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HISTORICAL SKETCH OF ART
trayal of distinguished personages there are few who are his peers.
His portraits are not only instinct with life: they fascinate by their
dignity of conception and grace of delineation, which, without
sacrifice of truthfulness, impart a certain stateliness as well as beauty
to the individual represented. In what a rare degree Van Dyck
possessed this faculty is best seen in his admirable etchings which
are still preserved, and in which he presents us with an invaluable
gallery of portraits illustrative of the 17th century.
Of the remaining pupils of Rubens few acquired distinction ;
but, owing to the copiousness of their works, they are by no means
unimportant. They occupy in the department of religious art the entire
century. From Diepenbeeck, Erasmus Quellin, Cornelis Schut, and
Jan van den Hoecke, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) may be distin-
guished by a marked individuality. No study in Italy had estranged
his thoughts from his native art. His profession of the reformed
faith made him unwilling to contribute to the exaltation of the
Church’s ideal, so he applied himself to depicting scenes from
domestic life and the unrestrained mirth of popular festivities, and
thus prepared the way for the formation of that school of genre
painting, in which the art of the Netherlands subsequently acquired
its chief renown. His often-repeated pictures of the crazy house-
concert (‘as the old ones sang, so will the youngsters twitter’), for
example, are well known. Jordaens’s humour is unsophisticated ;
his figures are as devoid of grace as they well can be; but so sur-
passing is the quality of colour in his pictures that one must condone
the vein of almost coarse vulgarity which runs through very many
of them. Pictures by him at the Bosch, near The Hague, which cel-
ebrate the deeds of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, show what he
could accomplish as an historical painter, and belong to the very
best contributions of the entire school.
Even upon David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), the greatest
genre painter to whom the southern Netherlands have given birth,
Rubens exercised an enduring influence. The fairs and rustic scenes
which he delighted in depicting fascinate not only by the spirit of
conviviality which animates them, but bear witness to a searching
observation of nature; and the subtlety of colouring serves of itself to
invest the scenes depicted with a true poetic charm. In gradation
of tone, in wondrous harmony of colour, in artistic combination, he
retains an undisputed supremacy. It is not less wonderful how he can
by the most delicate modifications so manipulate a dominant tone of
colour as to make it effective, and how he can at his pleasure
either assert or dispense with the most marked contrasts. The
pictures painted between 1640 and 1650, where the peculiar silvery
tone first appears, are those which afford the best insight into this
painter's method and style. His works are unfortunately widely
seattered, and are rarely to be met with in his native country. |
