still, heavy impasto and the clearness of the color make me think it is one of the first waterfalls that Ruisdael painted. We never, or hardly ever, find pictures of the painter's earliest period (covering the years 1646 to 1655) in the Dutch galleries.
"A fine, strong, cleverly painted little picture of Ruisdael's, painted in 1653, was sent to the Amsterdam Gallery with the Dupper Collection. Another very clear, lovely, and beautifully worked study of the Dunes, with a Grove, similar to the picture in the Louvre, is owned by Madame van Vollenhoven in Amsterdam. A somewhat dark but strong and spirited study, the Hut in the Dunes, also of his early period, was lately acquired by the Haarlem Gallery, which hitherto had owned nothing of Ruisdael's. These early pictures, of which, for instance, the Leipzig Exhibition in the Autumn of 1889 was able to show very important examples (the figures are often supplied by Berchem), are very highly esteemed by connoisseurs."
Love of Nature seen in his Earlier Works.—"In these works we see the youthful painter turning exclusively to Nature: a clump of bushes on a dune; a glimpse of the 'Haarlemer Hout'; a grove of trees on the shore, he paints exactly as he saw them. But how he saw them! In these early pictures his color is brighter, his manner of painting thicker and stronger than in his later works. Instead of the beautiful clouds for which Ruisdael was so famous, we often see the sky still painted in a more antique manner, with striped clouds in the style of his uncle Salomon.
His Growth toward Composition.—"Gradually his subjects become more 'composed,' but in the best sense of the word. Only occasionally does he wander away, as, for instance, in the Dresden Jewish Cemetery, which lay in the neighborhood of Amsterdam, but which he set in a fanciful landscape unknown to himself. He had quite another intention in the picture before us: the View of Haarlem from Overveen, with its bleaching-green in the foreground. Above it a beautifully clouded sky with the floating clouds casting their shadows here and there over the broad landscape. Amsterdam owns a similar picture; the Berlin Gallery another; the Ritter de Steurs in Maestricht, a fourth; and there are still others in private collections in England and Paris. Each of these pictures has a new excellence—Nature glorified through an artistic eye and immortalized with the practised hand of an artist. What mastery there is in the representation of the broad, broad space!"
His Carefulness of Detail.—"Nevertheless Ruisdael does not neglect the detail of his landscapes. We need only notice in him the tree-characteristics—how carefully he handles every kind of foliage in accordance with the forms of its leaves and branches; but with him the whole is never subordinated to the details. When he paints the sea—he does not paint it often—he does it better and more artistically than any other painter. What a mighty effect his great marine in Berlin produces! The real air from the sea seems to blow upon us. Views of the seashore by him are even rarer. The Hague picture shows us a beautiful view of a sea and sky happily illuminated without the dark, melancholy tone which so often dwells in his works, and which we would consider as a reflection of his own sad moods. Who can it be that painted the fine figures in this picture? Perhaps it was Eglon van der Neer."
Vermeer's View of Delft.—Vermeer of Delft (1632–75) was a pupil of Karel Fabricius (whom we shall meet in the Rijks), who was a pupil of Rembrandt. One of the most important and beautiful pictures in The Hague Gallery is Vermeer's View of Delft. On an appreciative eye and receptive mood it leaves a tenacious impression which will never be forgotten. Until about thirty years ago, Vermeer of Delft was hardly thought of, although in his own day his pictures were highly prized and sought after, and later his work received great praise from Sir Joshua Reynolds. It was the French critic Burger (Thoré), who rehabilitated this great artist.
Bredius exclaims:
"How this picture shines out from the others around it like a stream of light out of dark clouds!
"All the light which the artist saw fall upon his town, he has succeeded in concentrating at once in this picture, the broad, masterful, sure painting, the luminous colors, the clear sky which arches over the town, all excite our highest admiration."
A drawing said to be a sketch for this picture is in the Stadel Institute of Frankfort. The picture which brought 200 florins in 1698 was sold for 2,900 gulden at the Stinstra sale in 1822. (See Frontispiece.)
A Painter of Light and Sun.—The beautiful picture of Diana and her Nymphs, which was bought as a Maes in Paris in 1876 for 4,725 gulden, is now attributed by some people to this master, and by others to Vermeer of Utrecht.
Lemke says:
"Vermeer was a painter of the light and sun school; and this was his chief study—to catch and hold fast the moment. What Frans Hals did for physiognomy, grasping the flying moment in an incomparable manner with winks, smiles, leers, gesticulations, etc., and fixing it in paint, that Vermeer, as a landscape-painter, delighted to do for the sunshine. He shows its rays streaming into a room or the play of light and shadow when the light with the moving air falls through heavy foliage against a bright house and paints it with rays of light and shade. Unlike the moment of Rembrandt and Ruisdael, which is fixed for all eternity, with Vermeer the moment vibrates in the light. The shadows lose their sharp outlines, and the fine brush-work suggests the living change and play of the light. Rembrandt paints light in darkness and lets it glow in the dark, or streaming into it, or in a broad flood of brilliance; but Vermeer prefers to set darkness or twilight against the light. For interiors, Vermeer has another palette and mode of painting than for the outdoor pictures. When he selects the moment for this, where the scene consists of trees, houses, water, etc., it would seem that the artist wanted to make us blink, as if we were looking at the sun."
Vermeer's Portrait of a Girl.—Vermeer did not confine himself to landscape. In 1903, The Hague Gallery acquired by bequest a remarkable portrait by this master, the portrait of a girl wearing a buff coat, a blue and cream turban, and magnificent pearl earrings, on which are "concentrated," says the enthusiastic Frank Rinder,
"those dreams of gray, which are Vermeer's. Although in this portrait, with its liquid spots of light, we at once apprehend the presence of Vermeer, with his nostalgia for the interpretation of a beauty visioned inwardly rather than seen with the eye, the picture passed through the auction rooms at The Hague in 1878, fetching only 230 florins. It was bequeathed in 1903 to the Mauritshuis by M. des Tombes."
"In his laying on of paint he was distinguished," says Frank Rinder, "even among his technically well-equipped contemporaries; by virtue of his isolated vision, he is of all the Little Dutchmen the one inimitable weaver of spells."
Jan Wijnants's Love for the Dunes.—Jan Wijnants (1615–80) has two pictures in the Mauritshuis, Clearing in the Forest (1659) and Road through the Dunes (1675). Wijnants, the Haarlemite, loved his dunes, and when he lived for years in Amsterdam (probably he died there), he painted them even more frequently—every little hill, with its sandy rises and with little stunted trees, and those roads marked with deep wagon-ruts, almost always bright and illumined with warm sunshine. How had he observed them? How did he always know how to discover the paintable spot? Frankly, his fancy sometimes made the hills somewhat higher than we really find them at Haarlem; indeed, sometimes, he created landscapes with so poetic a flight, or we might say he sometimes composed them to such an extent that in truth we might seek them in vain in Holland; as, for instance, the great pictures in the Munich museum. We are, therefore, forced to conclude that he had seen Claude Lorraine's pictures, and wanted to paint somewhat in the same spirit. In Haarlem he was painted by Wouwermans, and as a fine little cavalier.
His Pictures enlivened by other Artists.—When he settled down in Amsterdam in 1660, the always ready Adriaen van de Velde often assisted him by enlivening his landscapes with charming little figures. He had no idea that at present a Wijnants would be so much more highly valued on account of his little figures than it would be without them. Lingelbach undertook this work later, straining after Van de Velde but not reaching him. In his early pictures, Wijnants is somewhat labored; but by and by he acquires that sureness of painting which must have become ever easier to him because he almost always painted the same subjects and the same style of landscape. In his last pictures he was quite broad and decorative in style, but less convincing.