David Teniers (1610-1690) developed entirely from Rubens's Kermesse pictures. From these this impeccable craftsman took his dancing and drinking peasants and his fine landscapes. Their joviality is rather conventional and the somewhat superficial observation turns quickly to caricature. But all the material part of his painting—the surety of his touch, the transparency of his medium, his brilliant and subtle colour—calls for unrestricted praise. He shows the greatest truth in his landscapes; his delicate greens and his silvery light sometimes give a real distinction to his pictures when he restrains his too facile humour.
Jan Siberechts (1627-1703) did not enjoy Teniers's vogue and good fortune. He had closer affinities with the French painters Le Nain and the Dutch painters of the same period than with the Flemings in the style of Teniers. His is an independent and an isolated figure.
Adriaen Brouwer (16o5 or 1606-1638) is still closer akin to the Dutch. Though he was born at Oudenarde the disordered episodes in this Bohemian's life show a secret attraction to Holland. He generally painted Tavern Interiors very similar to the favourite subjects of Teniers and his imitators, but he dis played in them a feeling for style and chiaroscuro which raises him well above the Flemish Little Masters. His little panels, whose subjects are so similar to many others of the time, charm and hold us by a fantastic imagination analogous to that of Bruegel the Elder and have a mysterious luminosity like that of Rembrandt. And this is no small praise. His rare landscapes are quite unlike those of the other Flemings.
At a period when there was not yet any very definite political division between the northern and southern parts of the Low Countries, there were few painters who could be regarded as specifically Dutch for, from the last third of the 15th century to the end of the 16th the Dutch could not be clearly distinguished from the Flemings. They treated the same religious subjects in very much the same manner. Gerard de Saint Jean (Geertgen tot Sint Jans, b. Leyden, c. 1465, d. Haarlem, whose generally accepted works are rare, is almost the only Primitive of remarkable talent among them. In the following generation. Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533) was a real innovator. His por traits are almost as incisive as those of the great Albrecht Diirer, his elder by twenty years. Indeed, without the Reformation, with its political and social as well as its religious consequences, the Dutch school would perhaps have continued to represent only a local variation of Flemish painting. But the Reformation won all the northern provinces of the Low Countries, which soon after called themselves the United Provinces, and Spain, after forty years of fierce warfare, was obliged to recognise the indepen dence of her former subjects.
The Reformation wanted churches devoid of images. The result was that there was no more religious painting. The current of naturalism which, since the Renaissance, had spread over the world, but which, in Catholic countries, conciliated itself with religious idealism and even placed itself voluntarily at the service of faith and dogma, reigned thenceforth in Holland without obstacle or compromise. Painters no longer had to submit to the commands of a king, a court or a church. They had only to please the republican bourgeoisie who, having once known how to fight to assure their independence, now enriched themselves and their country as merchants, bankers and ship brokers. They therefore painted pictures of dimensions and subjects suitable for the decoration of elegant but rather small houses. Portraits, landscapes, scenes of everyday life formed the themes of Dutch painting, thus foreshadowing the programme of the 19th century.