Jan Vermeer and Pieter de
Hooch, and, in a different way, Rembrandt and Ostade himself, have most
fully mastered, is here attacked in etching, and with extraordinary
success. What seems strange is that a problem so fascinating, one which
had evidently a strong seduction for Ostade in his painting, should have
been attempted by him so rarely in his etchings. _The Painter in his
Studio_ (B. 32) is another success in the same line, while the _Players
at Backgammon_ (B. 39) is partly a failure, through the biting having
gone wrong. But, as a rule, Ostade prefers out-of-door effects.

None of the etchings quite rivals, in the writer’s judgment at least,
this little plate, _Peasant Paying his Reckoning_. But there are several
typical small pieces which have a great charm. The _Spectacle-seller_
(B. 22, Fig. 1), for instance, is an admirable composition, and the

[Illustration]

etching rich. The _Humpbacked Fiddler_ (B. 44, Fig. 7), and the _Man and
Woman Conversing_ (B. 25, Fig. 5), though the needle has been used
somewhat differently in each, have similar merit.

But the plates that interest, perhaps, most, are not always those which
are etched the best. The chief glory of Ostade is his imaginative
draughtsmanship, and akin to this are his vivid human sympathy and his
humour. These are not so manifest in the plates we have mentioned as in
some others.

But before passing to those pieces which show these qualities at their

[Illustration: _Fig. 10.--The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26._]

best, let us notice one which is unlike any of the others. This is _The
Barn_ (B. 28, Fig. 6). Had the execution of this plate matched the
feeling it evinces, it would have been a fine achievement. Who does not
know the strange, vague impression which such a barn as this produces on
the mind? The cool dimness, the mysterious shadow among the rafters,
penetrated here and there by soft rays, the atmosphere of the farm,
scent of hay, cries of fowls, mingling in a sense of imperturbable
antiquity--all exhale an intangible emotion impossible to express in
language, but which a painting or an etching could well convey. Ostade
has conceived his subject finely; but the acid and the needle have
imperfectly seconded his design. Rembrandt would have given us out of
such material a memorable plate indeed. But let us not deny Ostade his
due. Much in the piece is admirable: note especially the softness with
which the light comes through the chinks on to the hay.

In _The Angler_ (B. 26, Fig. 10) the difficulties attempted are less
great, and there seems little wanting to entire success. Here Ostade’s
human interest is engaged, and whenever this is so, he is great. The
stationary posture, the muscular habit of the angler, with lax body but
firm wrist, is perfectly given; as is the slackening of the line, the
indolent gaze of the boy leaning on the rail, and the sleepy impression
of a still summer day without breezes.

It is in such expressive drawing of the human body that Ostade shows
himself a master. The delighted eagerness of the baby in Fig. 4; the
jerk of its short limbs and crowing of its lips; or in _The Music Party_
(B. 30), the boisterous, maudlin pleasure of the man who sits in the
chair, beating time with his hand to the laborious scraping of the
fiddler, catching what he can of the score, with what humour and
expression are these portrayed! One hears the terrible discord and the
cheerful thump of the peasant’s fist accompanying it.

Another piece of imaginative drawing is _The Brawl_ (B. 18). The loose,
ineffectual, lurching stroke of the drunken man, the startled effort of
the fat man as he springs up from his barrel, the terror of the woman
clasping her baby closer, the mingled fear, anger, and surprise of the
little man who has provoked the quarrel and prepares to defend
himself--all are excellent.

The same qualities pervade Ostade’s largest plate, the _Dance in the
Tavern_ (B. 49), which also shows his extraordinary art in composition
at its best.

There are people, and perhaps always will be, who find in work such as
Ostade’s nothing but vulgarity. And some, who cannot help enjoying his
fine drawing, find themselves repelled by his choice of subjects.

It seems difficult to understand this repulsion. For in his etchings, at
any rate, Ostade shows no exclusive preference for the coarse and
sordid. Mr. Hamerton has accused him of deadness of heart and apathy of
intellect, and declares him to be insensitive to all that is best among
the poor. But is this quite true?

An accomplished lady some time ago wrote an essay in condemnation of the
“vulgarity” of John Leech and Charles Keene in certain of their drawings
for _Punch_. Such criticism seems to argue an excessive delicacy or a
deficiency of humour. Ostade’s range was limited, compared with that of
those two great artists, but as a draughtsman he is in the same order
with them; and in the writer’s judgment he is equally free from that
dulness which has no sense for the fine or rare in men and things, that
acceptance of the common price, the common standard, which are the
attributes of real vulgarity.

Look, for instance, at the etching reproduced (Fig. 9). The subject has
been the theme of many painters and engravers. It is a subject easily
spoiled; a little too much of sentimental piety, a little too much of
satirical mockery, and the theme is made trivial or obvious. But
Ostade’s feeling is just right. There is no drawing of a trite moral,
as, for instance, in the treatment of the same subject by a later
engraver, Nicholas van Haeften. Nor is there a hint of mockery at the
discrepancy between the “good things” for which Heaven is thanked and
the humble pottage on the table. But is there not, besides the wonderful
sensitiveness of drawing in the figures, which makes one feel how the
toil-hardened, clumsy hands tremble awkwardly as they are clasped, and
how the boy, though his back is turned, is shutting his eyes resolutely
tight--is there not also a tenderness, a dignity in the whole?

Again, in the little plate, _The Child and Doll_, is there not true
feeling, expressed with a fine reticence, in the mother’s face and in
the child’s? The careful fondness of the mother is even better expressed
in another etching, where she hands a baby down to the eager arms of its
elder sister, a child of six or seven, who receives it with joyful
pride. The drawing reminds one of some of the exquisitely humorous and
exquisitely tender sketches of Leech.


V

It is when we come to the work of his pupils, Bega and Dusart, that we
realise best Ostade’s finer qualities.

Cornelis Pietersz Bega was born at Haarlem in 1620, and died there of
the plague in 1664, fully twenty years before his master.

According to Houbraken’s story, his real name was Begyn, which he
changed to Bega after being turned out of his father’s house for his
youthful escapades. The story is not incredible of such a youth as he
appears in his portrait, gay and somewhat vain-looking, with long
curling locks.

Bega’s etchings are thirty-eight in number, and have a very distinctive
air. Certain characteristics seem to indicate that his original bent was
towards a decorative treatment of his subject. His drawings show a care
for the happy disposition of drapery, remarkable in this school. He has
a feeling for large design, combined with great indifference to human
character. But such treatment was alien to the Dutch school in general;
nor did Dutch peasants lend themselves at all willingly, so it seems, to
passive decoration. Certainly a pupil of Ostade’s would have no
encouraging influences to help him forward on such lines. So, though
Bega adopts in part the themes and general handling of his teacher, the
rather flat design which he affects, his frankly artificial chiaroscuro,
his use of light and shadow as masses of black and white rather than as
opportunities of mystery, contrast strongly with Ostade’s solid
modelling, his pervading atmosphere, and his pre-occupying human
interest. One perceives that the master’s influence could not altogether
swamp the pupil’s natural impulse: but neither wins the day, and the
result is an unsatisfying compromise.

_The Tavern_ (Fig. 11) is a very characteristic plate. It is very
brilliant, and makes a powerful impression at first sight. But it does
not bear close study. There is a want of subtlety in it, and a want of
feeling; a certain hardness, combined with a certain cleverness, that
repels.

Bega’s two other large plates, also of tavern scenes, reveal just the
same qualities, and need not be further particularised.

In technical character, these etchings recall the Spanish etcher Goya,
who was also fond of producing a sharp, vivid, emphatic effect by a
similar artificial manner of lighting. Not improbably Bega’s etchings
may have been known to Goya, and given him a suggestion.

Bega had apparently no tenderness, and little or no interest in

[Illustration: _Fig. 11.--The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32._]

humanity. This deficiency, in one of the Dutch school, and trained in
the Dutch tradition, is notable. One has only to turn from his mother
and baby sitting by the window (B. 21) to Ostade’s _Child and Doll_, to
feel what a difference lies between the two.

Cornelis Dusart was a much later scholar. At Bega’s death he was only a
child of four, and he survived Ostade many years, living on till 1704.
When Ostade died, he finished his master’s uncompleted pictures, but
kept them till his death in his own possession.

Some of Dusart’s etchings, as for instance _The Village Fête_ (B. 16)
have a pleasing effect, with well-managed light and shade; but they
cannot be compared with the similar pieces by Ostade, whose method is
here carried on, but in an inferior manner. Yet he has a vein of his
own, a gross, riotous, extravagant vein, with a great fondness for
violent action. In the plate called by Bartsch _Le Violon Assis_ (B.
15), which was too large to be reproduced here, his specific qualities
appear to great advantage.

One seems to hear an hilarious din merely from looking at it. The
fiddler plays with a wild fantastic energy; one peasant accompanies him
with crashing tankard and roaring chorus; another sits bent and sullen
with his head on his hands. The landlord, with huge frame and round
paunch, looks on with twinkling eyes. A woman by the great chimney, on
which hangs the notice of a sale of tulips and hyacinths, “Tulpaan en
Hyacinthen,” calls a child to her. The roomy background with its beams
and rafters, is drawn and lighted with extraordinary skill. As a page of
daily life, fresh and vivid, this etching deserves the fullest praise.

Dusart in his later years devoted himself to mezzotint, and produced a
great deal in this manner. These engravings, some of which represent in
Dusart’s extravagant way, the joy in Holland at the taking of Namur in
1695 by William III., are more interesting historically than
artistically. It was not till the middle of next century that mezzotint,
the invention of which does not date from much earlier than Dusart’s
birth, reached its perfection in the hands of the English engravers.




THE ETCHERS OF LANDSCAPE


I

The seventeenth century, which inaugurated so much that is
characteristic in modern art, permitted for the first time the
recognition of landscape as a subject worthy for its own sake of
painting. And feeling for landscape seems to be almost entirely a modern
thing.

Drawings of landscape by Titian and Campagnola among the Italians, and
by Dürer among the Germans, had indicated the first beginnings of a
preference; and there are a certain number of landscape subjects among
the engraved work of the Little Masters. But these are occasional
efforts by men whose chief work lay in other lines. In painting no one
ventured as yet to concentrate his interest on the landscape, and though
men like the Flemish Joachim Patinir evidently cared more for their
backgrounds of mountain and river than for the human incidents which
relieve them, they had not the courage to cast away compromise and brave
authority by omitting the traditional foreground.

Rubens is the first great Northern master who paints landscape with
entire and frank abandonment to the subject. The broad prospects and
swelling undulations of Flemish country are painted by him with a kind
of glory that reflects his large and joyous mind. Lodowyck de Vadder and
Lucas van Uden, his contemporaries, etched landscape for the first time
in Flanders. But it was in Holland that this line was most abundantly
developed. To tranquil, observant natures, such as seem typical of the
nation, there was in landscape a strong appeal, a permanent delight. The
majority of the Dutch etchers found here their chief material.


II

Earliest, perhaps, of all Dutch landscape painters, and almost certainly
earliest among Dutch landscape etchers, is a little known artist,
Hercules Seghers. A mystery hangs over him; for though there is
documentary evidence in an inventory of 1625 or thereabouts, that he
painted a considerable number of landscapes, these pictures have nearly
all disappeared. Some, doubtless, may be lurking under other names; one,
called a Rembrandt, was discovered some time ago at Florence; one is at
Berlin; but this can hardly account for all. We can only guess what they
were like from the etchings, which are usually either views

[Illustration: _Fig. 12.--Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236._]

of Holland with vast horizons, or strange visions of wild and
mountainous country. Seghers was born in 1589,[3] and died in 1650. A
scholar of Gillis van Connincxloo, he was producing work as early as
1607, and from that date to 1630 seems to have been his chief period of
activity.[4] His life, like that of several of the Dutch masters, was a
long and hopeless struggle against poverty. He is said to have become a
drunkard, and to have died from the effects of a fall. Dr. Bredius,
judging apparently from his work, thinks that he must have visited the
Alps, travelled into Italy, and found a stimulus in the art of Adam
Elsheimer. Certainly the rocky landscapes which appear in the etchings
could have no archetypes in Holland. But there is so strong a vein of
the fantastic in them, that it is difficult to believe they were done
from nature, especially when one observes how precise a pencil Seghers
uses when he sketches his native country. However, truth to mountain
formation is anything but an easy thing to seize; only by incessant
training and close observation does the eye acquire it; and to draw
rocks imaginatively, that is, with vivid realisation of their essential
forms, is scarcely possible to one who has not the work of predecessors
to learn from and to surpass, and whose eye has not dwelt upon them from
childhood. One may imagine, therefore, that the efforts of a lowlander,
to whom mountains must have had something visionary and strange in their
aspect, would be halting, laborious, and confused in grappling with such
unfamiliar material. The rocks painted by Patinir are a case in point.
This may well explain the singular shortcomings of Seghers’ rendering of
rocks and mountains. In his attempts to represent floating clouds on the
mountain sides he is simply grotesque.

If, then, it was actual scenery that Seghers etched, where is that
scenery to be found? It is certainly not the Alps, and though one or two
plates suggest the Tyrol, the landscape is most like in character to the
Karst district on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. One of the
etchings might almost stand for the rock-surrounded plain of Cettinjé,
in Montenegro, though to infer that Seghers travelled to so remote a
country would be a wild conjecture.

There can be no doubt, on the other hand, of the influence of Elsheimer
over Seghers, and through him, over Rembrandt.

In the National Gallery there is a picture by Elsheimer representing
_Tobias and the Angel_, in a wooded landscape. This was engraved by
Elsheimer’s friend, Count de Goudt, and either from the picture or the
engraving,[5] Seghers borrowed the main features of one of his etchings
(Fig. 12). The two chief figures have been retained almost unaltered;
but their being placed higher up in the picture makes a considerable
change in the composition, they have more dignity and significance. The
elimination, also, of some rather trivial details, such as the great
flowers in the foreground, and the passing figures in the middle
distance, make for the same effect. A kind of mystery and solemnity have
been added to the landscape, and in fact the impression of the whole is
deepened and enlarged. The subject has been fused in Seghers’ mind and
has become his own.

At his death, Seghers’ effects, including his etched plates, were sold.
Among the buyers of these latter were, apparently, Antoni Waterloo and
Rembrandt. Waterloo published some of Seghers’ landscapes with his own,
and it has been assumed by Dutuit that these impressions were from the
earlier artist’s plates, re-worked. Comparison of one of the original
etchings, however, with that published by Waterloo of the same subject,
leads the writer to doubt this. The work is entirely different.

Rembrandt, we know from the inventory of his effects taken in 1656,
bought six of Seghers’ landscapes, and he also bought the copper on
which had been etched the _Tobias and the Angel_. It was re-worked by
Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt’s work as a _Flight into
Egypt_.[6] (See Fig. 13.)

The dark wooded landscape remains unaltered, and though the Holy Family
and a group of trees now occupy the right hand of the scene, the great
wing of the angel is still distinctly to be seen above them, and
Tobias’s legs have not been perfectly erased.

Rembrandt, we may be sure, would never have taken another man’s work
unless he had found in it a strong appeal to his own nature. And Seghers
seems to have been his prototype in landscape. On the one hand, the
mysterious, darkly wooded, mountainous visions of Seghers suggest the
type of landscape in which Rembrandt set, for instance, his own _Tobias
and the Angel_,[7] a type which he was fond of reproducing. On the other
hand, Seghers’ love for the vast distances of Holland, crowded plains
with broad rivers winding into an infinite horizon, appears again in
some of Rembrandt’s etchings, and more notably still in those spacious
prospects, “escapes for the mind” as Mr. Pater has called them, of
Rembrandt’s pupil, the most truly Dutch and perhaps the greatest, of all
the landscape painters of Holland--Philip de Koninck.

To return to Seghers’ etchings. There is something about them which
arrests the eye at once, and this is partly due to their peculiar
printing. Seghers was a born maker of experiments, and in nearly all his
plates sought to get an effect of colour. In fact, it is usually
asserted

[Illustration: _Fig. 13.--The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236._]

that he anticipated, by a hundred years, the coloured engravings of
Leblond.

Printing in colour from two or more blocks had been practised by
wood-engravers long before this time. Burgkmair and Cranach in Germany,
Ugo da Carpi and Andrea Andreani in Italy, had produced a number of
these “chiaroscuros,” as they are called, with charming effect. This was
about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And almost in Seghers’ own
time, Hendrik Goltzius, of Haarlem, published some of his best work from
coloured wood-blocks.

But in all of these cases, at least two, and often three separate blocks
were used, and the colours superimposed on each other. This was also the
procedure of Leblond, though he used metal plates and mezzotint.

Seghers, however, employed a single plate only, and his effects are not
due to what is usually understood as colour printing. He first prepared
his paper with a coat of paint, which formed the ground; in some cases
this was a greenish tint. He then etched his subject and printed it in
an indigo ink; and in order to procure shading of the same colour, he
lightly scratched the parts to be shaded with the dry-point, so that the
copper held the ink on its surface. By this simple means he produced an
apparently complex effect.[8]

The green tint and dark-blue ink are, of course, only taken as a
specimen, for Seghers used various colours. Sometimes the impressions
are printed on linen. In one case the etching is printed in white on a
brown ground.

Besides views of Dutch plains and of mountain scenery, Seghers also
etched trees; not with great success, but with a striving after truth of
foliage very rare in his day. Now and then, too, he attempted buildings,
and with a real feeling for the romantic, for picturesque beauty, in
architecture.

On the whole, we must allow an important place in the history of Dutch
landscape to Hercules Seghers. But that must not prevent us from
perceiving that it is an historical importance only. Seghers opened up
the road, but he achieved no eminent triumph himself. Nor, in spite of
his suggestiveness for Rembrandt and De Koninck, does he seem to have
exercised any great influence on the landscape etchers who immediately
succeeded him.

He has no affinity with the men whose work we must now consider.


III

The two diverging tendencies of Dutch art, that which fed on the Italian
tradition and that which clung to the native soil, are both to some
extent represented in Seghers.

Leaving for a time the Italianised masters, let us follow the main
development of Dutch landscape art, the painters and etchers whom
Holland alone inspired.

The first names of note are those of Esaias and Jan van de Velde. Jan
was born in 1596, Esaias a few years earlier. Of the former we shall say
something later on. He produced a great deal of work, the most
remarkable part of which is a number of plates engraved and etched in
the manner of Elsheimer. It is by these plates that he is best known,
and through them he ranks as one of the Italianised school. As, however,
he etched a certain number of purely Dutch landscapes, after the designs
probably of his brother, he must also be mentioned here. These
landscapes are mostly sets of traditional subjects, such as the
sixteenth century loved: _The Four Elements_, _The Four Seasons_, _The
Twelve Months_. Always strongly overworked with the burin, these
etchings have a somewhat harsh and dry effect. The harshness is
especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage. It is as if the
artist were striving to reproduce with the etching-needle the manner of
line-engraving as employed by the Goltzius school. Failing to secure
this he has recourse to the burin to supplement his incomplete success
in etching.

Esaias uses the acid in a much franker fashion. A plate of his, which we
may take as representative, depicts a whale cast on the shores of
Holland, perhaps at Scheveningen, in 1614. A great crowd has assembled
on the beach staring at the stranded monster, examining and measuring
its vast proportions. The dunes recede in the distance; boats are at
anchor in the surf.

The scene is treated with the plainness and sincerity characteristic of
Dutch art. And the etching, with its firmly and rather coarsely bitten
lines, unsophisticated by the burin, has a solidity and simplicity not
without attraction.

Regarded as etching, this is primitive work. Still it is genuine
etching, and by one who has perceived that needle and acid demand an
employment and an aim different in kind from that of the graver. It is
interesting, therefore, to compare this plate with the line-engraving of
a similar subject, representing another whale stranded, a few years
before, in 1598, by Jacob Matham, the pupil of Goltzius.

With the Van de Veldes it is natural to associate two contemporaries,
who with them helped to inaugurate the great age of Dutch art; Pieter

[Illustration: _Fig. 14.--Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5._]

Molyn, the elder, and Jan van Goyen, the latter born in the same year
with Jan van de Velde.

Molyn, who was born in London, but was working in Haarlem before 1616,
is an artist of real independence. A set of etchings, published in 1626,
shows the same qualities that appear in his drawings--firm
draughtsmanship, openness and freedom of design, and a fine economy of
means. Heaths and moors, a climbing country road with plodding waggon, a
wayside inn, such were the simple elements which he translated into
always distinguished work. Doubtless to Molyn’s teaching must be
attributed something of that fine manner which imparts so much charm to
the pictures of Gerard Ter Borch, his pupil.

Dying in 1656, Molyn survived by a few years one who, though not a
pupil, came certainly under his influence; Van Goyen. Till lately Van
Goyen, perhaps because his works are better known, was supposed to have
been Molyn’s teacher, or at least to have given a stimulus to his art.
Van Goyen shows more power in his drawings than in his paintings, which
are sometimes but little removed from sepia monochromes; and it is a
surprise to come, here and there, upon a picture of his which is bright
and fresh. The few etchings which he published are undated, but belong,
according to Dr. Lippman, to his middle life, 1625-30. They

[Illustration: _Fig. 15.--Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75._]

have not the character of Molyn’s plates, and are far less good as
etchings.

Simon de Vlieger, who ranks in date as a younger contemporary of the Van
de Veldes and of Molyn, is more successful as an etcher in the few
plates which he produced, than any of the early landscape artists.
Unhampered by the traditions of the line-engraver, he aims at an effect
at once delicate and free. As a painter, he is known almost entirely by
sea-pieces, silvery in tone, from which Jan van de Cappelle drew
something of his mastery over still effects at sea, mornings of sleepy
mist through which the sun breaks palely on the sails of anchored
vessels. Like most of the Dutch painters, de Vlieger changed his home
several times. Born at Rotterdam in 1600, he was at Delft from 1634 to
1640, and from then till his death, nineteen years later, at Amsterdam.
It seems probable that here he gave lessons to the young Willem van de
Velde, who was afterwards to be famous as the greatest of Dutch
sea-painters, and who died at Greenwich, a Court painter to Charles II.

In his etchings, which are undated, de Vlieger does not attempt the sea;
though one (B. 10), a fine piece in its way, is a scene on the
sea-beach, with fishermen and their haul. The best of the plates are two
Sylvan pieces, _The Wood by the Canal_ (B. 6), and the _Grassy Hill_ (B.
7). The foliage is more sensitively treated than it commonly is by Dutch
etchers, and with more approach to delicate truth. There is also a set
of animals and poultry; possibly one of the earliest sets of subjects of
this kind, which the middle of the century found so popular.


IV

With Allardt van Everdingen (1621-1675) we reach a new element in Dutch
landscape. Working under Pieter Molyn at Haarlem, he began by painting
marine subjects; and with a view to increasing his knowledge of the sea,
took ship on the Baltic. But a storm drove him to Norway; and there for
some time, taking advantage of misfortune, he lingered travelling and
sketching.

Before 1645, however--that is before he was twenty-five, Everdingen was
back in Haarlem. He now began to paint pictures from his Norwegian
sketches: and to the Dutch public this northern scenery disclosed a
novel charm. Used to wide pastures and ample skies, they found a
romantic strangeness in tumbling streams among rocks and pine-forests,
where the sky was shut off by mountain slopes.

In 1652 Everdingen removed to Amsterdam, where he remained till his
death. Probably his fame had preceded him: at any rate his popularity
soon grew great there also, and his canvases were much sought after.

Besides numerous pictures, the Norwegian sketches provided the artist
with material for a long series of etchings. Fig. 15 is a very
characteristic specimen of them. Without any extraordinary qualities,
they have often a genuine charm. The Norwegian landscape is treated
with insight into its peculiar features, and though Everdingen fails
entirely to suggest the rush and foam of torrents, he makes fine use of
the log cabins, rafts, and palings, and etches pines with truth and
spirit.

Of a probably later date are the four views of a watering-place,
possibly Spa, one of which is here reproduced (Fig. 16). The subject is

[Illustration: _Fig. 16.--Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B.
96._]

interesting, and the handling of the buildings and the groups of people
is excellent.

Everdingen was not without humour, which is shown in the long series of
illustrations to _Reynard the Fox_. But most readers will probably find
the chief interest of the artist to lie in his relations with a greater
man, Ruisdael.


V

Though a native of Haarlem, Jacob van Ruisdael produced most of his
life’s work at Amsterdam. He is conjectured to have been born about
1625; the precise year has not been discovered. His father Isaak, a
frame-maker, had him trained as a surgeon; and it was not till after he
had passed a course of surgery that he abandoned the profession for
painting, in which he had early shown his gift.

Ruisdael’s first pictures are dated 1646, and his works from that year
to 1655, his “early period,” are nearly all views of Haarlem and its
neighbourhood. Thoroughly Dutch in character, they have little of that
gloomy tone so frequent in the artist’s later time. The beautiful _View
of Haarlem_ at the Hague, with its massed clouds and ray of sunshine
gliding over the plain, is a perfect example of this early manner.

With Ruisdael’s removal from Haarlem, a great change comes over his art.
There seems no doubt that his early Dutch landscapes were not popular.
They were perhaps too original. He came to Amsterdam poor and without
much reputation, and he found there, established in fame and popularity,
Allardt van Everdingen, returned from Norway and now attracting the
world of buyers by his pictures of that wild and romantic country. It
was in 1652, as we have seen, that Everdingen settled in the city, and
three or four years later Ruisdael arrived. He did not become a burgess
till 1659, but had probably been already some years in residence before
the formal inscription of his name.

From this period dates the lamentable change in Ruisdael’s art. The
master, whose native independence is so marked that one is at a loss to
name his probable teacher, of his own will and in sheer mortification of
spirit at his want of success, forces himself from the meadows and dunes
of his delight, and invents, to win the patronage of the rich men of
Amsterdam, a Norway of his own. A visit to North Germany, of which there
is some evidence, helped his invention. Now begins the long series of
waterfalls and pines and torrents so familiar in the picture galleries.
It is not on these that Ruisdael’s fame rests; on this ground
Everdingen, in spite of his inferior merits as a painter, remains his
master. But as the pictures of this period are the most common, the
public is apt to identify him with this acquired style in which the
true Ruisdael is obscured. For this reason it was a fortunate choice
which secured for the National Gallery, two years ago, so exquisite a
specimen of the painter at his best as the _Shore at Scheveningen_, No.
1390. The chilly ending of an afternoon, with clouds blowing up and the
rain beginning, the vexed movement of shallow water as the rising wind
breaks it into short waves, the wetness of the spray-laden atmosphere,
are painted with a sensitive subtlety that more modern landscape, with
all its triumphs, has not excelled. The mood of feeling here expressed
is intimately Ruisdael’s own. Without the brooding melancholy which
became oppressively habitual later, which found such grandiose
expression in pictures like the famous _Jews’ Burying-place_ at Dresden,
there is here a latent sadness that seems to have been bred in the fibre
of the man. It seems a kind of expectation of sorrow; the mood that
poetry with greater intensity has expressed in some lines of Browning
which suggest themselves:

    The rain set early in to-night;
      The sullen wind was soon awake:
    It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
      And did its worst to vex the lake.
    I listened, with heart fit to break....

For such a nature who would predict happiness? Fortune satisfied that
inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing poverty, and
the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore the artist
down. The autumn of 1681 found him ill and helpless; so helpless that
the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of Mennonites,
procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem. There he
lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St. Bavon’s.


VI

Ruisdael’s etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number; only
seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what their
technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude
for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it
far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the _Three Oaks_ (B.
6), is dated 1649, and it is difficult to assign any of the others,
except possibly the _Cornfield_, to a later date.

Of the four large plates, the one which Bartsch calls _Les Voyageurs_
(B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild
and intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great
roots of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills
the left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the
wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at
one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael’s strong feeling for old
trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious,
inspires him here; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of
sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the
difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master and
the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael never
succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in
etched line; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his
sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh
and wonderful, make his work always interesting.

The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings of
the same kind of subject. Though the first, _The Little Bridge_, is not
a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is
penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity
and neglected solitude. The _Three Oaks_ are etched with truth and
strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger
plate. The _Cornfield_ (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.

There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the _Three
Oaks_ and the _Cornfield_. As the later states are by far the more
common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched,
and, in the writer’s opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first
three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire on
this consummate master of clouds!) has been inserted, and in all there
is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still
suggesting an alien hand.

Ruisdael’s etching is little more than an illustration of his painting;
criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the
other.

Ruisdael’s great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical
importance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way for
Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the landscape of
modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a considerable
figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive waterfalls,
which too often represent him, his real qualities would have more chance
of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is

[Illustration: _Fig. 17.--The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5._]

more various, more subtle, altogether finer than Hobbema, except when
Hobbema is at his very best, as in the severely charming _Avenue of
Middleharnis_. Hobbema often fails to convince, because he has not
sufficiently felt his subject; and so he will paint a grand sky with the
wind moving great clouds across it, but when he comes to the trees of
his foreground he forgets his sky, and paints the branches in a
breathlessly stiff atmosphere, without the suggestion of a wind. The
resulting effect is a perplexing heaviness. Ruisdael betrays the same
defect in his later pictures; what else could one expect from one
condemned to produce unrealities for a market? But in his good period he
always shows an impressible imagination, and his materials are fused by
the feeling in which he steeps them. His sense for the beauty of trees
is profound, though rather limited in its range. He was lacking in the
consummate style of Crome, and would never have achieved the largeness
and reticent power of a picture like the English master’s _Avenue at
Chapel Fields_. But for skies, for clouds, he has an eye more true, a
love more comprehensive, than those of any who had gone before him, than
those of many who were to follow him. He piles his clouds in mountainous
glory, “trailing” their shadows over the wide country, till the level
pastures of Holland grow in “visionary majesties” like the grandest
mountains of Norway. This gives us all the more reason to deplore the
absence of any attempt to deal with clouds in the etchings, still more
the presence of those inflated shapes inserted by a stupid publisher.


VII

Though an important figure in the history of landscape painting,
Ruisdael did not strongly influence the contemporary etchers of
landscape. Hobbema, his famous scholar, did not, so far as we know, etch
at all. A few etchers, however, felt Ruisdael’s stimulus more or less:
Van Beresteyn, who was working at Haarlem in 1644, and produced some
etchings somewhat in the manner of Ruisdael’s _Cornfield_, but with a
mannered treatment of trees: H. Naiwincx, who handled a delicate point,
and etched a set of graceful plates of woodland and river: and Adriaen
Verboom, who in his two or three etchings is perhaps more successful in
treatment of trees than any of the Dutchmen.

But more celebrated than any of these is Antoni Waterloo.

His etchings, to which alone he owes his reputation, are considerably
over a hundred in number; and as the subjects are monotonous, they soon
become tedious. Groups of trees by a roadside, or a fringe of wood alone
occupy Waterloo’s needle. Now and then, as in B. 28, the touch is light
and the effect pleasant: but having once found a formula, Waterloo is
content to repeat it. His foliage is hard and heavy.

[Illustration: _Fig. 18.--The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der
Heyden._]

Roelant Roghman (1597-1686), though most of his plates are nominally
topographical, shows more feeling, if less skill. One set of plates by
him illustrates the Dutch postal system between the mother country and
the East Indies, and has therefore an historical interest.

But Roghman’s chief claim on our concern is that he was the faithful and
beloved friend of Rembrandt. His etchings, however, show no trace of
Rembrandt’s influence; and he was by ten years the elder man.

Like Seghers and like Ruisdael, Roghman was neglected and miserable in
his life, and died in an almshouse. One of his landscapes is in the
National Gallery.


VIII

The illustration on page 51 (Fig. 18) is from an etching which
represents a certain province of Dutch art, handled by several of the
painters with much success, but scarcely touched by the etchers.

Of this group, to whom architecture, whether in the spacious and austere
interiors of the Dutch churches, or the squares and ruddy brick
house-fronts of the towns, was the chief preoccupation, Jan van der
Heyden is the most famous and the best. He is also the one among them
who has etched. The illustration, though much reduced, gives a fairly
good idea of his work. Master of a precise and patient pencil, Van der
Heyden is not content till he has drawn in every brick, every stone. And
the marvel is, that in spite of his method, he contrives to convey a
certain spirit of largeness into his design. In fact, though so minute
in detail, he seems always to have kept his eye on the whole. A pleasant
temperate warmth of colour pervades his pictures, the kind of light
which on certain days suffuses old brick walls, as if dyed in the
sunshine of many summers: and that exquisite order, the almost
extravagant cleanliness of Dutch households, makes itself felt in these
glimpses of tree-bordered canals, and of trim house-fronts with their
well-proportioned windows.

Much of this colour persists even in the black and white of an etching
like that reproduced. It is the day after a fire, and a little crowd of
neighbours is gathered to look on the burnt remnant of the house. How

[Illustration: _Sea Piece. From an etching by L. Backhuysen._]

excellently are the groups and figures depicted! This is not true
etcher’s work; but it is very skilful work, very good work, of its kind.

Neither Van der Heyden, nor any of the Dutch painters of architecture,
realised the capacity of outlines in stone or brick, attended by their
circumstance of light and shadow, to impress the imagination, to stir
emotion, as Méryon was to do later. But their work, by its soberness and
firm simplicity, wins us. In its own way, and in its own degree, it will
always give pleasure.


IX

From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth
century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally
to be expected: and among the several fine painters who now for the
first time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and
Ludolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger
painted, but did not etch marine subjects; of Jan van de Capelle only
three indifferent plates are known; and Willem van de Velde did not etch
at all.

Zeeman’s real name was Nooms; but his love of the sea procured him early
the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled much, but
worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born in 1623.

Zeeman’s etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of
Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They
passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture,
commissioned him to do them: and they were evidently popular. Such work,
nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a
pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose
his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher
as etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.

Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with
their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an
endless fascination for him: for it is shipping, rather than the sea
itself, which he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable
feeling, a simple and effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of
war move with royal stateliness; and the battle-pieces have something
of the magnificence one imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in
their way are plates like the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at
morning over the still sea, bathed in a wash of limpid air and sunshine.
Only in his clouds does Zeeman completely fail. Historically, too, these
prints are interesting. Here, with patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of
showing the English ship of the line or frigate, with her sails riddled,
conquered at last, and with the Dutch tricolour hoisted over the St.
George’s Cross. Nothing could more

[Illustration: _Fig. 19.--Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38._]

vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at the
time.

Backhuysen’s etchings are later than Zeeman’s, being all produced in
1701, when the artist was seventy years old,[9] and seven years before
his death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame
and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the
Tsar Peter the Great; and from over much production his work suffered.

The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither
languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen’s
drawings. It is the same with Zeeman: probably because the
etching-needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of
foam and the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No
one, till Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight
of water as the tides move it in deep seas; but the easily agitated,
breezy motion of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a
pleasant freshness by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of
the ship under sail, crushing the water under her bows into foam.


X

So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists,
who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the
end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of
painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added
new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a
few years.

Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving
originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a
second and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.

Jan van de Velde,[10] it seems probable, spent some years of his manhood
in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any rate, a
number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer’s manner. These are so
heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as
line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or
less important part in all Jan van de Velde’s prints.

One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by
Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates
of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology
being at fault. Uytenbroeck’s birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode
has pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist
who died in 1612. The date must therefore be put back several years.
Uytenbroeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers.
The relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types,
with their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment
of Italian landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master’s
art.

Elsheimer’s influence still persists strongly in Cornelis Poelenburg,
one of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small,
smoothly glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in
every

[Illustration: _Fig. 20.--Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh.
B. 17._]

gallery. Poelenburg did not etch himself, but his friend Jan Gerritz
Bronchorst etched from his paintings and in his style, though with less
grace and elegance. We find here the beginnings of that school of
landscape, “Arcadian” as Bode calls it, which so soon received its
fullest and most perfect expression in the large and tranquil art of
Claude.

[Illustration: _Fig. 21.--Landscape. By Both. B. 3._]

Pieter de Laer, of whose etchings of animals we shall say something in
the next chapter, etched one landscape at least in the delicate soft
manner of that master. And with him maybe associated Bartolomeus
Breenbergh, who lived in Rome from his twenty-first to his twenty-eighth
year, 1620-1627. He was married at Amsterdam in 1633 and died there in
1659 or earlier; but was at Rome again in the interval, during which he
published (1640) a set of very attractive little prints. Fig. 20 is an
example of his work.

The same delicate, fine needle, and the same preference for the
picturesque, characterise the earlier etchings of Thomas Wyck. Later he
adopted a freer, broader style, and worked on a larger scale, but with
less success.

But the most conspicuous and important of this group is Jan Both. Like
Poelenburg, he was a man of Utrecht, where he was born in 1610 and where
he died in 1652. His portrait, taken in his later days at home, is that
of a stout, grave burgher. Quite young he left the studio of his master
Bloemart and travelled through France to Rome. There the soft sunshine
of Claude fascinated him and he began to follow in the footsteps of that
famous painter.

Every one knows the landscapes of Both, their smooth, rather insipid
grace, their premeditated balance of composition, their elegant
monotony. It is certain that they were popular in Holland, whither they
were brought in ships from Italy to adorn the walls of wealthy buyers.
Probably in that day such painting of placid sunshine was a new thing;
what we perceive to be a surface acquaintance with Nature savoured
almost of intimacy; and doubtless Both’s pretty and monotonous
conventions had then a permanent charm.

In his etchings, Both’s weaknesses do not appear so strongly. And,
wisely, he did not produce many. Had there been more they would, beyond
doubt, have been precisely similar to what we have; and from mere
fatigue at their monotony one would have rated them below their worth.

As it is, the ten landscapes after his own designs are more than enough
to reveal Both’s great limitations. Yet they are few enough for us to
enjoy them. For, after all, they are attractive and accomplished
etchings. From Claude, Both had learned how to produce, with a nice
management of the acid, an exquisite softness in his distances. The
atmosphere is limpid and bathed in sunshine, and the foregrounds are
suggested with that light touch and selection of detail which are first
requisites in an etching.

Here, again, it is only fair to the artist to judge him by the early
states of his work. The ruled lines defacing the sky which they are
meant to constitute, were added in the second state by the publisher. Of
that there can be little doubt. Unfortunately, Both’s first states are
extremely rare.

Both’s pupil, Willem de Heusch, approaches if he does not rival his
master. He is not independent enough, however, to merit special notice.

Herman van Swanevelt, another artist whose birth-date must be put
further back than the traditional 1620,[11] lived on to 1690, when he
died at Rome. His etchings are more considerable in number than in
merit. He began the school of reminiscences from Claude and Titian’s
landscapes which lingered on through paler and paler repetitions into
the eighteenth century, in the sad facility of Genoels and Van der Cabel
and Glauber. Never was art more bloodless and apathetic than in these
degenerate spoilers of a fine tradition.




THE ETCHERS OF PASTORAL


I

While landscape thus occupied the talent of so many Dutch painters, a
certain number struck out a branch apart, choosing subjects that may
briefly be called pastoral. For these men the foreground of cattle, the
goatherd or the shepherd with his flock, was of greater interest than
the background of often quite conventional scenery. Sometimes two or
more painters collaborated, and one painted the landscape while another
put in the animals.

And as in painting, so in etching. A certain group of men etched nothing
but animals, with now and then a landscape. Of these the chief are Paul
Potter, Claes Berchem, Adriaen van de Velde, Karel du Jardin.

This love of the domestic animals for their own sake in art seems native
and almost peculiar to Holland.

Many painters before this time had shown a remarkable love of animals.
From Benozzo Gozzoli to Bassano, individuals among the Italian masters
had introduced their favourites, wherever opportunity offered, into
sacred and historical compositions. And among the elder contemporaries
of the Dutchmen, Rubens, Snyders, and Velasquez had painted dogs and
horses as only they could paint them. But it is mainly in hunting
pieces, as servants or companions of man, that these painters introduce
animals; cattle and sheep do not interest them.

It is the same with the great engravers who preceded the
seventeenth-century etchers. Dürer was undoubtedly very fond of animals
and engraved them frequently. And that singular master of the fifteenth
century, whose name we do not know, but who is generally called the
Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet from the fact that by far the fullest
collection of his prints is at Amsterdam, engraved dogs and horses with
a freedom and a vivacity which Dürer never attained, and which were in
that period of Northern art unique. This master was long thought a
Dutchman, but the type of his faces, among other considerations, marks
him as a Swabian artist.

Yet in none of these men appears anything like the peculiar feeling
which in Potter, for instance, strikes so strong a note. The glory and

[Illustration: _Fig. 22.--A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51._]

excitement of the chase, so magnificently put on canvas by Rubens, the
relish of the boar’s savage fury as the hounds hurl themselves at him,
are absolutely alien to that brooding intentness, as alert to catch
every curve in the attitude of cattle rising or lying down, as subtle to
penetrate to their mysterious non-human existence, so distant and aloof,
pervading the Dutchman’s art. It is a mood which fuses the mind into the
life it watches, till the delight of cool running water to the cattle,
as they plunge in from the hot fields, is as intimately felt as the joy
of battle in their charging hounds, which is merely reflected human
feeling, is felt by the painters of the hunt.

Thus, while in Flanders painters and etchers like Jan Fyt carried on in
their animal pieces the tradition of Rubens and Snyders, a totally
different mode of animal painting and etching was springing up in
Holland.

“Pastoral,” it is most convenient to call it; but it is not pastoral in
the same sense that the word has come to have, as applied to certain
types of poetry, whether the _Idylls_ of Theocritus or the _Eclogues_ of
Virgil. There, as with the early painters of animals, the human interest
is the preoccupying interest; and the poet sings of the peasant’s life
in the fields, his industries, his pleasures, his loves and quarrels,
either from native love and knowledge of that life, or in a desire no
less genuine, if expressed through forms of more or less artificial
colouring and outline, for the real simplicity of the country. It is the
herdsman, not his herd, that is the pastoral poet’s theme.

Now, for the first time, the artist disengages himself from the point of
view of man, and effaces himself before the dumb life he contemplates.

Already, in the engravings of Lucas van Leyden, who, by his early
maturity and his early death, his gentle nature and his exquisite skill,
seems to stand as a prototype of Paul Potter--a kind of foreshadowing of
this attitude appears. But not till the seventeenth century does the
vein begin to be developed. Then, by rapid degrees, not through any
single influence, but communicated imperceptibly as if “in the air,” the
tradition grows.


II

Moses van Uytenbroeck and Claes Moeyart, whose etchings in the style of
Elsheimer were mentioned earlier, both produced a certain number of
purely pastoral plates. Of Uytenbroeck, we have a set of groups of
animals with backgrounds of Campagna landscape, which seem to date from
early in the century. And in the later manner of Moeyart, dated 1638, is
a group of cattle, sheep, and goats, under shady trees, in a
conventional landscape but with an unidealised Dutch herdsman. Neither
of these men etched cattle with much knowledge or spirit, though
Moeyart was an artist of many-sided talent, and painted pictures that
are excellent in their way.

Considerably better is an etching by Jan Gerritz Bleecker, also dated
1638. It is a group of cattle with a cowherd piping, conceived in the
pastoral vein of Potter’s _Shepherd_. Here, already, the interest of the
artist begins to centre on the animals.

In Pieter de Laer this interest is still more frank. Born before 1613,
de Laer found early a home in Italy, where his pictures were widely
appreciated. In the same year that we have just mentioned, 1638, he,
too, published a set of etchings of animals, in which attitude and
action are caught with far more vivacity and truth than hitherto, while
the design--though coarsely bitten--is light and free, compared with
earlier work. Another set of horses, which probably followed this, is
the prototype of studies like those of Potter’s.

De Laer seems to have been one of the first Dutchmen to import Dutch
realism and the Dutch method of painting into Italy. The Italians found
in such art something fresh and vigorous. De Laer soon gained immense
vogue in the south, and had a corresponding influence on his countrymen
who came to work there.

Among these, probably, was Claes Pietersz Berchem. It is not known for
certain whether this artist visited Italy, but the internal evidence of
his pictures points strongly to the supposition that he did. At any
rate, Dr. Bredius is convinced of it, and for the present we may safely
accept the hypothesis on his authority.

Berchem was born at Haarlem in 1620, but was working at Amsterdam before
1642, in which year his name occurs as member of the Haarlem Guild of
St. Luke. We also know that he was painted by Rembrandt in 1647.[12] Was
this before or after his journey to Italy, asks Bredius, and leaves the
question open. The etchings, however, help us towards an answer. 1644 is
the date on a set of cattle, with a milkmaid for title; also on the
_Return from the Fields_ (_L’Homme Monté sur l’Âne_) (B. 5). These are
etched with fine, delicate short strokes, in a manner afterwards
abandoned by Berchem. His most celebrated print, however, the so-called
“Diamond,” or _Joueur de Cornemuse_ (B. 4), and the _Fluting Shepherd_
(B. 6), are in the delicate early manner, and must be assigned to the
same date. Now, these are all unmistakably Italian in character. If we
may assume from Berchem’s pictures that he had been to Italy, we can
assume it with equal safety from these etchings. We may infer, then,
that in 1647 he had already returned from Italy. Berchem had many
pupils, including Karel du Jardin, of whom we shall speak later. He was
evidently one of the popular artists of the day. It is curious to
compare the features of the man as they live in

[Illustration: _Fig. 23.--Title Piece._ _By Berchem._ _B. 35._]

Rembrandt’s magnificent portrait,[13] with the characteristics of his
art. It is a face in which, for all its obvious strength, there is a
want of gentleness, fineness, impressibility; a type of nature that
succeeds easier in life than in art: for the qualities which count for
strength in the world count often in art for weakness. And weak, in
truth, is Berchem the artist.

With his paintings we are not now concerned. Through them he rivalled
Both in popularity, and for facility and complacency it is hard to say
which bears the palm. Berchem is quite content to paint the gnarled
trunk of an oak, the hairy leaf of a burdock, the moss on a stone and
the stone itself, grass and leaping water, as of the same polished, one
might almost say, “slimy” texture. So long as he has produced an
agreeable composition, he is content.

In his etchings, this insensibility to the fine differences in the grain
and moulding of things, all that goes to give trees and rocks and plants
the charm and interest of character, is less obviously disclosed. At
first sight the plates have a pleasant look, they are touched by a
cunning hand which has attained no common skill in distributing light
and in grouping. But one has not to look at them long before wearying of
their emptiness. Berchem etches cows, and sheep, and goats, because they
make pretty groups in composition--they add to the effect of a pastoral
landscape; but in themselves he shows no real interest whatever. His
goats pose; his cows have a look of faded human sentiment; his very
sheep are foolishly self-conscious. Though they are drawn with a certain
spirit and with a “touch” that mediocre artists and their admirers
mistake for an evidence of genius, the main truths in the lines of these
animal forms escape him.

In fine, Berchem was one of those men who have little of the artist in
them but skill of hand and facility in assimilation. Having invented or
concocted a recipe for producing a chosen class of subjects, he is
perfectly happy in repeating himself as long as the demand continues.
Berchem lived sixty-three years, and worked hard.


III

Who that has seen it can forget the portrait of Paul Potter by his
friend Van der Helst? The most beautiful portrait of that accomplished
painter, it has also an impalpable attraction that comes wholly from the
sitter, and of the many choice pictures in that choice gallery of the
Hague, the Mauritzhuis, its charm is not the least enduring.

The picture was painted in 1654, when Potter was already near death. A
certain drooping of the eyelids, a pallor of the face, indicate the
fatigue which was overmastering his powers. He was not yet thirty when
he died, but his production had been immense. And in him, as sometimes
happens, Nature, as if by a kind of anticipation, had brought the inborn
gift to early flower, a compensation in some sort to the world for its
early loss.

It was at Enkhuisen, a village on the extreme point of jutting land

[Illustration: _Fig. 24.--The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. 1._]

that looks out upon the Zuider Zee, that Paul Potter was born, Nov. 20,
1625. But only his early boyhood was passed there, for in 1631 his
father Pieter, also a painter, removed to Amsterdam. From his father the
boy first learnt to draw, and perhaps from him also inherited the love
of animals which was so strong in him. M. van Westrheene, in his life of
Potter, conjectures that he was influenced by two artists, Aelbert
Klomp and Govert Camphuisen, who painted pictures of the kind that
Potter made famous. But these men appear to have begun painting too late
for this to have been possible. Dr. Bredius thinks Claes Moeyart was a
more likely source of influence. It is known also that at a certain
period, about 1642, Potter was in the studio of Jacob de Wet at Haarlem.
But whoever may have taught him, his early ripeness and the strong
sincerity of his nature assure us that Potter derived little from any
teacher. With vivid preferences, a habit of subtle observation, and an
extraordinary skill of hand, he would have been content to repeat no
master’s formulas, however popular. His first signed picture and his
first signed etching bear the same date, 1643. He was eighteen years
old. The etching (B. 14) shows already skill in grouping and a hitherto
unknown knowledge in etching of animal forms. Its fault is over-much
elaboration. Three years later Potter was at Delft, and there in 1647,
at the age of twenty-two, painted his most famous picture, _The Young
Bull_, now at the Hague. It was one of the pictures carried off by
Napoleon, and of all those masterpieces from all countries which were
restored by France in 1815, this was esteemed the second in value. Since
then its fame has fallen, but with all its obvious demerits it has
suffered more--to borrow an expression applied by Mr. Swinburne to
Byron’s Address to Ocean in _Childe Harold_--from praise than from
dispraise. In 1649 Potter removed to the Hague, and it was here that he
met his wife, Adriana Balcheneynde, daughter of an architect in that
town. They were married in the following year. His marriage did not stop
the artist’s ceaseless industry, but rather increased it by his desire
to provide for his household. Thinking perhaps to find more patrons
there than at the Hague, he was induced by Dr. Tulp, the professor of
anatomy, famous from Rembrandt’s picture, to come to Amsterdam. In a
letter by a Frenchman who was in Amsterdam at this time, looking for
pictures on behalf of Queen Christina of Sweden, we have a glimpse of
Potter in his studio, working with prodigious assiduity. The Frenchman
found Potter at work on a painting which had already cost him five
months of continuous toil. “Rien ne se peut voir plus curieusement
fait,” says the Frenchman. When we consider that the painter produced
considerably over one hundred pictures in his brief life, it is amazing
to realise his powers of work. He was only to live two years longer.


IV

The etched work of Potter that has come down to us consists of eighteen
plates; not many, considering how prolific he was as a painter, but all
the plates are important.

Taking them in chronological order, we have first the etching already
spoken of, done when the artist was only eighteen, _The Cowherd_ (B.
14). In 1649, six years after its original execution, the plate was
reduced in length by Potter and the new date affixed. A reedy hollow,
with a pool, was substituted for the group of three cows at the left;
and an alteration was also made in the feet of one of the cows
descending the hill on the right. The etching, we know, was popular.
For, after it had been cut down, it was issued by at least three
publishers in turn; by F. de Wit, by P. Schenk, and by an anonymous
publisher who effaced the two former names. Probably in the first
instance it was issued by Potter himself, as was the series of cattle
published in 1650.

Full of skill in grouping and knowledge of form as this plate is, it is
certainly inferior to the later etchings. Already, by the next year,
Potter was able to produce a print, _The Shepherd_ (B. 15) which
surpasses it in every way, and which to more sound drawing adds a
pastoral atmosphere of lightness and sunshine and repose.

Berchem, Potter’s senior by five years, was at Haarlem in 1642, when
Potter, as we know, was in De Wet’s studio. We may assume, therefore,
that the two met. Perhaps it was in emulation of Berchem’s set of
etchings, published in 1644, that Potter produced his _Cowherd_ and
_Shepherd_. If so, he succeeded in surpassing them.

There now occurs an interval of some years in Potter’s etched work. His
next publication, so far as we know, was the series of eight plates (B.
1-8) representing cattle, and beginning with the fine _Bull_ (Fig. 24).
This title-piece is dated 1650, so that we may refer the production of
the plates to 1649, and possibly the year or two immediately preceding.
However, the fact that 1649 is the date of the revised _Cowherd_ seems
to point to Potter’s having resumed his interest in etching in that
year, and to his having executed the whole set after the re-publication
of that plate.

[Illustration: _Fig. 25.--Studies of a Dog. By Paul Potter. British
Museum._]

He would hardly issue an immature work, when he had by him much more
triumphant specimens of his skill.

As studies of animals, these eight little plates are as good as they can
be. But they are not more than studies. As we saw, it had become a
fashion for artists to etch such studies, and so spread their fame among
those who could not buy their pictures. This at once suggests the reason
of Potter’s deficiency as an etcher. Strictly speaking, he was not an
etcher at all. He used etching because it was the favourite medium for
multiplying sketches of his time. But one feels that the burin would
have been the apter instrument for that sure and cunning hand. There is
a deliberation, a want of immediacy in these designs, that are not of
the born etcher. Between the treatment of cattle in these etchings and
their treatment in line-engraving by Lucas van Leyden there is no
essential difference.

But we must take things as they are, and as specimens of subtle and
certain drawing, the plates are astonishing. The attitudes and movements
of oxen have never been better given. But it is not in mere correctness
of drawing that Potter excels his rivals. Berchem was only interested in
animals so far as they helped him in the composition of a landscape, but
with Potter they were the main interest, he loved them for themselves.
And in expressing that vague inarticulate soul that is in the look of
cattle, that mildness and acquiescence which are in their attitudes and
motions, he is a master, greater than any.

There is something in Dutch landscape, so open, tranquil, large, which
seems to look for the presence of these peaceful creatures as its
natural complement; their spirit is so entirely in harmony with the
spirit of their pastures. Not accidental, perhaps, nor without its due
effect, was the Dutch strain of blood in the American poet who seems to
have first suggested in words what Potter expressed in art--

    Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain, or halt in the leafy shade,
    What is it that you express in your eyes?
    It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.[14]

Like Whitman, Potter is possessed by the fascination of animals; he,
too, “stands and looks at them long and long.” And with a feeling so
reticent that its intensity escapes a superficial notice, he puts into
these etched lines the breath that moves their bodies, and the dumbness
that looks out of their eyes.


V

Two years after the publication of the cattle series, appeared the five
larger plates of horses. These have less the air of being mere etched
studies for pictures; they seem to have been made for their own sake,
and make a kind of history, such as Tolstoi in the strange story of
Kohlstomir has written; a kind of Horse’s Progress.

The fourth (B. 12), the _Two Plough Horses_, is reproduced on Plate III.
This and the _Horse Whinnying_ (B. 10) seem to the writer the finest of
the series, and the finest of all Potter’s etchings. The work is
entirely simple and unaffected: there is immense skill, but no apparent
consciousness of it, still less parade of it. Nothing adventitious is
brought in, no artifice is used of setting or surrounding: bathed in
light and air, on their own level pastures, the horses stand clearly
outlined. But what a feeling of morning freshness, of careless and free
joy, is in the breeze that tosses the mane of the whinnying horse, and
makes him tremble with felt vitality! It is a triumph of the untamed
energy of life. How different a picture from this of the two tired
creatures, set free from their heavy labour at the plough, but no longer
rejoicing in their freedom, except as a respite. By some magic of
sympathy Potter makes us feel the ache of their limbs, stiff with
fatigue, just as he expresses the patience in their eyes. Yet tender as
is the feeling of the drawing, it is so restrained that “pity” seems a
word out of place. It is rather the simple articulation by means of
sensitive portrayal, of an else inarticulate pathos. Such drawing as
this is in a true sense imaginative.

The studies of dogs, reproduced in Fig. 25 are an admirable example of
Potter’s gift. It is interesting to compare them with a drawing by
Berchem, also in the British Museum, representing a hunting scene, with
the boar at bay and dogs springing at him or struggling in the leash.
Unfortunately, it has been impossible to find room for a reproduction
of it; but whoever looks at it will perceive at once a vital difference
between such drawing and that of Potter’s. Berchem sketches the scene in
a rapid, summary manner, using a few strokes only for each figure. It is
Rembrandt’s method; but what a difference in the result! There is a
sketch by Rembrandt of a lion springing at and seizing a man on
horseback. Only a few lines are used, but the whole action of each
figure is expressed perfectly. Berchem thinks to do the like, but his

[Illustration: _Fig. 26.--The Cow. By Paul Potter. B. 3._]

lines are all just beside the truth. His mind, which has not sufficient
love for things to brood upon their forms, is incapable of the swift act
of sympathy necessary to seize their movement in action; and its power
of reproduction, by nature probably a delicate and precise faculty, has
been warped and blunted by the man’s satisfaction in his own cleverness,
till it gives an inaccurate image.

Berchem’s work is therefore false, and deserves to be called
unimaginative. It convinces only the incompetent spectator of things.

Potter’s work is never false, and its imaginative quality is rather
obscured than absent in his poorer productions. The fact is that, having

[Illustration: _Fig. 27.--Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2._]

given the vital image of an animal, he could not resist the temptation
of adding to it non-essential facts. He had not that transcendent
intelligence which instinctively practises the economy called “style.”
But it was on the side of intelligence, certainly not of tenderness or
sympathy, that he was lacking. He sat down to Nature’s feast, and the
delight of his eyes seduced him.

Before leaving this plate of the _Two Plough Horses_, we may notice a
point which does not seem to have been remarked before, that there was
apparently a kind of tradition of subjects among the animal painters and
etchers. This plate was published, in the set of horses, in 1652. But in
a set of etchings published the year before, 1651, by the artist Dirk
Stoop, this identical subject appears. The horses stand towards the left
of the plate in precisely the position of Potter’s horses.

Stoop, though as good as many of the Dutch etchers, was no consummate
draughtsman, and his horses are not to be compared with Potter’s. Yet
they do not look in the least like a copy, while the dates
discountenance such a supposition. If there be any direct relation
between the two etchings it must have been Potter who took a hint from
Stoop. But it seems equally likely to suppose that the subject, two
plough-horses released from labour, was a traditional one. The life of
cattle and horses does not offer more than a certain number of typical
pictures, and hence the tendency of painters and etchers to repeat the
same subject, always with an eye to improving on the best yet done; just
as earlier painters would choose a _Saint Sebastian_ as the typical
subject in which to display their power of painting the human figure. In
the same way Potter’s fifth etching of horses, where he depicts the
forlorn death that overcomes the worn-out beast, has its prototype in a
similar etching by Pieter de Laer, and the subject is repeated by Du
Jardin.

The etcher mentioned above, Dirk Stoop, Jed a wandering life, went to
Lisbon, became painter to the Court there, and, being brought over to
England with the Infanta, worked also in London. His etchings of horses
and dogs are less good than those of the court _fêtes_, processions, and
spectacles at Lisbon, at Hampton Court, and at London.


VI

If Potter did not produce many etchings himself, Marcus de Bye, who
etched in most cases after Potter’s designs, was comparatively prolific.
He produced over a hundred prints. Some of these,

[Illustration: _Ox and Sheep. From an etching by A. Van de Velde._]

purporting to be after drawings by Potter, are studies, not of cattle
and sheep or horses, but of wild animals--lions, tigers, and wolves. If
these could be taken as fairly representative of Potter’s work, we
should have to infer that Potter was far less fortunate in his drawing
of wild creatures than of tame. And it would be unlike Potter to have
made such studies except from the life. De Bye, however, lost a great
deal of the subtlety and life of his original in working from Potter’s
sketches. Karel du Jardin is a more independent artist. Born at
Amsterdam in 1622, he was trained in Berchem’s studio, but went to Italy
still young. There he found De Laer’s pictures in great esteem, and
developed a manner and a choice of subject very similar to his. Some
time before 1656 he returned to Holland, and remained at the Hague till
1659, when he removed to Amsterdam. There he painted some fine
portraits, quite unlike his ordinary pictures in style, being stirred to
emulation presumably by the superb Corporation pieces then produced
there. In 1675 he started again for Italy, but died three years later in
Venice.

The British Museum possesses a red-chalk drawing of Du Jardin by
himself. It is an agreeable portrait, but the face does not suggest much
power.

Though a pupil of Berchem, Du Jardin in his etchings follows Potter much
more than that artist. Dr. Lippmann, in fact, speaks of him as “Schuler
Potters,” but the expression must only mean a follower, not a pupil, of
Potter.

Twenty-four of Du Jardin’s etchings are dated, the dates being 1652,
1653, 1655, 1656, 1658, 1659, 1660, and 1675. Only one piece belongs to
the last year, while the other years have two, three, four, and five
pieces each. So that, whenever the undated etchings were produced, the
bulk of Du Jardin’s work on copper may safely be assigned to the eight
years 1652-1660; that is to say, to the first years after his return to
Holland, and possibly to the last year or two of his first stay in
Italy. Most of the etchings are from sketches made in Italy. Fig. 27 is
an example, and is a good specimen of Du Jardin as an etcher. There is
nothing very original about such art, but its agreeable qualities will
always give pleasure. Du Jardin, in his drawing and in his painting, has
a light and happy touch; yet beyond such craftsman’s merits there is
little to be said for him. He seems to have painted and etched what was
the fashion with a facile grace and commendable skill, but without any
strong inborn love of the subjects he handled.

As an etcher he is of the same order as Potter. A good many of the
prints are pastoral landscapes; these are less good than those in which
animals are the main subject. To turn from some of these small landscape

[Illustration: _Fig. 28.--Pigs. By K. Du Jardin. B. 15._]

studies of Du Jardin’s, in which nothing is seized strongly while
everything is made a little dull, to an etching of Rembrandt’s, say
_Six’s Bridge_, is to receive a most vivid impression of Rembrandt’s
immense superiority. Rembrandt’s light sketch is instinct with style; Du
Jardin, in these prints at any rate, has no style at all. Such etchings
as that of the pigs (Fig. 28) are of far higher quality.

Another etcher from Amsterdam, Adriaen van de Velde, came strongly under
Potter’s influence. Born in 1635-36 Van de Velde, like Du Jardin,
studied with Berchem. It has sometimes been assumed that he, too,
followed up his studies with a journey to Italy, but Dr. Bredius decides
against this supposition. There is Italian scenery in many of Adriaen’s
pictures, but there were plenty of fellow artists to borrow materials
for such backgrounds from. And with him the landscape is never much more
than a background. His interest lay more in his cattle and his figures
than in their surrounding. It is known, indeed, that he inserted figures
for several of the landscape painters, including Ruisdael and Hobbema.

Van de Velde’s etchings are nearly all of cattle, and here he sometimes
comes near Potter in drawing, while in management of the acid he is
decidedly Potter’s superior. His earliest dated etching of 1653 is a
large plate, which though not powerful has a real beauty. The cow which
forms the centre of the composition is almost identical with that in the
foreground of Potter’s _Cowherd_. Perhaps this was deliberate imitation,
and if so, is evidence of the recognition Potter’s knowledge of animal
form commanded, but it may equally well have been an accident. The whole
plate is bathed in drowsy sunshine, with which the man asleep by the
roadside, drawn with an admirable suggestion of repose, harmonises well.
This print is one of those which must be seen in the silvery earliest
state to be appreciated.

The original design for this plate is in the British Museum. In the same
collection is also the design for _The Cow Lying Down_ (B. 2). On the
same sheet of paper is a study of part of the cow in a slightly altered
position, and this has been adopted in the etching. Except for this
insignificant change, the two etchings are copied from the pencil
studies with entire fidelity. And probably this was always Van de
Velde’s practice, as it was with Potter and Du Jardin. It is, therefore,
strictly speaking, incorrect to describe the drawings as being made for
the etchings. The studies were etched simply that they might be
multiplied.

None of the studies of cattle, etched by the Dutch masters, surpasses
Van de Velde’s set of three, numbered 11, 12, and 13 in Bartsch. The
second is reproduced (Plate IV.). Potter never produced an effect so
delicate and so rich in colour as Van de Velde in these three etchings.
At the same time there is no ostentation of skill; rather there seems a

[Illustration: _Fig. 29.--A Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16._]

kind of modesty in the workmanship that is winning. Equally excellent is
the charming little study of a goat (Fig. 29).

Van de Velde, if not a great artist, was a true one, and his early death
at the age of thirty-seven was a loss to the art of Holland.




INDEX


Altdorfer, 12

Amsterdam Cabinet, Master of, 60


Backhuysen, 53, 54, 55

Bartsch, 5, 23

Bassano, 60

Bega, 26, 31, 32

Berchem, 60, 63-65, 68, 71, 72

Beresteyn, C. van, 50

Bleecker, 63

Bode, 13, 55, 56

Both, A. 13

Both, J. 57, 58, 65

Bray, J. de, 18

Bredius, 8, 37, 63, 67, 77

Breenbergh, 57

Bronchorst, 56

Brouwer, 21

Bye, M. de, 74, 75


Cabel, A. van der, 48, 58

Callot, 12, 13

Campagnola, 35

Camphuisen, 67

Capelle, J. van de, 43, 53

Caravaggio, 13

Claude, 13, 55, 56, 57

Constable, 49

Cornelis Cornelisz, 18

Crome, 49, 50


Du Jardin, 60, 64, 74, 75

Dürer, 11, 35, 60

Dusart, 31, 34

Dutuit, 24, 26, 38


Elsheimer, 13, 14, 37, 55

Everdingen, A. van, 44-46


Fyt, J., 62


Genoels, 58

Glauber, 58

Goltzius, 18, 39

Goudt, Count de, 37

Goya, 32

Goyen, J. van, 42, 43

Gozzoli, 60

Groot, Hofstede de, 8

Grotius, 9


Haeften, N. van, 31

Hals, D., 18

Hals, F., 6, 18, 20

Hamerton, 6, 30

Helst, B. van der, 65

Heusch, W. de, 58

Heyden, J. van der, 52, 53

Hirschvogel, 12

Hobbema, 6, 49, 50, 77

Honthorst, 13

Hooch, P. de, 6, 9, 28

Hopfer, 12


Keene, 31

Klomp, 66

Koehler, 40

Koninck, P. de, 39


Laer, P. de, 57, 63, 74

Lautensack, 12

Leblond, 39, 40

Le Ducq, 5

Leech, 31

Leyden, Lucas van, 62, 70

Lippmann, 43, 75


Matham, 42

Metsu, 9

Miel, 13

Moeyart, 62, 67

Molyn, P. de, 42, 43


Naiwincx, 50


Ostade, A. van, 6, 17-32


Pater, Walter, 9, 38

Patinir, 35, 37

Picart, 25

Potter, 6, 60, 62, 63, 65-75, 77


Rembrandt, 5, 6, 13, 15, 24, 28, 38, 63, 72, 76

Roghman, 50, 52

Rousseau, Th., 49

Rubens, 11, 14, 15, 35, 60, 61

Ruisdael, 6, 7, 46-50, 77


Seghers, H., 36-40

Snyders, 60, 62

Spinoza, 9

Steen, 6, 9

Stoop, 74

Swanevelt, 13, 48, 58


Terborch, 9, 42

Theocritus, 62

Titian, 35

Tolstoi, 71


Uden, L. van, 35

Uytenbroeck, M. van, 55, 62


Vadder, L. de, 35

Vandyck, 15

Velasquez, 13, 60

Velde, A. van de, 60, 77, 78

Velde, E. van de, 18, 41

Velde, J. van de, 41, 55

Velde, W. van de, 44, 53

Verboom, 50

Vermeer, 6, 28

Vlieger, S. de, 43, 53

Vosmaer, 17


Waterloo, 5, 38, 48, 50

Watteau, 9

Westrheene, van, 66

Wet, J. de, 67, 68

Whitman, 70

Willigen, van der, 8, 17

Wyck, 57


Zeeman, 53, 54


FOOTNOTES:

[1] The last figure is doubtful. It is 8 according to Bartsch and
Dutuit, but may also be 9.

[2] _Manuel de l’Amateur d’Estampes_: par M. Eugene Dutuit. Vol. V.
Paris. 1882.

[3] By all the older authorities the date is wrongly given as 1625.

[4] The _Tobias and the Angel_ dates probably from about 1613, or a
little later, as this was the date of de Goudt’s print.

[5] Probably the engraving, since Seghers’ print is a reverse copy from
this, but in the same sense as the picture.

[6] No. 236 in Middleton’s Catalogue.

[7] In the National Gallery.

[8] Seghers has also been credited with the use of soft ground etching
or of aquatint. Examination of the prints shows, however, that the
effects in question were got either by using acid on the plate, or by
working in dotted lines, not with the roulette but with the simple
needle. In ascertaining these facts and in correcting some of his
first impressions the writer has profited by the knowledge and the
kind assistance of Mr. S. R. Koehler, Keeper of the Prints at Boston,
U.S.A., whose authority on such questions is well known.

[9] This assumes him to have been born 1631. Another date given is 1633.

[10] See _supra_: p. 41.

[11] A drawing of his is dated _Paris, 1623_. And according to
Bertolotti he was in Rome by 1627.

[12] Bredius gives the date as 1644.

[13] Exhibited last winter (1895) at Burlington House by the Duke of
Westminster.

[14] Compare also a little-known piece of Whitman’s “The Ox-Tamer,” in
_Autumn Rivulets_, which ends:

    Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them ...
    I confess I envy only his fascination--my silent, illiterate friend,
    Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
    In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.



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