A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

871. BATHING AT LOW WATER.

W. van de Velde (Dutch: 1633-1707). See 149.

Incidentally a good study in the "philosophy of clothes." The painter hits off with much humour the essential difference between those who regard man as "by nature a naked animal"—seen in the naked bathers—and those who regard him as emphatically "a clothed animal"—seen in the prim old gentleman who gets himself carried on a man's back. Intermediate between these two classes are those who use clothes as a convenience, but are not entirely subject to them—such, for instance, is the comfortable old fellow smoking his pipe and wading home, not without obvious contempt for the old gentleman riding, as aforesaid, in ignominious slavery to his "Sunday best." Dated 1661; bought by Sir Robert Peel from the collection of the Duc de Berri.