An official and civic art existed only in the form of the collec tive portrait which displayed, round a banquet or council table, a group of town magistrates, professors, syndics of a corporation or officers of a company of volunteers. The Dutch painters immediately excelled in this untried genre. Hals was the first to interpret it ; then came the great Rembrandt, and Van der Helst (1613-1670) followed worthily in the footsteps of these two leaders. Individual portraiture claimed also skilled craftsmen, Mierevelt, Moreelse, Ravesteyn, Thomas de Keyser and Bol.
Within the limits of a purely prosaic conception the Dutch were inventors, and at once they showed a perfection of tech nique which has perhaps never been surpassed nor even equalled. It is possible that the first idea of the Card players, the Drinkers, the Concerts, the Merrymakers, which were multiplied to infinity during more than two centuries, derived from Caravaggio. Indeed the connecting link between Holland and Italy is visible in the person of Gerard Van Honthorst (1590-1656), who lived for long in Rome where he was called Gherardo della Notte, and who took back to his country two or three themes borrowed from his master Caravaggio, and a taste for interior lighting effects, achieved either by the skilful use of chiaroscuro or by a point of artificial light. But the Dutch painters soon abandoned what remained of the decorative and fanciful intentions of the Ital ianized Honthorst. They desired no other Muse than Truth. To give a faithful and recognisable image of all which could be seen in their own and their neighbour's houses, in the cultivation of the fields, by the side of and on the sea which was everywhere so close to them, which was perhaps the principal field of activity of this maritime people—such was the ideal of these painters, and it was more exactly in harmony with their national spirit and temperament than any other example which we can quote. From thence came a tranquil certitude which is one of the distinguish ing characteristics of Dutch art.
In everything the Dutch were innovators. Landscape had been brought to a high degree of poetry and truth from the time when the French miniaturists illustrated the Tres Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry: and later when the Venetians, in works of in finitely prolonged and magnificent resonances, made of it an ample melody uniting man to nature. And at the same time when Ruysdael, Van Goyen, the Van de Veldes, Hobbema, Wynants, Paul Potter, Aelbert Cuyp and Van der Heyden flourished, Pous sin, assuming for his part the Venetian ideal, gave it a more universal sovereignty in adding to it his note of noble and high intellectuality. It remained for the Dutch to create for the first
time masterpieces which were neither picturesque nor orna mental, and to have no apparent ambition beyond the exact ren dering of things hitherto deemed devoid of interest.
Their innovations were hardly less great in genre pictures as they conceived them, though the origins of this style can be traced to the greatest of Flemish primitives, Van Eyck, when he painted Arnolfini and his Wife in the midst of the familiar setting of their daily life. The Dutch painters of rich or poor interiors, of caba rets, artists' studios, fashionable parties in marble-paved halls hung with gilded velvet, gallant conversations over a table bearing wine and a long-stemmed glass, seem once again wholly pre occupied with a care for exactitude. But they compel our admira tion and even our sympathy by the refinement of their colour, the exactness of the lighting, a touch of incredible sureness, at once precise and soft, and also because we feel in the best of them a secret and intimate pleasure in the subjects they have chosen, of which their extraordinary virtuosity is only an instru ment. That is why Holland, when she quotes Adriaen Van Ostade, Terborch, Jan Steen and Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Vermeer of Delft, knows that these are painters who are unlike any elsewhere, and that, for purely pictorial qualities, the school which they formed can challenge comparison with the most illustrious. The general character of this school seems to be, besides justness of observation and perfection of rendering, a placidity which favours the exercise of these two gifts.
But here we may bethink ourselves of the fact that generalisa tions and classifications are always rather vain. The history of art cannot do without them : they are the necessary frames; but to compel into them the reality, which is always complex and full of contradictions, artifice is now and then necessary. No period in the history of art more suitably illustrates these reflec tions. The essential features which we have believed ourselves able to attribute to the whole of Dutch painting do indeed apply to the majority of the painters of that school. But others escape our definition, and these happen to be the best, amongst them that summit of humanity, Rembrandt, who surpasses all the rest. We should have no reason to change the idea accepted generally and with reason of the Dutch school if Rembrandt had not existed, and if Hals, Steen and Vermeer had equally been excluded. But how much in that case would the glory of Holland have been dimmed. For, in our judgment, Hals, Steen and Vermeer were, with Rembrandt, the true original geniuses of Holland; but, in a School genius is an accident, and a danger to its evolution.