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