The names from our list that the School of Delft includes are those of Mierevelt, Fabritius, Van Aelst, Palamedesz, De Hooch, and, most distinguished of all, Vermeer. Mierevelt, as a portrait-painter, found better opportunities for his art at the seat of government, and became a member of the Guild of Painters of The Hague. Carel Fabritius was early attracted to Amsterdam by the fame of Rembrandt, and only returned to work in Delft during the last four years of his short life of thirty-four years. Van Aelst, also, the still-life painter, after oscillating between Delft and Florence, finally settled in Amsterdam. So did the portraitist and painter of fashionable genre, Palamedesz. He derived help at first from Mierevelt and was influenced by Hals, and in 1621 his name appears as a member of the guild in Delft, but he spent the latter part of his life in Amsterdam. This city also absorbed De Hooch, who, before he finally settled there, had been influenced by Rembrandt. In fact, his participation in the School of Delft was limited to the two years in which he was a fellow-member of the guild with Jan Vermeer. They were of the same age, but Vermeer was his senior in the guild by two years, and it is scarcely to be questioned that the influence of his refined feeling and exquisite craftsmanship must have affected De Hooch considerably. In contrast to the flux of change that characterized the lives of the other members of the Delft School is the consistency of Vermeer’s attachment to the city of his birth. We shall discuss his art later. Here it is enough to recall that his only teacher was Carel Fabritius; but that his art, as it developed, was individually his own, conspicuously unique, and so admirable that when one speaks of the Delft School it is to think almost exclusively of its greatest artist, Jan Vermeer of Delft.
In connection with The Hague it is more correct to speak of a group than of a school. Among the artists in our list the only one born actually in this city was Ravesteyn, although it is true that Schalcken’s native place was a village in the vicinity. But the same reason that made the former constant to the seat of government attracted thither other artists. The Hague was also a center of society and fashion. Mierevelt found there a market for his portraits, Van Goyen for his landscapes, and Netscher, Schalcken, and De Hooch for genre pictures. The last named spent some years there, but retired to Amsterdam. The rest continued working at The Hague until their deaths. Among them Van Goyen is easily the most distinguished. The rest are rather symptomatic of the atmosphere of their surroundings. The portraits by Mierevelt and Ravesteyn have the perfunctoriness of official and society products, eminently dignified and comme il faut, irresistibly uninteresting, while the genre of Netscher and Schalcken is petty and frivolous by comparison with that of the older and greater painters, and Netscher’s portraits are frequently insipid as to character and over-occupied with the niceties of millinery.
Of Dordrecht or Dort our list contains only one name, that of Aelbert Cuyp, whose versatile genius embraced portraiture, landscape and animal painting, genre, still-life, church interiors, and marines. We may add one other name, that of Hoogstraten, not, however, so much on account of his art as because he was the George Vasari of his day, the historian and story-monger of the painters of Holland in the seventeenth century.
It remains to summarize the School of Amsterdam. As may have been gathered from the foregoing, it was rather an aggregate of artists, drawn thither by two causes: the wealth of the commercial capital and the fame and influence of Rembrandt. The latter, as we have seen, moved finally from his native city, Leyden, to Amsterdam in 1631, when he was in his twenty-fifth year. Two years later he painted The Lesson in Anatomy, and pupils began to flock to him; among the most notable being Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Eeckhout, Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Fabritius, and De Hooch. On the other hand, among those whom the importance of the city attracted were several from the neighboring School of Haarlem; the portrait-painter Van der Helst, for example, and the landscape-painters Berchem, Jan Wynants, Everdingen, and Jacob Ruisdael; while from Utrecht came the still-life painters Hondecoeter and Weenix, and from Delft Van Aelst.
On the other hand, the native-born artists of Amsterdam included that early genre painter Pieter Aertz; the portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser; and the landscapists, Hercules Seghers, Philips Koninck, Adriaen van de Velde, Aert van der Neer, and Hobbema. But the distinctively local characteristic of the school, situated as it was in this great emporium of foreign commerce, is its group of marine-painters; among whom we may mention Simon de Vlieger, Bakhuysen, and the elder and the younger Willem van de Velde. Their pictures are particularly interesting for the faithful and spirited representation of shipping: fishing craft, coasting vessels, East-Indiamen in harbor, and men-of-war in action. The pictures of these last are the most important of the occasional indications to be found in Dutch painting that throughout this period of productivity in the arts of peace the country was involved in war. Not that the soldier is absent from pictures. On the contrary, he figures frequently, but usually in the intervals of fighting, while enjoying the pleasures of a furlough; though occasionally we come upon some positive hint of the prevailing disturbance, as in a scene of bivouac, or of peasants and soldiery fighting, or of soldiery attacking a traveling-coach or party of hunters. Generally, however, the subjects of the Holland pictures are rather suggestive of a profound tranquillity.
As a matter of fact, by the time that painting reached its maturity, Holland had ceased to be the battle-ground. She had become rather a focus point of intrigue, involved in distant complications with France, Germany, and England. There are in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam two pictures which hint at this: The Fishers for Souls, by Adriaen van de Venne, and The Enraged Swan, by Jan Asselyn.
The former, painted in 1611 during the truce, represents a river dotted with boats, the occupants of which
LANDSCAPE WITH OAK JAN VAN GOYEN