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HISTORICAL SKETCH OF ART
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 for-
mation 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. Jor-
daens’s humour is unsophisticated ; his figures are as devoid of grace,
as they well can be; but so surpassing 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 celebrate 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. —
Among the less-known though by no means unimportant pupils
of Rubens is Jan van den Hoecke (1598-1651), who in delineat-
ing scenes of quiet feeling runs his master very hard and, indeed,
is not unfrequently mistaken for him.
Even upon Davin Tunrers (1610-1685), 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 con-
viviality which animates them, but bear witness to a searching ob-
servation of nature; and the subtlety of colouring serves of itself to
inyest 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 of his fortieth year, 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 scattered,
and are rarely to be met with in his native country.
The same may be said of the Majority of genre painters of the
southern Netherlands. The neighbourhood of France lured away, if
not the painters themselves, certainly many of their works; nor were
either wealth or love of art at this time sufficiently diffused in Bel-
gium to allow of the creations of native ;
land. In this respect
art being retained in the
painting was more advantageously circum-
stanced in Holland. There it was unmistakably associated with the
people, and to this day indeed is identified with their habits and
predilections. The greater number as well as the best of its pro-
ductions are still retained in Holland, coveted though they be by
the lovers of art from every quarter, who at last have learned to
estimate them at their true value. |