Melchior Hondecoeter (1636–1695), the painter of the farmyard, gives unmistakable proof of his power in his large signed Eagle swooping down on a Farmyard (No. 2405), and two rather smaller pictures (Nos. 2406–7).
Jan Weenix (1640–1719), who usually concerns himself with dead game and birds, is working on the usual lines in three (Nos. 2610, 2611, and 2612a) of his four pictures in the great French museum; the other represents A Seaport (No. 2612). He was the fellow-pupil of Hondecoeter in the studio of his father, Jan Baptist Weenix (1621–1660), who studied for a time under the early Dutch master, Abraham Blomaert, and worked in Italy for four years. For that reason the latter has adopted an Italian mode of signing his only picture (No. 2609) in the Louvre.
THE DECLINE
Although Gerard Honthorst (“Gerard of the Night”) was born as early as 1590, and was a pupil of Blomaert, he may he relegated to the period of decline. Almost invariably he resorted to the trick of lighting the figures in his pictures, whether he was painting religious subjects, portraits, or conversation-pieces, with a candlelight effect. This habit he had acquired in Italy by studying the style of Caravaggio. Of his five pictures here, the best is perhaps the Portrait of Charles Louis, Duke of Bavaria (No. 2410), of 1640. His Concert (No. 2409), painted sixteen years earlier, is an ill-balanced and overloaded composition.
Such artists as Abraham Hondius, who paints a Man Selling Pigeons (No. 2407a); Karel de Moor, who was a pupil of G. Dou, and gives us an insignificant Dutch Family (No. 2477); Eglon van der Neer, whose name is signed on a small panel, A Man Selling Pigeons (No. 2485); Egbert van Heemskerck, whose Interior (No. 2393) is in the La Caze collection; Jan Verkolie, whose Interior (No. 2602) has been engraved; H. van Limborch, whose Pleasures of the Golden Age (No. 2446) was in the collection of Louis xvi.; Louis de Moni, the painter of a Family Scene (No. 2476); and Willem van Mieris, a replica of whose Soap Bubbles (No. 2473) is at The Hague,—all these mediocre painters are the despair of the critic, and afford merely momentary entertainment for the curious.
It is apparent that by this period the art of Holland was marked by mechanical inventions, the surface of these eighteenth-century paintings being highly fused and metallic in appearance. The four panels of Adriaen van der Werff (1659–1722), which include an unpleasant Magdalene in the Desert (No. 2617) and a repulsive Dancing Nymph (No. 2619), are characteristic examples of his monotonous art. The Disembarkation of Cleopatra (No. 2441) and the Hercules between Vice and Virtue (No. 2443) of Gerard de Lairesse (1640–1711), have the enamel-like smoothness and meaningless expression of academic art, although they have their usefulness as museum pieces.
It is a remarkable fact that the Louvre does not contain a single example of the revival of art in Holland in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
THE EARLY FRENCH SCHOOL
THE early phases of the French school of painting—perhaps it would be more correct to say of painting in France—present one of the most interesting problems to the student of art history. It was not really until the great Exhibition of French Primitives held in Paris in 1904 that any serious attempts were made to construct a history of Early French painting; but the learned arguments that have been brought to bear upon the tangled question have so far failed to establish the existence of an important autochthonous school in the fifteenth century. It is true that contemporary records mention the names of a few painters who seem to have enjoyed great repute at the Courts at which they were employed, but it has been impossible to connect any notable extant pictures with their names; whilst those other “French” painters who have left tangible proofs of their activity are almost without exception of Flemish birth and training. Indeed, most of these early pictures show no characteristics that may be described as French, save the types of the faces, which would naturally be taken from the country where the artists worked.