797. A MAN'S PORTRAIT.
Cuyp (Dutch: 1620-1691). See 53.
This excellent portrait serves to remind us that, unlike most of his fellow landscape painters, Cuyp could paint his own figures. Indeed we have seen that he sometimes painted them in other landscapes, see No. 152. The picture is signed "Aetatis suae 56, 1649. A. Cuyp fecit." Cuyp is one of the most various of all the Dutch masters. "What universality in the hand that could paint skies more glowing than those of Both, clouds as vaporous as those of Van de Cappelle, water more luminous than Van de Velde's, cattle as true to nature as Paul Potter's, horses better than Wouverman's, horsemen more distinguished than Vandyck's! Sometimes, too—and there is a noble example in our National Gallery—we find Aelbert Cuyp painting portraits, not in the stiff precise way that the father painted them, but with a freedom of touch and a brilliancy of colour that place him between Van der Helst and Rembrandt" (Quarterly Review, October 1891, and Fromentin's' Les Maitres d'autrefois, "Hollande," ch. viii.).