Of the four great painters of Holland, Vermeer (1632-1675) is the only one who corresponds to that idea we have of the national placidity. He is perhaps the heroic type of placidity, for in none of his pictures is there the least breath of disquietude. We have everywhere the impression that he laid the strokes on slowly, but with faultless certainty, and that he was as interested in a reflec tion in a bottle, or a curtain on a wall, in the stuff of a carpet or a dress, as in the faces of his men and women. No apparent virtuosity, no prowess of the brush, no superfluities here, but all leads to perfection and to the maximum of effect expressible by simple exactness : exactness of composition, of draughtsmanship, of colouration which in its clear and rather cold range of colours under a silvery light is a rare and original creation.
In the other three great painters of the Dutch school, however, it would be difficult to discover the least sign of placidity. In place of the calm attitudes which we see in the majority of the persons who people the pictures of Terborch, of Metsu and of their contemporaries, including Vermeer, everything in the work of Hals and Steen is full of movement and even of agitation. We can almost say that this is noisy painting. In looking at the Fête at an Inn and many other pictures by Steen (1626-1679) we can almost hear the heavy slaps on the back of the drunkards who hustle each other, their shoes beating the ground, the piercing cries and bellows resembling the cries of animals, and the no less sonorous bursts of laughter, whilst a musician blows violently into an instrument which seems dumb in the midst of that infernal charivari. He is very unequal, but when he is well in spired he lavishes on the scenes of debauchery which he loved to depict, the charms of a lively colouration and a sensitive touch.
Analogous remarks apply to Frans Hals (1580 or 1581-1666), save in what concerns his moral intentions, which were non existent. And these remarks are still more significant here since Hals devoted himself almost exclusively to a subject in which a taste for agitation had not much chance of spreading itself. When he painted the portrait of a rich and important personage how could he abandon himself to the impulses of his imagination? He was obliged to choose a pose conformable to the rank and pretensions of his sitter. It was the same in those assemblies of Archers of St. George or St. Adrien which amply made his repu tation. These officers in their fine uniforms, escorting the flag of their company, wished to bequeath to posterity a flattering likeness of themselves. Hals, with his vast facility, his unctuous
and flexible medium, his gift of touching in broadly a human being in his own likeness, at least outwardly, found the means of introducing movement everywhere into his faces, in the eyes which seek ours, in the mouths opened to speak, in the hands about to grasp an object and also into the sumptuous ampleness of the clothes he paints. He did not forget in his civic pictures the flags, which furnished him with picturesque backgrounds.
But he was still more at his ease perhaps with the popular models who inspired his imaginary figures. The Bohemian (Louvre), the Guitarist and the Hille Bobbe (Berlin).
As for Rembrandt (1606-1669), in spite of the secret and august peace which emanates from some of his religious com positions such as the Pilgrims at Emmaus and the Carpenter's Family, who could believe he possessed his share of Dutch placidity? He is completely mysterious in his spirit, his character, his life, his work and his method of painting. But what we can divine of his essential nature through his painting and the trivia] or tragic incidents of his unfortunate life, whose misfortunes even are not entirely explicable, conjures up a disturbance of ideas and feelings, contradictory impulses emerging from the depths of his being like the light and shade of his pictures. In spite of this nothing perhaps in the history of art gives a more profound impression of unity than his paintings, composed though they be of such different elements, loaded with such complex significations. In the same way his nature, full of contradictions, so rich, power ful and dominant and at the same time so feeble and helpless against the snares of life and the attacks of fate, seems yet to reveal a closer unity than we see in any other genius between his intelligence, his mind and his heart.
One feels as if his mind, that genial, great, free mind, bold and ignorant of all servitude, which led him to the loftiest meditations and the most sublime reveries, derived from the same source as his emotions. From this comes the tragic element which he imprinted on everything he painted, irrespective of subject; perhaps I ought to say on everything he painted on his inspired days. For there was inequality in his work for the reason that the sublime, which was the natural vocation of such a man, is not a daily thing.