By the fireplace to the left a lady is seated. She is playing cards with a gentleman, and shows her hand to a cavalier who stands beside her. In the background stand two lovers, and a boy is entering the room, a richly appointed room, hung with gilt leather.
Signed on the base of one of the columns supporting the mantelpiece:—“p. d. hooch.”
Painted in oil on canvas.
2 ft. 2½ in. × 2 ft. 6½ in. (0·67 × 0·77.)
GABRIEL METSU
A high place among the painters of “Conversation-pieces” must be accorded to Gabriel Metsu (1630?–1667), a shortlived artist who was born at Leyden and learnt the first principles of his art from Dou. As early as 1644 he seems to have earned some reputation as a painter, his signature appearing on his Court Physician in that year. He came under the influence of Rembrandt, and in later life practised as a painter at Amsterdam, where he died.
Metsu, whose work is at first sight not easily distinguishable from Terborch’s, acquired a facility in the control of the expression and the ever-varying gesture of the hands in his pictures, that was denied to many of his contemporaries. Instances of this are the figure of the Christ writing a long Latin inscription on the ground in the Woman taken in Adultery (No. 2457), the ease with which the young lady in a white satin dress runs her fingers over the keys of the spinet in the Music Lesson (No. 2460), and the treatment of the Dutch Lady (No. 2462), who holds a jug in her right hand. The last-named panel is evidently the companion to the very thinly painted Dutch Cook peeling Apples (No. 2463), which is signed “g. metsu.” Perhaps his best outdoor scene of humble life is the Vegetable Market at Amsterdam (No. 2458), although his handling of the trees suggests that his forte was the Conversation-piece of Dutch tradition, and that he would not have risen to high rank as a landscape painter. The placing of the signature on a letter, which in this instance lies on the ground, is a favourite device with Metsu. He has derived much pleasure from the treatment of the textures of the tablecloth, the curtain, and the chair in the Officer visiting a Lady (No. 2459). The Alchemist (No. 2461) may be the companion picture to the Sportsman in the Gallery at The Hague. Much speculative criticism has been indulged in by critics as to whether the so-called Portrait of Admiral Cornelis Tromp (No. 2464) represents that admiral, and some doubt has also been cast on its attribution to Metsu.
LANDSCAPE PAINTERS
The naturalistic treatment of the landscape background in the religious pictures of Jan van Eyck and his successors, Memlinc, Bouts, Hugo van der Goes, and other painters in the Netherlands, in time brought about the promotion of landscape painting to an independent art. Among the earlier Dutch artists who approached the study of Nature were Arent Arentzen (1586?–1635?), as we see from his Landscape with a Fisherman (No. 2300a), and Roeland Roghman, who was born a year later than Jan van Goyen, and lived as late as 1685. He painted the Landscape (No. 2555b), which was formerly in the Paul Mantz collection. Indeed, several Dutchmen of the period sought to commit to panel views of nature, as in the case of Pieter de Bloot (1600–1652), who gives us a Landscape with a River (No. 2327b).
The romantic feeling which so often pervades the background of Rembrandt’s paintings, and is so apparent in such etchings as the Three Trees, can only be touched on here. This new tendency is best exemplified in the works of Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), who may be regarded as the founder of a self-centred school of landscape painting in Holland; but it was his ever handy sketch-book that enabled him to outstrip his rivals in this branch of Dutch art. He is seen to great advantage in his very fine Banks of a Dutch River (No. 2375), his superb River View with eight Men in a Boat (No. 2378), a signed and dated work of 1649, a large light-brown-toned River in Holland (No. 2377), a good Banks of a Canal (No. 2379), as well as a Dutch Canal (No. 2376) and a Dutch River (No. 2377).