Fig. 2.—Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3.
other circumstances about them, and that is an advantage. They may have had theories about painting, but fortunately we do not know them, except by inference from their practice.
And if seventeenth-century Holland has only expressed herself in painting, she has known how to express herself with marvellous fulness. Never before, and never perhaps since, has pictorial art been so universally the speech of a nation; never has it been more various and abundant. Instead of being the handmaid of religion or the adornment of a court, it is now for the first time itself: full-blooded, active, exuberant, scorning nothing, attempting everything. Modern with all the added richness that the modern spirit allows in life and art, it reflects the just pride and joy of a great nation arrived, through incredible struggle and privation, at victory and peace.
Yet more wonderful even than this abundance is the fine tact, the instinctive judgment, which guided such profuse creation.
For in all the great painters of Holland there is the same sure choice of subjects proper to painting, the same sure avoidance of what does not lend itself so much to painting as to some other expression of art. Religious pictures in the old sense, pictures intended for churches, were forbidden by the Protestant spirit. No court existed to patronise the painters. Yet they seemed unconscious of being cut off from any province. In the life around them they found overflowing material, and their choice of subject was invariably simple, never a complex product like the engravings of Dürer, half literary in their interest; never anecdotic or moral. An excellent tradition was begun, which lasted through the century.
Nor was this tradition due to the creative impulse of one man. There was nothing in Holland parallel to the renovation, the re-creation rather, of Flemish art by Rubens. Rembrandt came near the beginning, but he did not start the period. One cannot say precisely how this great tradition began; it seems as if the flowering time came all at once throughout the country, with the mysterious suddenness of spring. Till the seventeenth century, it was Italy from which Dutch artists took their inspiration, but henceforward it is a native impulse. Only men of lesser importance went to paint at Rome, and even then they took there more than they brought away.
III
Considered as etchers, the Dutch masters range themselves somewhat differently.
Only a few, seemingly, realised the specific capacities and limitations of etching: the rest regarded it merely as a method of reproducing their drawings, as an easier kind of engraving. This was probably the conception of those who first applied acid to metal for the purpose of reproducing designs, at the beginning of the sixteenth century: the art had been formerly employed only in the damascening of swords or armour. Albert Dürer is an exception; for, though he did not develop the method far, he saw that it required a different kind of handling from that suitable for the burin; and in his few etched plates the work is freer and more open than that of his line-engravings.