The making of great Italian art was a gradual
process: the Dutch masters sprang forth fully armed at the first
word of command. In the preceding generation the Rembrandts had been
millers; the Steens brewers; the Dous glaziers; and so forth. But
the demand for pictures having sounded, their sons were prepared to
be painters of the first magnitude. Why try to explain this amazing
event? Let there rather be miracles.
I have said that the great Dutch painters expressed no idea; and yet
this is not perfectly true. They expressed no constructive idea, in
the way that a poet or statesman does; but all had this in common,
that they were informed by the desire to represent things--intimate
and local things--as they are. The great Italians had gone to religion
and mythology for their subjects: nearer at hand, in Antwerp, Rubens
was pursuing, according to his lights, the same tradition. The great
Dutchmen were the first painters to bend their genius exclusively
to the honour of their own country, its worthies, its excesses, its
domestic virtues, its trivial dailiness. Hals and Rembrandt lavished
their power on Dutch arquebusiers and governors of hospitals, Dutch
burgomasters and physicians; Ostade and Brouwer saw no indignity in
painting Dutch sots as well as Dutch sots could be painted; De Hooch
introduced miracles of sunlight into Dutch cottages; Maes painted
old Dutch housewives, and Metsu young Dutch housewives, to the life;
Vermeer and Terburg immortalised Dutch ladies at their spinets; Albert
Cuyp toiled to suffuse Dutch meadows and Dutch cows with a golden
glow; Jan Steen glorified the humblest Dutch family scenes; Gerard
Dou spent whole weeks upon the fingers of a common Dutch hand.
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