Chapter XI
Amsterdam's Pictures
Dutch art in the palmy days--The Renaissance--A miracle--What
Holland did for painting--The "Night Watch"--Rembrandt's
isolation--Captain Franz Banning Cocq--Elizabeth Bas--The
Staalmeesters--If one might choose one picture--Vermeer
of Delft again--Whistler--"Paternal Advice"--Terburg--The
romantic Frenchmen again--The Dutch painter's ideal--The two
Maris--Old Dutch rooms--The Six Collection--"Six's Bridge"
and the wager--The Fodor Museum.
The superlative excellence of Dutch painting in the seventeenth
century has never been explained, and probably never will be. The
ordinary story is that on settling down to a period of independence and
comparative peace and prosperity after the cessation of the Spanish
war, the Dutch people called for good art, and good art came. But
that is too simple. That a poet, a statesman or a novelist should be
produced in response to a national desire is not inconceivable; for
poets, statesmen and novelists find their material in the air, as we
say, in the ideas of the moment. They are for the most part products
of their time. But the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century
were expressing no real idea. Nor, even supposing they had done so,
is it to be understood how the demand for them should yield such a
supply of unsurpassed technical power: how a perfectly disciplined
hand should be instantly at the public service.
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