825. THE POULTERER'S SHOP.
Gerard Dou (Dutch: 1613-1675). See 192.
This picture, as an acknowledged chef d'œuvre of the master, has long been celebrated. It was purchased by Sir Robert Peel from the Fonthill Collection in 1823 for £1270. Mrs. Jameson, on seeing the picture at Sir R. Peel's, wrote: "All executed with such a nicety of touch—such an inconceivable truth and minuteness of imitation—as to render the picture a very miracle of art. A higher merit consists in the admirable painting of the heads, especially that of the old woman, which is full of life." "A wicker market-basket is a common homely thing, but look at its presentment here—every polished, well-used twig of it following the true undulations of form and colour, light and shade, through the marvellous patience and skill of the vanished Dutchman—and see if it does not produce an exquisite poetic tremor by the thoughts it evolves. There is a dead image of the barnyard cock which Mr. Darwin may compare with the barndoor fowl of to-day as accurately as if it were photographed. His once fiery eye is glazed and sightless as a dim pearl, his neck feathers ruffled but no longer in anger or pride; his pale, amber-coloured legs helplessly and ingloriously reversed, their impatient and masterful scratching among his dames in the stubble over for ever; the glossy purples, greens, and blacks of his tail-feathers rising sharp and delicate out of the speckled hazes of colour which it required days and days to lay side by side among the crushed and crowding plumes. The cock, the horologe of Thorpe's light, crows no more to the answering hill-farms. He is destined for the spit of the housewife who holds up the hare. But his fate was glorious, for by what tens of thousands since the year 1650 or thereabouts have his perfections been admired and praised. It was worth living for, and, to chanticleer, worth dying for, to become the occasion of such a miracle of art" (Smetham's Literary Works, p. 240).