But the researches of Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede de Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved much, disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To Dr. Bredius’ Meisterwerke der königlichen Gemälde-Galerie im Haag, and
Fig. 1.—The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29.
still more to his Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam, the writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to acknowledge.
But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or exchanged it only for a home a few miles off: Haarlem for Amsterdam, or Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or spent some years in France or Germany; but here the journey itself is sometimes only a matter of inference from the painter’s works. Birth, marriage, and death: there is little beyond these, and the dates of their principal productions, to record about many of these men.
Of the whole social life of the Holland of that day we know practically nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings not survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this country and its history! Most countries that have left us great art have left us also great literature, and each is the complement of the other. The marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recollections, gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is the same with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only material we have for investigating and realising that movement.
There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in seventeenth-century Holland; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland. Besides the names of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not in literature proper, not a single author’s name is familiar, nor any book eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is certainly not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch. Hence a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies so near us: a remoteness emphasised in England by the general ignorance of the language.
When one looks at a picture by Watteau, one seems to be joining in the conversation of those adorable ladies and their gallants; half instinctively, one seems to divine the witty phrase, the happy compliment that is on the speaker’s lips. But the conversations of Ter Borch and of Metsu are mute and distant. We hear the jovial laughter of Hals, but we cannot divine his jests and oaths. And Van de Velde’s merry skating companies, and Ostade’s tavern-haunting peasants, and the family groups in their gravely furnished rooms, rich with a sober opulence, of De Hooch or of Jan Steen, all, in spite of their human touches and their gaiety, affect us with a kind of haunting silence.
Mr. Pater, in one of the most finished and charming of his Imaginary Portraits, Sebastian van Storck, called up a picture of the social life of these times, very suggestive and delightful; but it was noteworthy, how much of it was merely a reconstruction, in words, of impressions from the contemporary pictures.
After all, however, our ignorance may not cost us much. We judge the painters as painters, and by their works; we are not distracted by