Dutch etchers of the seventeenth century

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THE

PORTFOLIO

MONOGRAPHS ON ARTISTIC SUBJECTS

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS

PUBLISHED MONTHLY

No. 2 1

September^ i^^$

Dutch Etchers

of the

Seventeenth Century

h

LAURENCE BINl'^ON

London: SEELEY AND CO., LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND

Sold by

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DUTCH ETCHERS

OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTURY

By

LAURENCE BINYON

n

Of the Department of Prints and Drawings^ British Museum

'LONDON
SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND

NEW YORK, MACMILLAN AND CO.

1895

e'>'^

^

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

PAGE

The Two Plough Horses. From the etching by Paul Potter. B. 1 2 . Frontispiece

The Wife Spinning. From the etching by A. Van Ostade. B. 31 . . . to face 28

Sea Piece. From the etching by L. Backhuysen. B. 4 . " „ „ 52

Ox and Sheep. From the etching by A. Van de Velde. B. 12 .... „ „ 74

ILLUSTRJTIONS IN THE TEXT

FIG.

1. The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29 8

2. Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3 10

3. Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade. British Museum ... 12

4. The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16 14

5. Man and Woman Conversing. By Ostade. B. 37 16

6. The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23 19

7. The Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44 22

8. Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B, 42 25

9. Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34 27

10. The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26 29

11. The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32 33

12. Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236 36

13. The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236 39

J 4. Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5 42

218393

4 :''-V'''^'''''''' 'i:js¥''Of ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. PAGF

15. Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75 45

16. Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B. 96 .15

17. The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5 aq

18. The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der Heyden 51

19. Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38 ca

20. Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh. B. 17 56

21. Landscape. By Both. B. 3 50-

22. A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51 61

23. Title Piece. By Berchem. B. 35 6-f

24. The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. i Se

25. Studies of a Dog. By Paul Potter. British Museum 69

26. The Cow. By Paul Potter. B. 3 yz

27. Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2 7j

28. Pigs. By K. Du Jardin. B. i 5 ^ 76

29. A Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16 7g

DUTCH ETCHERS

OF

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

INTRODUCTION

I

When, towards the close of the last century, Adam Bartsch began
that monument of his industry and patience, Le Peintre Graveur, he
devoted the first volumes of his twenty-one, not to the early engravers
of Germany or Italy, but to the Dutch etchers of the seventeenth
century. These were, in fact, the idols of the amateur of that day ;
and the indiscriminate praises which Bartsch lavishes on mediocre
artists, like Waterloo or Le Ducq, sufficiently show how uncontested
was their rank, and how fashionable their reputation.

Since then their vogue has considerably declined. Rembrandt, of
whom Bartsch treated in a separate work, is perhaps more admired, more
studied than he ever was. His etchings, reproduced in more or less
accurate forms, are not only familiar to artists and to students, but, to
a certain extent, reach even the general public. But Rembrandt's glory
has obscured the fame of his countrymen and contemporaries. Like
Shakespeare by the side of the lesser Elizabethans, he stands forth alone
and dazzling, and, though they enjoy a titular renown, they suffer a
comparative neglect.

6 D UrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

Yet, if Rembrandt is by far the greatest, others are great also. The
following pages are designed to serve as a sort of introduction to the
more notable among these etchers, in the same way that Mr. Hamerton's
monograph, the first of the present series of the Portfolio^ was intended
as an introduction to the etched work of Rembrandt.

And first, let us warn the reader who is familiar perhaps with
masterpieces like the Christ Healing the Sick and Rembrandt Drawing
at a Window^ Clement de Jonghe^ or The Three Trees^ but who is not
yet acquainted with the etchings of Ostade and Paul Potter, not to-
expect too much. Few of these lesser masters approach Rembrandt in
the specific qualities of the etcher : he is beyond them all in draughts-
manship, far beyond them in the intensity of his imagination. Yet
the best of them must rank high.

It is his immensity of range which marks off Rembrandt, more even
than his transcendent powers, from the rest of the Dutch etchers. Not
only did his production exceed by far the most prolific among them, but
he touched on almost every side of life. Yet he was not the school
in epitome, as a hasty enthusiasm might affirm. With all his breadth of
sympathy, his insatiable curiosity, he was not quite universal. The life
of animals, the growth and beauty of trees, the motion of the sea-waves —
none of these attracted Rembrandt deeply. And here, to supplement him^
we have the work of men like Potter, Backhuysen, Ruisdael, each
developing his peculiar vein.

All of these etchers whom we have to consider are, however, in-
dependent of Rembrandt and his influence. The Rembrandt school has
been expressly excluded from the present monograph. For, interesting
as some of those artists are, the first thought suggested by their work is-
that it recalls Rembrandt : the second thought, that it is not Rembrandt.
It is their relation to their master that interests us rather than any
intrinsic excellence of their own.

Only the independent masters, therefore, are exhibited here ; and
from these groups of etchers several of the greatest names in Dutch art
are absent. Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Vermeer of Delft, Hobbema, De-
Hooch — none of these, so far as we know, has left a single plate. Adriaen
Brouwer etched a few ; but they afford only the slightest indications
of his genius. And Albert Cuyp, who is the author of half a dozen

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 7

small etchings, showed in this line but little of his skill, and did not
apparently pursue it farther.

Yet the quantity of etched plates produced during this period in
Holland is immense, and most of the best work was published within the
same two or three decades. To take a single year, 1652, Potter's studies
of horses, a set of cattle by Berchem, several plates by Du Jardin, one
of the finest pieces of Ostade, La Fileuse^ appeared in it ; while the year
following saw the publication of Adriaen van de Velde's largest etching,
and Ruisdael's Three Oaks had been issued but three years earlier.
Rembrandt's Tobit Blind is dated 165 1, and the Three Crosses 1653.
This great fecundity has been necessarily a source of some embarrass-
ment to the writer ; and though a number of minor men have been
omitted, several etchers have been included, whom for the sake of
completeness it was necessary to give some account of, but whom it
is hard to make interesting, and about whom enthusiasm is impossible.

II

Treating, as it does, of so considerable a number of masters, the
present monograph aims at indicating, as far as space would allow, some-
thing of the relations between them, and at tracing the interdependence
of the various schools. To have taken the etchers separately and con-
sidered their work apart, would have meant the compilation of a tediously
crowded catalogue.

But when once the masters are approached from the historical side, it
is impossible to treat them simply as etchers. It is as painters that they
influenced and were influenced. Consequently some account has had to
be taken of them as painters. And since some who produced little, and
that little not very remarkable, in etching, are yet of great significance
as artists, it has been impossible to treat each man simply on his merits
as an etcher. Hence, for instance, much more space has been devoted to
Ruisdael than the quality or the amount of his work on copper strictly
merits.

The lives of most of these artists have, till recently, rested on a some-
what shifting foundation. Dates of birth and death have fluctuated in

« DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENrH CENTURT

various authors with easy rapidity. Of some, even now, nothing certain
is known.

But the researches of Dr. vander Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede
de Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved
much, disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To
Dr. Bredius' Meisterwerke der koniglichen Gemdlde-Galerie im Haag^ and

Fig. I. — The Spectacle Seller. By Osiade. B. 29.

Still more to his Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam., the
writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to
acknowledge.

But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the
lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were
in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or
exchanged it only for a home a few miles off : Haarlem for Amsterdam,

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 9

or Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or
spent some years in France or Germany ; but here the journey itself is
sometimes only a matter of inference from the painter's works. Birth,
marriage, and death : there is little beyond these, and the dates of their
principal productions, to record about many of these men.

Of the whole social lije_of the„JHolland of that day we know

practically nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings
not survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this
country and its history ! Most countries that have left us great art have
left us also great literature, and each is the complement of the other.
The marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their
incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recol-
lections, gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is
the same with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the
flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only
material we have for investigating and realising that movement.

There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in
seventeenth-century Holland ; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland.
Besides the names 'of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not
in literature proper, not a single author's name is familiar, nor any
book eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is
certainly not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch.
Hence a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies
so near us : a remoteness emphasised in England by the general
ignorance of the language.

When one looks at a picture by Watteau, one seems to be joining in
the conversation of those adorable ladies and their gallants ; half in-
stinctively, one seems to divine the witty phrase, the happy compliment
that is on the speaker's lips. But the conversations of Ter Borch and
of Metsu are mute and distant. We hear the jovial laughter of Hals,
but we cannot divine his jests and oaths. And Van de Velde's merry
skating companies, and Ostade's tavern-haunting peasants, and the family
groups in their gravely furnished rooms, rich with a sober opulence, of
De Hooch or of Jan Steen, all, in spite of their human touches and their
gaiety, affect us with a kind of haunting silence.

Mr. Pater, in one of the most finished and charming of his Imaginary

lo BUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

Portraits, Sebastian van Storck^ called up a picture of the social life of
these times, very suggestive and delightful ; but it was noteworthy, how
much of it was merely a reconstruction, in words, of impressions from
the contemporary pictures.

After all, however, our ignorance may not cost us much. We judge
the painters as painters, and by their works ; we are not distracted by

f

Yig, 2. — Peasant laitb a Pointed Cap. By Qstade. B. 3.

Other circumstances about them, and that is an advantage. They may
have had theories about painting, but fortunately we do not know them,
except by inference from their practice.

And if seventeenth-century Holland has only expressed herself in
painting, she has known how to express herself with marvellous fulness.
Never before, and never perhaps since, has pictorial art been so univer-
sally the speech of a nation ; never has it been more various and abundant.
Instead of being the handmaid of religion or the adornment of a court, it
is now for the first time itself : full-blooded, active, exuberant, scorning
nothing, attempting everything. Modern with all the added richness that
the modern spirit allows in life and art, it reflects the just pride and joy
of a great nation arrived, through incredible struggle and privation, at
victory and peace.

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 1 1

Yet more wonderful even than this abundance is the fine tact, the
instinctive judgment, which guided such profuse creation.

For in all the great painters of Holland there is the same sure choice
of subjects proper to painting, the same sure avoidance of what does not
lend itself so much to painting as to some other expression of art.
Religious pictures in the old sense, pictures intended for churches, were
forbidden by the Protestant spirit. No court existed to patronise the
painters. Yet they seemed unconscious of being cut off from any pro-
vince. In the life around them they found overflowing material, and
their choice of subject was invariably simple, never a .complex product
like the engravings of Diirer, half literary in their interest ; never
anecdotic or moral. An excellent tradition was begun, which lasted
through the century.

Nor was this tradition due to the creative impulse of one man. There
was nothing in Holland parallel to the renovation, the re-creation rather,
of Flemish art by Rubens. Rembrandt came near the beginning, but he
did not start the period. One cannot say precisely how this great tradition
began ; it seems as if the flowering time came all at once throughout the
country, with the mysterious suddenness of spring. Till the seventeenth
century, it was Italy from which Dutch artists took their inspiration, but
henceforward it is a native impulse. Only men of lesser importance went
to paint at Rome, and even then they took there more than they brought
away.

Ill

Considered as etchers, the Dutch masters range themselves somewhat
differently.

Only'a few, seemingly, realised the specific capacities and limitations
of etching : the rest regarded it merely as a method of reproducing their
drawings, as an easier kind of engraving. This was probably the con-
ception of those who first applied acid to metal for the purpose of
reproducing designs, at the beginning of the sixteenth century ; the
art had been formerly employed only in the damascening of swords or
armour. Albert Diirer is an exception ; for, though he did not develop
the method far, he saw that it required a different kind of handling from

12 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

that suitable for the bunn; and in his few etched plates the work is
freer and more open than that of his line-engravings.

The first men to use etching extensively were the Hopfer family of
Augsburg, who produced a great number of prints, chiefly decorative
designs.

It was employed in landscape by Altdorfer, Hirschvogel, Lautensack,
and others among the Little Masters. But these did little more than

Fig. 3. — Game of Backgammon. From a drawing by Ostade. British Museum.

carry on the Niirnberg tradition of engraving, through another medium.
They had little or no influence on the Dutchmen.

A new and powerful stimulus, however, was to be given to etching
with the beginning of the seventeenth century, by the prolific and famous
French artist, Jacques Callot. Born in 1592, Callot produced a great
mass of work before his death in 1638, and his etchings, by which alone
he is known, had a great popularity in his lifetime. In 1624 he was
invited to Brussels by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, and was com-

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 13

missioned by her to commemorate the Siege of Breda, an event which also
occasioned a masterpiece to Velasquez, the famous Lances of Madrid.
Callot undoubtedly brought the art into prominence and favour in the
Netherlands. Yet of direct influence over either Flemings or Dutchmen,
Callot had little or none. His spirit was too essentially French, his
method too individual, for him to be imitated by men of such different
race and temperament.

In 1627, however, Callot met, at Nancy, Claude Lorraine, and prob-
ably instructed him in etching. Claude left Nancy for Italy in the
same year, and in the following year etched his first plates. Between
1630 and 1663, he published a considerable number, among them some
of exquisite delicacy and beauty. And from these etchings many of the
Dutchmen derive their inspiration ; and Claude is said to have employed
men like Swaneveldt, Andries Both, and Jan Miel for inserting figures
in his landscapes.

Another foreign master who exercised a widespread influence over the
Dutch etchers was the German, Adam Elsheimer. Traces of this in-
fluence pervade the history of Dutch art , as Dr. Bode in his Stuaien zur
Geschichte der holl'dndischen Malerei has very fully demonstrated.

Elsheimer etched a few plates ; but, with all deference to Dr. Bode's
authority, we find it diflicult to attach to them the importance which he
gives them. Through the etchings and engravings made from his
pictures Elsheimer was undoubtedly a source of inspiration to the
Dutchmen, but scarcely through the rare and by no means remarkable
plates which he etched himself.

The real importance of Elsheimer, and the secret of his fascination
over his contemporaries, lie in his fresh treatment of light and shade.
Problems of lighting occupied his contemporaries, Caravaggio and
Honthorst, but these devoted their skill chiefly to effects of double
lighting and strong contrast ; it was the rendering of luminous shadow
and subtle tones of twilight that Elsheimer was the first to attack.
In this he is a forerunner of Rembrandt, who undoubtedly took sug-
gestions from him, and was helped by him in his own development of
chiaroscuro. Rembrandt cannot be fully understood without a know-
ledge of what Elsheimer had done before him.

But Rembrandt was by no means the only Dutch master who profited

14 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUR2''

by the German's art. The whole of the Italianised Dutch school at
Rome, men like Poelenburg for instance, felt his influence more or less
strongly. Nor was he without followers in the native school of land-
scape painters and etchers in Holland, as we shall see when we come
to them.

Elsheimer, in fine, though by no means a great painter, is of consider-
able historical importance, and the admiration which he excited in his

Fig, ^,— Th Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. i6.

own day can hardly be over-estimated. So great a man as Rubens
admired him so much that he had three of his landscapes on his walls,
and made copies from his paintings and designs.

This is the more remarkable, because Rubens rarely occupied himself
^ith the problems that fascinated Elsheimer. And while these problems

DUrcH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTURT 15

were of a kind to appeal to etchers, it was not on etching"' but on line-
engraving, an art admitting little scope for subtlety of chiaroscuro, that
Rubens cast his potent influence. Without using the burin himself,
he employed a number of brilliant engravers to reproduce his designs,
just as Raphael had employed Marc Antonio for the like purpose. Even
in our day, when public picture-galleries are numerous and the distances
between various capitals have so immensely shrunk, the fame of the
great painters rests still to a large extent on photographs and engravings
from their works ; it is easy, therefore, to comprehend of what capital
importance it was for masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
to secure competent interpreters.

Line-engraving was admirably suited for the reproduction of pictures
like those of Rubens, with their large design and flowing sweep. And so
potent was Rubens's example, that etching found in Belgium only a
few isolated, and with the single exception of Vandyck, unimportant
followers.

In Holland it was just the reverse. Perhaps it was the result of
some vital diff^erence in temperament between the Flemings and the
Dutchmen, such as caused the one country to embrace the severer,
soberer religion of Protestantism, while the other clung to the more
ancient creed of Rome, with its strong appeal to the senses ; at any rate,
it seems characteristic that line-engraving, with its capacity for repro-
ducing qualities of splendour and spacious action, should have found in
Antwerp its most effective, various, and brilliant exposition, while the
plainer, more self-contained, more intense spirit of the great Dutchmen
developed the more personal, intimate, subtle art of etching, as it had
never been developed before.

But Dutchmen, no less than Flemings, felt the need for repro-
ducing their designs, and here arose a difficulty. For etching is not,
in spite of modern successes, so well adapted to reproduction as line-
engraving is.

As we have said, it was only a certain number of the Dutchmen who
divined this. Rembrandt, of course, perceived it ; and though he spread
his fame by working steadily on copper as well as on canvas, he made his
etched work independent of his painting and never a simple reproduction

i6 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

of pictures. Lesser men had not the intelligence to do as he did ; and
many of the artists of whom we shall treat, though they produced fine
work on copper, cannot be esteemed true etchers.

We will begin our studies with one who was, beyond dispute, a born
etcher, Ostade.

fc "^-T^ ' -^-5B?«iiflir'»*yafr'i^' '--—• ' " ■ — -^-^ ■

fig^ 5. — Man and Woman Cotiversing. By Ostade. B. 37.

OSTADE AND HIS SCHOOL

I

Adriaen van Ostade was born in Haarlem, at the end of 1610.
The researches of Dr. Van der Willigen have placed this fact beyond
doubt, and the old tradition of his having been born at Liibeck must
therefore be set aside. In the baptismal register for December 10, 16 10,
there is entered the name of Adriaen, son of Jan Hendricx, of Eyndhoven,
and of Janneke Hendriksen. On the 2nd of June, 1621, the birth of
Isack, son of the same parents, is recorded.

These dates have always been associated with the births of the
brothers Ostade, and there are other grounds for identifying them with
the Adriaen and Isack just mentioned.

Jan Hendricx was a weaver, and in consequence of the religious
persecutions of the time, left his native Eyndhoven, a village in North
Brabant, for Haarlem. This was some time before 1605, for in that
year, already a burgess of the town, he married. He had several
children; and in a document of 1650, two of them are mentioned as
brother and sister to Adriaen and Isack, who are thus proved to have
been his sons. The name of Ostade was taken from a hamlet close
to Eyndhoven. Adriaen is first mentioned with this surname as a
member of the civic guard, in 1636.

Haarlem, M. Vosmaer has said, is in two things like Florence. It

is a city of flowers and a city of artists. Its archives show that from

an early time the arts flourished and were fostered there. Money was

never grudged for fine work in every branch of skilful industry, no less

than for good painting and good sculpture. The goldsmith, the potter,
/

B

1 8 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTC/RT

the leather-worker, the stone-cutter, could find employment for their
powers and remuneration worth their skill. Haarlem was, in fact, a
type of those busy and prosperous cities where it seems that art thrives
best ; for though art and commerce are often supposed to have a natural
disagreement, history shows them to have been the most apt companions.

But the city of Dierick Bouts, of Albert van Ouwater, of Jan
Scorel, was at the time of Ostade's birth, in a condition even more
favourable for the production of fine work than it had been in the
fifteenth and following centuries. In 1573 occurred the famous siege
by the Spaniards. Those who had borne the burden of those terrible
days were now growing old ; but the young generation received and
handed on their heroic memories, unembittered by thoughts of loss,
suffering, or defeat. And when, in 1609, peace came, and the United
Provinces, acknowledged by Spain, turned to enjoy their victorious
repose, there was added the sense of triumph to that of trials endured.
It was the great tin\e for Holland. Her soldiers were famed as the
finest in Europe. Her navy was the most powerful, the best-manned.
Her cities grew, and wealth poured into them. A universal well-being
pervaded the country, and a spirit of joy and of expansion, like the glow
of health, diffused itself in the citizens.

It was natural that art, too, should feel this new influence. And in
Haarlem, where the siege had destroyed so much of the old town, and
modern buildings of warm red brick had sprung round the vast surviving
monument of the middle ages, the Groote Kerk of St. Bavon ; in
Haarlem especially, a new spirit, intensely modern, began to possess
the rising painters. From art which lavished its parade of dexterity on
the old mythological fables, handled without heart or meaning, from
the smooth and pallid conventionalities of Cornelis Corneliszoon, and
the extravagant cleverness of Goltzius," these men turned to the life that
was around them. Among them were artists like Jan de Bray, Esaias
van de Velde, Dirk and Frans Hals. It was in the studio of Frans
Hals that the young Ostade learnt to paint. Already in 16 16, Hals had
painted his superb group of the civic guard, and was now in the fulness
of his extraordinary power. The exuberant joy and energy, the confident
sincerity, the swift and certain touch, intimate with realities, that marked
Hals, were typical of the country and the time. Life — that is the

o

20 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

absolute necessity for such an artist : for him everything that has life is
a possible subject, a possible realm to conquer. A subject that he cannot
feel, as well as conceive, his instinct rejects at once, A great pride of
life is v/hat characterises Hals' pictures ; human life in all its fulness he
accepts : unhindered by the shrinkings of more fastidious natures, he
enjoys with a robust enjoyment.

It is the same also with Ostade ; but the pupil was too individual an
artist to repeat his master. Ostade felt, perhaps, that he could never
rival those magnificent portrait-groups, and his own preferences, his own
gifts, led him to a different choice of subject.

Perhaps some who have seen Ostade's pictures and found them coarse
and ignoble, have imagined the painter of them to be equally coarse and
ignoble-looking as his boors. His portrait shows him a man of somewhat
severe, keen countenance, in plain attire ; a grave man, one would say,
with humour lurking in his gravity, as often happens ; it is a portrait
that might be taken for that of an Englishman of the Commonwealth.
Ostade was, in fact, a well-to-do citizen of the middle class. His collec-
tion of pictures, sold at his death in 1685, was, as we know from the
Haarlem Gazette^ extensive ; and the fact that it contained two hundred
of his own paintings, proves that he was, unlike so many of his compeers,
far removed from want.

Of Ostade's life, apart from his production, we know almost nothing. He
was a member of the Oude Schuts, the ancient and honourable Company
of Arquebusiers. He was married twice ; first, in 1636, to Machtelgen
Pietersen, who died in 1642 ; and again to a second wife, whose name is
not known, by whom he had a girl, Johanna Maria. This daughter
married a surgeon. Dirk van der Stoel, into whose hands Ostade's etched
plates and proofs passed at his death.

In 1647 and 1661 Ostade is mentioned as a member of the govern-
ment of the Guild. In 1662, he was dean of the Guild. An incident of
his earlier years is of interest, as showing his liberal spirit. In 1642 he
joined Salomon Ruysdael, at a meeting of the Guild, in protesting against
the policy of protection, which inspired Haarlem Guild, like many others,
to oppose the importation of works of art from other towns or their sale
in Haarlem.

Ostade seems never to have travelled, like many of his countrymen,

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTU

beyond the borders of Holland, nor ever to have changed his home,
except from one street of Haarlem to another.

He died in 1685.

On an early afternoon of May his body was carried from his house in
the Kuis-straat to the Groote Kerk, a little company of his friends
following.

II

With most of the Dutch artists, etching was a subordinate accom-
plishment, and their work on copper is but a less interesting reflection
of their work on canvas. This cannot be said of Ostade. As with
Rembrandt, his etched work is the complement, rather than a supplement
merely, of his painting. To the present writer, indeed, his etchings have
more interest than his pictures. The latter are numerous ; they may be
seen in almost all galleries of importance, and the reader is doubtless
familiar with their characteristics. Delightful as they often are, they do
not rival those of Adriaen Brouwer, who was by four years Ostade's senior,
and who, though born a Fleming, worked mostly in Holland, and entered
Hals' studio at the same time. There are a few plates attributed to
Brouwer ; but, if genuine, these show that he never thoroughly mastered
the technique of etching ; none of them approaches the least successful
plates of Ostade. Brouwer as a painter, on the other hand, surpasses
beyond question all the painters of peasant life, whether of Holland
or of Flanders.

Ostade does not manage paint with the freedom of a great master,
but his drawing is always superb. The drawing reproduced (Fig. 3) is a
characteristic specimen. It is the end of a game of backgammon. The
game is won, but the defeated player refuses to accept his defeat without
a careful scrutiny. In the attitudes, the gestures of players and onlookers,
everything is vital ; the moment is admirably caught.

There is an etching also of a game of backgammon, but it does not
directly illustrate the drawing.

Ostade did, however, make use of sketches for his etchings. There is
in the British Museum a sketch for The Father of a Family (B. i,'}))- -A-
comparison of this with the etched plate is interesting. There is a certain
affinity to Rembrandt in the manner of drawing ; less summary and swift.

22 DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

but masterful and free. And, like Rembrandt, Ostade does not use his
sketch as a finished thing, and copy it faithfully and minutely. His

Fig. 7. — Tke Humpbacked Fiddler. By Ostade. B. 44.

interest in the subject has not died out ; he is alert for a new posture, a
fresh touch, a livelier handling of some part of his design, that may im-

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 23

prove the whole. In this case the drawing, which is of a different shape
from the print and much broader, contains at the left the figure of a man
seated and cutting a loaf of bread on his knees. Ostade felt that this
figure disturbed the unity of the piece no less than the sense of home
seclusion, and he omitted it from his work on the copper. This reveals
the born etcher : one who works with directness, swiftness, passion ;
whose needle takes the impulse of his thought immediately, who never
works in cold blood.

Ill

Let us now consider the etchings themselves. There are just fifty in
all, and nine or perhaps ten of the number are dated. The earliest date
is 1647, the latest 1678. Arranging the dated plates in order of time,
we get the following table. The references are to the numbers in
Bartsch, Peintre-Graveury Vol. I. : —

1647.
The Hurdy-Gurdy Player. B. 8.
The Barn. B. 23.
The Family. B. 46.

1 648.
The Father of the Family. B. 33.

1652.
The Wife Spinning. B. 31.

1653-
The Tavern Brawl. B. 18.
Saying Grace. B. 34.

1671.
The Cobbler. B. 27.

1678.1
The Child and the Doll. B. 16.

To this may possibly be added The Humpbacked Fiddler (B. 44).

^ The last figure is doubtful. It is 8 according to Bartsch and Dutuit, but may
also be 9.

24 DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTURT

Neither Bartsch nor Dutuit appears to have noticed a date on this plate ;
but it seems clear that it is there, following the signature, though
obscured by lines. The writer inclines to decipher it as 1631 or 165 1 ;
but it is impossible to be positive on the point. These data would
doubtless serve many critics with material for constructing a chronological
list of the whole of the etchings. But this amusement shall be left to
the reader. The etchings, as a matter of fact, do not present any marked
variety of treatment. Ostade was not, like Rembrandt, a master of many
styles ; nor did he develop any particular style by continually surpassing
his own successes. We can only say that he seems to have attained his
greatest mastery in a middle period, about 1650. The JVife Spinning of
1652 is not followed by any dated piece that at all rivals it. The Cobbler
of 1 67 1, for instance, which was a failure in the first biting, betrays also
a certain languor of handling, very diiferent from the inexhaustible care
and skill bestowed on the earlier plate.

This inference is confirmed by what we know of Ostade's work on
canvas. His first period dates from 1630 to 1635 '■> ^^^^ follows a
middle period in which, influenced by Rembrandt, he adopted a warmer
scheme of colour ; lastly, in a third period, he began to repeat himself
and decline.

Beyond such general deductions it does not seem worth while to go.
In Rembrandt's case the question of chronology is of extreme interest
and significance, but in Ostade there is no development to speak of, and
to labour after exhibiting it would be waste of time.

Next, as to the various states of the etchings. The reverence for
first states and rare states, common to collectors, has from their point of
view its own justification ; but they are apt perhaps sometimes to confuse
the aesthetic value of a print with its market value. Artists, on the
other hand, are sometimes prone to dismiss the whole question of states
as tedious and absurd. It is, however, of great importance that the
etcher should be judged on his own merits and not on the merits, or
demerits, of other people. Ostade undoubtedly made alterations in his
plates during printing and thus created " states " ; but many more states
were created after his death by other hands re-working the worn copper.

It is reasonable to suppose that the last state touched by the artist is
the one that he would wish to be taken as typical of his perfect work.

DUTCH ErCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 25

But the question arises : Which is the last state touched by the
artist ?

The work of later hands, added to a plate after the artist's death,
does not concern us ; but the development of the etching up to that
state when the artist leaves it as a finished thing, must interest us greatly.
How are we to decide ?

In the case of Ostade, we are helped a little by external data. As we

Fig. 8. — Peasant paying his Reckoning. By Ostade. B. 42.

have seen, the plates were sold at his death in 1685. We know also that
they were sold again by their new possessor, Dirk van der Stoel, Ostade's
son-in-law, in 1686 ; and eight years later again, in 1694. What state
they were in then we can only conjecture : but we may infer something
from what we know to have been their state in 17 10 or a little later.

In the year just mentioned a French engraver, Bernard Picart, arrived
in Holland ; and some time after his arrival he published a collection of

26 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

the etched work of Ostade and of his pupil Bega. The book of Ostade's
etchings was bought, perhaps on its publication, by Hans Sloane : and
through him it has passed into the possession of the British Museum.
Whoever examines it will notice at once the inequality of the plates :
some are worn and harshly retouched, some are passable, a few are even
good. Something of this is due to the delicately-worked plates, giving
out sooner than those more coarsely etched. Probably also some were
more in demand than others. Thus, to take a few examples : while The
Painter in His Studio (B. 32) is in the tenth and last state, and Peasant
Paying His Reckoning (B. 42) is in the seventh or last but one, The
Dance in the Tavern (B, 49) is in the fourth out of seven states in all,
and The Empty Jug (B. 15) in the fourth out of eight states in all.
And several of the smaller plates are still in the second state.

In determining therefore the extent to which later hands have worked
on the etchings, each must be considered separately. Only in a few
cases, probably, are those in Picart's edition still in the condition left by
the master himself; and most seem to have been retouched more than
once. Every one will judge for himself the precise point at which new
work comes in : and opinion will always differ on such questions. As
Ostade was not always successful in his first biting, the second state is
generally the most representative. Peasant Paying His Reckoning is
a very different thing in Picart's edition Trom the brilliant second state
of the same etching.

The student of Ostade will find Dutuit's book ^ indispensable : it con-
tains all that was known of the etchings and their different impressions
up to the year of its publication. And the author's own collection was
perhaps unrivalled. Nevertheless, it is not perfect. The states are
described with an extraordinary superfluity of detail, and the one or two
differentiating circumstances are buried in a mass of irrelevant descrip-
tion. Verification is therefore a matter of time and labour.

There are also a few states still undescribed. Still, for those who
have an appetite for " states," Dutuit is very satisfying.

1 Ma7iuel de r Amateur (TEstajnpes : par M. Eugene Dutuit. Vol, V. Paris. 1882.

^^S- 9- — Saying Grace. By Qstade. B. 34.

28 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURl^

Ostade's etched work is, considered as etching, unequal. Sometimes,
as for instance in The Cobbler (B. 27), the first biting was not a success ;
at other times, as in the Man Laughing (B. 4), the Saying Grace (B. 34),
or the Fiddlers (B. 45), the plate has been over-bitten. The plate which
Bartsch calls La Fileuse (The Wife Spinning. B. 31) [Plate I.], is one
which represents very fully some of Ostade's characteristic excellences as
an etcher. It is a jfine example of his success in bathing his subject in
atmosphere. One feels the quiet afternoon warmth upon the cottage-
front, as the woman who spins feels it, as the child feels it, as the two
basking pigs feel it. That softness of air, which in our northern climate
gives even to the near trees a kind of impalpable look, and which seems
to clothe things with itself — that is what Ostade has sought to render
with mere etched lines ; and he has triumphed over immense difficulties.
His figures detach themselves with a wonderful reality, with no hard
brilliancy, no superfluous shadows. There is a fine absence of cleverness
in such quiet mastery of means.

More remarkable still is the little plate (B. 42) which is reproduced
in Fig. 8. The amount of knowledge, of feeling for light and shadow,
of subtle and sure draughtsmanship in this small etching is astonishing.
The problem of painting daylight as it is diffused in a room through the
window, which, of all painters in the world, Jan Vermeer and Pieter
de Hooch, and, in a different way, Rembrandt and Ostade himself, have
most fully mastered, is here attacked in etching, and with extraordinary
success. What seems strange is that a problem so fascinating, one
which had evidently a strong seduction for Ostade in his painting, should
have been attempted by him so rarely in his etchings. The Painter in
his Studio (B. 32) is another success in the same line, while the Players
at Backgammon (B. 39) is partly a failure, through the biting having
gone wrong. But, as a rule, Ostade prefers out-of-door effects.

None of the etchings quite rivals, in the writer's judgment at least,
this little plate, Peasant Paying his Reckoning. But there are several
typical small pieces which have a great charm. The Spectacle-seller
(B. 22, Fig. i), for instance, is an admirable composition, and the

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 29

etching rich. The Humpbacked Fiddler (B. 44, Fig. 7), and the Man
and Woman Conversing (B. 25, Fig. 5), though the needle has been
used somewhat differently in each, have similar merit.

But the plates that interest, perhaps, most, are not always those
which are etched the best. The chief glory of Ostade is his imaginative
draughtsmanship, and akin to this are his vivid human sympathy and
his humour. These are not so manifest in the plates we have mentioned
as in some others.

But before passing to those pieces which show these qualities at their

Fig. 10. — The Angler. By Ostade. B. 26.

best, let us notice one which is unlike any of the others. This is The
Barn (B. 28, Fig. 6). Had the execution of this plate matched the
feeling it evinces, it would have been a fine achievement. Who does not
know the strange, vague impression which such a barn as this produces
on the mind ? The cool dimness, the mysterious shadow among the
rafters, penetrated here and there by soft rays, the atmosphere of the
farm, scent of hay, cries of fowls, mingling in a sense of imperturbable

30 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

antiquity — all exhale an intangible emotion impossible to express in
language, but which a painting or an etching could well convey. Ostade
has conceived his subject finely ; but the acid and the needle have
imperfectly seconded his design. Rembrandt would have given us out
of such material a memorable plate indeed. But let us not deny Ostade
his due. Much in the piece is admirable : note especially the softness
with which the light comes through the chinks on to the hay.

In The Angler (B. 26, Fig. 10) the difficulties attempted are less
great, and there seems little wanting to entire success. Here Ostade's
human interest is engaged, and whenever this is so, he is great. The~
stationary posture, the muscular habit of the angler, with lax body but
firm wrist, is perfectly given ; as is the slackening of the line, the indolent
gaze of the boy leaning on the rail, and the sleepy impression of a still
summer day without breezes.

It is in such expressive drawing of the human body that Ostade shows
himself a master. The delighted eagerness of the baby in Fig. 4 ; the
jerk of its short limbs and crowing of its lips ; or in The Music Party
(B. 30), the boisterous, maudlin pleasure of the man who sits in the
chair, beating time with his hand to the laborious scraping of the fiddler,
catching what he can of the score, with what humour and expression are
these portrayed ! One hears the terrible discord and the cheerful thump
of the peasant's fist accompanying it.

Another piece of imaginative drawing is The Brawl (B, 18). The
loose, ineffectual, lurching stroke of the drunken man, the startled effort
of the fat man as he springs up from his barrel, the terror of the woman
clasping her baby closer, the mingled fear, anger, and surprise of the little
man who has provoked the quarrel and prepares to defend himself — all
are excellent.

The same qualities pervade Ostade's largest plate, the Dance in the
Tavern (B. 49), which also shows his extraordinary art in composition
at its best.

There are people, and perhaps always will be, who find in work such
as Ostade's nothing but vulgarity. And some, who cannot help enjoying
his fine drawing, find themselves repelled by his choice of subjects.

It seems difficult to understand this repulsion. For in his etchings,
at any rate, Ostade shows no exclusive preference for the coarse and

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 31

sordid. Mr. Hamerton has accused him of deadness of heart and apathy
of intellect, and declares him to be insensitive to all that is best among
the poor. But is this quite true ?

An accomplished lady some time ago wrote an essay in condemnation
of the " vulgarity " of John Leech and Charles Keene in certain of their
drawings for Punch. Such criticism seems to argue an excessive delicacy
or a deficiency of humour. Ostade's range was limited, compared with
that of those two great artists, but as a draughtsman he is in the same
order with them ; and in the writer's judgment he is equally free from
that dulness which has no sense for the fine or rare in men and things,
that acceptance of the common price, the common standard, which are
the attributes of real vulgarity.

Look, for instance, at the etching reproduced (Fig. 9). The subject
has been the theme of many painters and engravers. It is a subject
easily spoiled ; a little too much of sentimental piety, a little too much of
satirical mockery, and the theme is made trivial or obvious. But Ostade's
feeling is just right. There is no drawing of a trite moral, as, for
instance, in the treatment of the same subject by a later engraver,
Nicholas van Haeften. Nor is there a hint of mockery at the dis-
crepancy between the " good things " for which Heaven is thanked and
the humble pottage on the table. But is there not, besides the wonderful
sensitiveness of drawing in the figures, which makes one feel how the toil-
hardened, clumsy hands tremble awkwardly as they are clasped, and how
the boy, though his back is turned, is shutting his eyes resolutely tight —
is there not also a tenderness, a dignity in the whole }

Again, in the little plate. The Child and Doll, is there not true feeling,
expressed with a fine reticence, in the mother's face and in the child's .''
The careful fondness of the mother is even better expressed in another
etching, where she hands a baby down to the eager arms of its elder
sister, a child of six or seven, who receives it with joyful pride. The
drawing reminds one of some of the exquisitely humorous and ex-
quisitely tender sketches of Leech.

It is when we come to the work of his pupils, Bega and Dusart, that
we realise best Ostade's finer qualities.

32 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENrH CENTURT

Cornells Pietersz Bega was born at Haarlem in 1620, and died there
of the plague in 1664, fully twenty years before his master.

According to Houbraken's story, his real name was Begyn, which he
changed to Bega after being turned out of his father's house for his
youthful escapades. The story is not incredible of such a youth as he
appears in his portrait, gay and somewhat vain-looking, with long curling
locks.

Bega's etchings are thirty-eight in number, and have a very distinctive
air. Certain characteristics seem to indicate that his original bent was
towards a decorative treatment of his subject. His drawings show a care
for the happy disposition of drapery, remarkable in this school. He has
a feeling for large design, combined with great indifference to human
character. But such treatment was alien to the Dutch school in general ;
nor did Dutch peasants lend themselves at all willingly, so it seems, to
passive decoration. Certainly a pupil of Ostade's would have no
encouraging influences to help him forward on such lines. So, though
Bega adopts in part the themes and general handling of his teacher, the
rather flat design which he affects, his frankly artificial chiaroscuro, his
use of light and shadow as masses of black and white rather than as
opportunities of mystery, contrast strongly with Ostade's solid modelling,
his pervading atmosphere, and his pre-occupying human interest. One
perceives that the master's influence could not altogether swamp the
pupil's natural impulse : but neither wins the day, and the result is an
unsatisfying compromise.

The Tavern (Fig. 11) is a very characteristic plate. It is very
brilliant, and makes a powerful impression at first sight. But it does
not bear close study. There is a want of subtlety in it, and a want of
feeling ; a certain hardness, combined with a certain cleverness, that
repels.

Bega's two other large plates, also of tavern scenes, reveal just the
same qualities, and need not be further particularised.

In technical character, these etchings recall the Spanish etcher Goya,
who was also fond of producing a sharp, vivid, emphatic effect by a
similar artificial manner of lighting. Not improbably Bega's etchings
may have been known to Goya, and given him a suggestion.

Bega had apparently no tenderness, and little or no interest in

Fig. II. — The Tavern. By Bega. B. 32.

34 BUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

humanity. This deficiency, in one of the Dutch school, and trained in the
Dutch tradition, is notable. One has only to turn from his mother and
baby sitting by the window (B. 21) to Ostade's Child and Doll^ to feel
what a difference lies between the two.

Cornells Dusart was a much later scholar. At Bega's death he was
only a child of four, and he survived Ostade many years, living on till
1704. When Ostade died, he finished his master's uncompleted pictures,
but kept them till his death in his own possession.

Some of Dusart's etchings, as for instance The Village Fete (B. 16)
have a pleasing effect, with well-managed light and shade ; but they
cannot be compared with the similar pieces by Ostade, whose method is
here carried on, but in an inferior manner. Yet he has a vein of his
own, a gross, riotous, extravagant vein, with a great fondness for violent
action. In the plate called by Bartsch Le Violon As sis (B. 15), which
was too large to be reproduced here, his specific qualities appear to great
advantage.

One seems to hear an hilarious din merely from looking at it. The
fiddler plays with a wild fantastic energy ; one peasant accompanies him
with crashing tankard and roaring chorus ; another sits bent and sullen
with his head on his hands. The landlord, with huge frame and round
paunch, looks on with twinkling eyes. A woman by the great chimney,
on which hangs the notice of a sale of tulips and hyacinths, " Tulpaan
en Hyacinthen," calls a child to her. The roomy background with its
beams and rafters, is drawn and lighted with extraordinary skill. As a
page of daily life, fresh and vivid, this etching deserves the fullest
praise.

Dusart in his later years devoted himself to mezzotint, and pro-
duced a great deal in this manner. These engravings, some of which
represent in Dusart's extravagant way, the joy in Holland at the taking
of Namur in 1695 by William III,, are more interesting historically than
artistically. It was not till the middle of next century that mezzotint,
the invention of which does not date from much earlier than Dusart's
birth, reached its perfection in the hands of the English engravers.

THE ETCHERS OF LANDSCAPE

I

The seventeenth century, which inaugurated so much that is charac-
teristic in modern art, permitted for the first time the recognition of
landscape as a subject worthy for its own sake of painting. And feeling
for landscape seems to be almost entirely a modern thing.

Drawings of landscape by Titian and Campagnola among the Italians,
and by Diirer among the Germans, had indicated the first beginnings of a
preference ; and there are a certain number of landscape subjects among
the engraved work of the Little Masters. But these are occasional efforts
by men whose chief work lay in other lines. In painting no one ventured
as yet to concentrate his interest on the landscape, and though men like
the Flemish Joachim Patinir evidently cared more for their backgrounds
of mountain and river than for the human incidents which relieve them,
they had not the courage to cast away compromise and brave authority
by omitting the traditional foreground.

Rubens is the first great Northern master who paints landscape with
entire and frank abandonment to the subject. The broad prospects and
swelling undulations of Flemish country are painted by him with a kind
of glory that reflects his large and joyous mind. Lodowyck de Vadder and
Lucas van Uden, his contemporaries, etched landscape for the first time
in Flanders. But it was in Holland that this line was most abundantly
developed. To tranquil, observant natures, such as seem typical of the
nation, there was in landscape a strong appeal, a permanent delight.
The majority of the Dutch etchers found here their chief material.

II

Earliest, perhaps, of all Dutch landscape painters, and almost
certainly earliest among Dutch landscape etchers, is a little known artist,

c 2

36 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Hercules Seghers. A mystery hangs over him ; for though there is
documentary evidence in an inventory of 1625 or thereabouts, that he
painted a considerable number of landscapes, these pictures have nearly
all disappeared. Some, doubtless, may be lurking under other names ;
one, called a Rembrandt, was discovered some time ago at Florence ; one
is at Berlin ; but this can hardly account for all. We can only guess
what they were like from the etchings, which are usually either views

Fig. 12. — Tobias and the Angel. £f H. Seghers. M. 236.

of Holland with vast horizons, or strange visions of wild and mountainous
country. Seghers was born in 1589,^ and died in 1650. A scholar of
Gillis van Connincxloo, he was producing work as early as 1607, and
from that date to 1630 seems to have been his chief period of activity. ^
His life, like that of several of the Dutch masters, was a long and hopeless

^ By all the older authorities the date is wrongly given as 1625.
2 The Tobias and the Jnge/ dates probably from about 161 3, or a little later, as this
was the date of de Goudt's print.

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 37

struggle against poverty. He is said to have become a drunkard, and to
have died from the effects of a fall. Dr. Bredius, judging apparently
from his work, thinks that he must have visited the Alps, travelled into
Italy, and found a stimulus in the art of Adam Elsheimer. Certainly the
rocky landscapes which appear in the etchings could have no archetypes
in Holland. But there is so strong a vein of the fantastic in them, that
it is difficult to believe they were done from nature, especially when
one observes how precise a pencil Seghers uses when he sketches his native
country. However, truth to mountain formation is anything but an
easy thing to seize ; only by incessant training and close observation does
the eye acquire it ; and to draw rocks imaginatively, that is, with
vivid realisation of their essential forms, is scarcely possible to one
who has not the work of predecessors to learn from and to surpass,
and whose eye has not dwelt upon them from childhood. One may
imagine, therefore, that the efforts of a lowlander, to whom mountains
must have had something visionary and strange in their aspect, would be
halting, laborious, and confused in grappling with such unfamiliar
material. The rocks painted by Patinir are a case in point. This may
well explain the singular shortcomings of Seghers' rendering of rocks and
mountains. In his attempts to represent floating clouds on the mountain
sides he is simply grotesque.

If, then, it was actual scenery that Seghers etched, where is that
scenery to be found ^ It is certainly not the Alps, and though one or
two plates suggest the Tyrol, the landscape is most like in character to
the Karst district on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. One of the
etchings might almost stand for the rock-surrounded plain of Cettinje, in
Montenegro, though to infer that Seghers travelled to so remote a country
would be a wild conjecture.

There can be no doubt, on the other hand, of the influence of
Elsheimer over Seghers, and through him, over Rembrandt.

In the National Gallery there is a picture by Elsheimer representing
Tobias and the Angela in a wooded landscape. This was engraved by
Elsheimer's friend. Count de Goudt, and either from the picture or the
engraving,^ Seghers borrowed the main features of one of his etchings

1 Probably the engraving, since Seghers' print is a reverse copy from this, but in the
same sense as the picture.

38 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

(Fig. 12). The two chief figures have been retained almost unaltered ;
but their being placed higher up in the picture makes a considerable
change in the composition, they have more dignity and significance.
The elimination, also, of some rather trivial details, such as the great
flowers in the foreground, and the passing figures in the middle distance,
make for the same effect. A kind of mystery and solemnity have been
added to the landscape, and in fact the impression of the whole is
deepened and enlarged. The subject has been fused in Seghers' mind
and has become his own.

At his death, Seghers' effects, including his etched plates, were sold.
Among the buyers of these latter were, apparently, Antoni Waterloo and
Rembrandt. Waterloo published some of Seghers' landscapes with his
own, and it has been assumed by Dutuit that these impressions were from
the earlier artist's plates, re-worked. Comparison of one of the original
etchings, however, with that published by Waterloo of the same subject,
leads the writer to doubt this. The work is entirely different.

Rembrandt, we know from the inventory of his effects taken in
1656, bought six of Seghers' landscapes, and he also bought the copper
on which had been etched the Tobias and the Angel. It was re-worked
by Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt's work as a Flight into
Egypt} (See Fig. 13.)

The dark wooded landscape remains unaltered, and though the Holy
Family and a group of trees now occupy the right hand of the scene, the
great wing of the angel is still distinctly to be seen above them, and
Tobias's legs have not been perfectly erased.

Rembrandt, we may be sure, would never have taken another man's
work unless he had found in it a strong appeal to his own nature. And
Seghers seems to have been his prototype in landscape. On the one
hand, the mysterious, darkly wooded, mountainous visions of Seghers
suggest the type of landscape in which Rembrandt set, for instance, his
own Tobias and the Angel^ a type which he was fond of reproducing.
On the other hand, Seghers' love for the vast distances of Holland,
crowded plains with broad rivers winding into an infinite horizon,
appears again in some of Rembrandt's etchings, and more notably still
in those spacious prospects, "escapes for the mind" as Mr. Pater has

1 No. 236 in Middleton's Catalogue. ^ In the National Gallery.

DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTURT 39

called them, of Rembrandt's pupil, the most truly Dutch and perhaps the
greatest, of all the landscape painters of Holland — Philip de Koninck.

To return to Seghers' etchings. There is something about them
which arrests the eye at once, and this is partly due to their peculiar
printing. Seghers was a born maker of experiments, and in nearly all
his plates sought to get an effect of colour. In fact, it is usually asserted

fig. 13. — T/:e Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236.

that he anticipated, by a hundred years, the coloured engravings of
Leblond.

Printing in colour from two or more blocks had been practised by
wood-engravers long before this time. Burgkmair and Cranach in
Germany, Ugo da Carpi and Andrea Andreani in Italy, had produced
a number of these " chiaroscuros," as they are called, with charming
effect. This was about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And
almost in Seghers' own time, Hendrik Goltzius, of Haarlem, published
some of his best work from coloured wood-blocks.

40 DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENrEETNH CENTURT

But in all of these cases, at least two, and often three separate blocks
were used, and the colours superimposed on each other. This was also
the procedure of Leblond, though he used metal plates and mezzotint.

Seghers, however, employed a single plate only, and his effects are
not due to what is usually understood as colour printing. He f rst
prepared his paper with a coat of paint, which formed the ground ; in
some cases this was a greenish tint. He then etched his subject and
printed it in an indigo ink ; and in order to procure shading of the same
colour, he lightly scratched the parts to be shaded with the dry-point, so
that the copper held the ink on its surface. By this simple means he
produced an apparently complex effect.^

The green tint and dark-blue ink are, of course, only taken as a
specimen, for Seghers used various colours. Sometimes the impressions
are printed on linen. In one case the etching is printed in white on a
brown ground.

Besides views of Dutch plains and of mountain scenery, Seghers also
etched trees ; not with great success, but with a striving after truth of
foliage very rare in his day. Now and then, too, he attempted buildings,
and with a real feeling for the romantic, for picturesque beauty, in
architecture.

On the whole, we must allow an important place in the history of
Dutch landscape to Hercules Seghers. But that must not prevent us
from perceiving that it is an historical importance only. Seghers opened
up the road, but he achieved no eminent triumph himself. Nor, in spite
of his suggestiveness for Rembrandt and De Koninck, does he seem
to have exercised any great influence on the landscape etchers who
immediately succeeded him.

He has no affinity with the men whose work we must now consider.

1 Seghers has also been credited with the use of soft ground etching or of aquatint.
Examination of the prints shows, however, that the effects in question were got either
by using acid on the plate, or by working in dotted lines, not with the roulette but with
the simple needle. In ascertaining these facts and in correcting some of his first
impressions the writer has profited by the knowledge and the kind assistance of Mr.
S. R. Koehler, Keeper of the Prints at Boston, U.S.A., whose authority on such
questions is well known.

DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVEN'TEENrH CENTURT 41

III

The two diverging tendencies of Dutch art, that which fed on the
Italian tradition and that which clung to the native soil, are both to some
extent represented in Seghers.

Leaving for a time the Italianised masters, let us follow the main
development of Dutch landscape art, the painters and etchers whom
Holland alone inspired.

The first names of note are those of Esaias and Jan van de Velde.
Jan was born in 1596, Esaias a few years earlier. Of the former we
shall say something later on. He produced a great deal of work, the
most remarkable part of which is a number of plates engraved and etched
in the manner of Elsheimer. It is by these plates that he is best known,
and through them he ranks as one of the Italianised school. As, how-
ever, he etched a certain number of purely Dutch landscapes, after the
designs probably of his brother, he must also be mentioned here. These
landscapes are mostly sets of traditional subjects, such as the sixteenth
century loved : T/ie Four Elements^ The Four Seasons, The Twelve
Months. Always strongly overworked with the burin, these etchings
have a somewhat harsh and dry effect. The harshness is especially
noticeable in the treatment of foliage. It is as if the artist were striving
to reproduce with the etching-needle the manner of line-engraving as
employed by the Goltzius school. Failing to secure this he has recourse
to the burin to supplement his incomplete success in etching.

Esaias uses the acid in a much franker fashion. A plate of his, which
we may take as representative, depicts a whale cast on the shores of
Holland, perhaps at Scheveningen, in 16 14. A great crowd has assembled
on the beach staring at the stranded monster, examining and measuring
its vast proportions. The dunes recede in the distance ; boats are at
anchor in the surf.

The scene is treated with the plainness and sincerity characteristic of
Dutch art. And the etching, with its firmly and rather coarsely bitten
lines, unsophisticated by the burin, has a solidity and simplicity not
without attraction.

Regarded as etching, this is primitive work. Still it is genuine etching.

42 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

and by one who has perceived that needle and acid demand an employ-
ment and an aim different in kind from that of the graver. It is interest-
ing, therefore, to compare this plate with the line-engraving of a similar
subject, representing another whale stranded, a few years before, in 1598,
by Jacob Matham, the pupil of Goltzius.

With the Van de Veldes it is natural to associate two contemporaries,
who with them helped to inaugurate the great age of Dutch art ; Pieter

Fig. 14. — TSree Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5.

Molyn, the elder, and Jan van Goyen, the latter born in the same year
with Jan van de Velde.

Molyn, who was born in London, but was working in Haarlem before
1616, is an artist of real independence. A set of etchings, published in
1626, shows the same qualities that appear in his drawings — firm
draughtsmanship, openness and freedom of design, and a fine economy of
means. Heaths and moors, a climbing country road with plodding
waggon, a wayside inn, such were the simple elements which he trans-
lated into always distinguished work. Doubtless to Molyn's teaching
must be attributed something of that fine manner which imparts so much
charm to the pictures of Gerard Ter Borch, his pupil.

Dying in 1656, Molyn survived by a few years one who, though not

DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENrH CENTURT 43

a pupil, came certainly under his influence ; Van Goyen. Till lately Van
Goyen, perhaps because his works are better known, was supposed to
have been Molyn's teacher, or at least to have given a stimulus to his
art. Van Goyen shows more power in his drawings than in his paintings,
which are sometimes but little removed from sepia monochromes ; and it
is a surprise to come, here and there, upon a picture of his which is
bright and fresh. The few etchings which he published are undated, but
belong, according to Dr. Lippman, to his middle life, 1625-30. They

Fig. I !^.~ Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75.

have not the character of Molyn's plates, and are far less good as
etchings.

Simon de Vlieger, who ranks in date as a younger contemporary of
the Van de Veldes and of Molyn, is more successful as an etcher in the
few plates which he produced, than any of the early landscape artists.
Unhampered by the traditions of the line-engraver, he aims at an effect
at once delicate and free. As a painter, he is known almost entirely by
sea-pieces, silvery in tone, from which Jan van de Cappelle drew some-
thing of his mastery over still effects at sea, mornings of sleepy mist

44 BUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

through which the sun breaks palely on the sails of anchored vessels.
Like most of the Dutch painters, de Vlieger changed his home several
times. Born at Rotterdam in 1600, he was at Delft from 1634 to 1640,
and from then till his death, nineteen years later, at Amsterdam. It
seems probable that here he gave lessons to the young Willem van de
Velde, who was afterwards to be famous as the greatest of Dutch sea-
painters, and who died at Greenwich, a Court painter to Charles II.

In his etchings, which are undated, de Vlieger does not attempt the
sea ; though one (B. 10), a fine piece in its way, is a scene on the sea-
beach, with fishermen and their haul. The best of the plates are two
Sylvan pieces. The Wood by the Canal (B. 6), and the Grassy Hill {E. 7).
The foliage is more sensitively treated than it commonly is by Dutch
etchers, and with more approach to delicate truth. There is also a set
of animals and poultry ; possibly one of the earliest sets of subjects of
this kind, which the middle of the century found so popular.

IV

With Allardt van Everdingen (1621-1675) we reach a new element
in Dutch landscape. Working under Pieter Molyn at Haarlem, he began
by painting marine subjects ; and with a view to increasing his knowledge
of the sea, took ship on the Baltic. But a storm drove him to Norway ;
and there for some time, taking advantage of misfortune, he lingered
travelling and sketching.

Before 1645, however — ^^^^ ^^' before he was twenty-five, Everdingen
was back in Haarlem. He now began to paint pictures from his Nor-
wegian sketches : and to the Dutch public this northern scenery disclosed
a novel charm. Used to wide pastures and ample skies, they found
a romantic strangeness in tumbling streams among rocks and pine-forests,
where the sky was shut off by mountain slopes.

In 1652 Everdingen removed to Amsterdam, where he remained till
his death. Probably his fame had preceded him : at any rate his popu-
larity soon grew great there also, and his canvases were much sought after.

Besides numerous pictures, the Norwegian sketches provided the artist
with material for a long series of etchings. Fig. 1 5 is a very characteristic
specimen of them. Without any extraordinary qualities, they have often

DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 45

a genuine charm. The Norwegian landscape is treated with insight into
its peculiar features, and though Everdingen fails entirely to suggest the
rush and foam of torrents, he makes fine use of the log cabins, rafts, and
palings, and etches pines with truth and spirit.

Of a probably later date are the four views of a watering-place,
possibly Spa, one of which is here reproduced (Fig. 16). The subject is

Fig. 16. — Drinking t.'.e Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B. 96.

interesting, and the handling of the buildings and the groups of people
is excellent.

Everdingen was not without humour, which is shown in the long
series of illustrations to Reynard the Fox. But most readers will probably
find the chief interest of the artist to lie in his relations with a greater
man, Ruisdael.

46 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

Though a native of Haarlem, Jacob van Ruisdael produced most of his
life's work at Amsterdam. He is conjectured to have been born about
1625 ; the precise year has not been discovered. His father Isaak, a
frame-maker, had him trained as a surgeon ; and it was not till after he
had passed a course of surgery that he abandoned the profession for
painting, in which he had early shown his gift.

Ruisdael's first pictures are dated 1646, and his works from that
year to 1655, his "early period," are nearly all views of Haarlem and its
neighbourhood. Thoroughly Dutch in character, they have little of
that gloomy tone so frequent in the artist's later time. The beautiful
View of Haarlem at the Hague, with its massed clouds and ray of sun-
shine gliding over the plain, is a perfect example of this early manner.

With Ruisdael's removal from Haarlem, a great change comes over
his art. There seems no doubt that his early Dutch landscapes were not
popular. They were perhaps too original. He came to Amsterdam poor
and without much reputation, and he found there, established in fame
and popularity, Allardt van Everdingen, returned from Norway and
now attracting the world of buyers by his pictures of that wild and
romantic country. It was in 1652, as we have seen, that Everdingen
settled in the city, and three or four years later Ruisdael arrived. He did
not become a burgess till 1659, but had probably been already some
years in residence before the formal inscription of his name.

From this period dates the lamentable change in Ruisdael's art. The
master, whose native independence is so marked that one is at a loss to
name his probable teacher, of his own will and in sheer mortification of
spirit at his want of success, forces himself from the meadows and dunes
of his delight, and invents, to win the patronage of the rich men of
Amsterdam, a Norway of his own. A visit to North Germany, of which
there is some evidence, helped his invention. Now begins the long series
of waterfalls and pines and torrents so familiar in the picture galleries.
It is not on these that Ruisdael's fame rests ; on this ground Everdingen,
in spite of his inferior merits as a painter, remains his master. But as
the pictures of this period are the most common, the public is apt to

DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTURT 47

identify him with this acquired style in which the true Ruisdael is ob-
scured. For this reason it was a fortunate choice which secured for the
National Gallery, two years ago, so exquisite a specimen of the painter
at his best as the Shore at Scheveningen, No. 1390. The chilly ending of
an afternoon, with clouds blowing up and the rain beginning, the vexed
movement of shallow water as the rising wind breaks it into short waves,.
the wetness of the spray-laden atmosphere, are painted with a sensitive
subtlety that more modern landscape, with all its triumphs, has not
excelled. The mood of feeling here expressed is intimately Ruisdael's
own. Without the brooding melancholy which became oppressively
habitual later, which found such grandiose expression in pictures like the
famous Jews'' Burying-place at Dresden, there is here a latent sadness
that seems to have been bred in the fibre of the man. It seems a kind
of expectation of sorrow ; the mood that poetry with greater intensity has
expressed in some lines of Browning which suggest themselves :

The rain set early in to-night ;

The sullen wind was soon awake :
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its worst to vex the lake.
I listened, with heart fit to break. . . .

For such a nature who would predict happiness ^ Fortune satisfied
that inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing^
poverty, and the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore
the artist down. The autumn of 168 1 found him ill and helpless ; so
helpless that the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of
Mennonites, procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem.
There he lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St.
Bavon's.

VI

Ruisdael's etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number ;
only seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what
their technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude
for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it
far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the Three Oaks (B. 6)^

48 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTURT

is dated 1649, ^^^ ^^ ^^ difficult to assign any of the others, except
possibly the Cornfield^ to a later date.

Of the four large plates, the one which Bartsch calls Ees Voyageurs
(B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild and
intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great roots
of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills the
left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the
wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at
one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael's strong feeling for
old trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious,
inspires him here ; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of
sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the
difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master
and the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael
never succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in
etched line ; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his
sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh
and wonderful, make his work always interesting.

The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings
of the same kind of subject. Though the first. The Little Bridge^ is
not a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is
penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity
and neglected solitude. The Three Oaks are etched with truth and
strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger
plate. The Cornfield (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.

There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the
Three Oaks and the Cornfield. As the later states are by far the more
common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched,
and, in the writer's opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first
three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire
on this consummate master of clouds !) has been inserted, and in all there
is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still
suggesting an alien hand.

Ruisdael's etching is little more than an illustration of his painting ;
criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the
other.

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 49

Ruisdael's great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical im-
portance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way
for Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the
landscape of modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a
considerable figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive
waterfalls, which too often represent him, his real qualities would have
more chance of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is

Fig. i-j.—The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5.

more various, more subtle, altogether finer than Hobbema, except when
Hobbema is at his very best, as in the severely charming Avenue of
Middleharnis. Hobbema often fails to convince, because he has not
sufficiently felt his subject ; and so he will paint a grand sky with the
wind moving great clouds across it, but when he comes to the trees of
his foreground he forgets his sky, and paints the branches in a breath-
lessly stiff atmosphere, without the suggestion of a wind. The resulting
effect is a perplexing heaviness. Ruisdael betrays the same defect in his

so DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

later pictures ; what else could one expect from one condemned to
produce unrealities for a market ? But in his good period he always
shows an impressible imagination, and his materials are fused by the
feeling in which he steeps them. His sense for the beauty of trees is
profound, though rather limited in its range. He was lacking in the
consummate style of Crome, and would never have achieved the large-
ness and reticent power of a picture like the English master's Avenue at
Chapel Fields. But for skies, for clouds, he has an eye more true, a
love more comprehensive, than those of any who had gone before him,
than those of many who were to follow him. He piles his clouds in
mountainous glory, " trailing " their shadows over the wide country, till
the level pastures of Holland grow in " visionary majesties " like the
grandest mountains of Norway. This gives us all the more reason to
deplore the absence of any attempt to deal with clouds in the etchings,
still more the presence of those inflated shapes inserted by a stupid
publisher.

VII

Though an important figure in the history of landscape painting,
Ruisdael did not strongly influence the contemporary etchers of land-
scape. Hobbema, his famous scholar, did not, so far as we know, etch at
all. A few etchers, however, felt Ruisdael 's stimulus more or less : Van
Beresteyn, who was working at Haarlem in 1644, and produced some
etchings somewhat in the manner of Ruisdael's Cornfield^ but with a
mannered treatment of trees : H. Naiwincx, who handled a delicate
point, and etched a set of graceful plates of woodland and river : and
Adriaen Verboom, who in his two or three etchings is perhaps more
successful in treatment of trees than any of the Dutchmen.
But more celebrated than any of these is Antoni Waterloo.
His etchings, to which alone he owes his reputation, are considerably
over a hundred in number ; and as the subjects are monotonous, they
soon become tedious. Groups of trees by a roadside, or a fringe of
wood alone occupy Waterloo's needle. Now and then, as in B, 28, the
touch is light and the eff*ect pleasant : but having once found a formula,
Waterloo is content to repeat it. His foliage is hard and heavy.

Fig. 1 8. — The Burnt House on the Canal. By Fan der Hey den.

52 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

Roelant Roghman (1597-1686), though most of his plates are nominally
topographical, shows more feeling, if less skill. One set of plates by him
illustrates the Dutch postal system between the mother country and the
East Indies, and has therefore an historical interest.

But Roghman's chief claim on our concern is that he was the
faithful and beloved friend of Rembrandt. His etchings, however,
show no trace of Rembrandt's influence ; and he was by ten years
the elder man.

Like Seghers and like Ruisdael, Roghman was neglected and miserable
in his life, and died in an almshouse. One of his landscapes is in the
National Gallery.

VIII

The illustration on page 51 (Fig. 18) is from an etching which re-
presents a certain province of Dutch art, handled by several of the
painters with much success, but scarcely touched by the etchers.

Of this group, to whom architecture, whether in the spacious and
austere interiors of the Dutch churches, or the squares and ruddy brick
house-fronts of the towns, was the chief preoccupation, Jan van der
Heyden is the most famous and the best. He is also the one among
them who has etched. The illustration, though much reduced,
gives a fairly good idea of his work. Master of a precise and patient
pencil. Van der Heyden is not content till he has drawn in every
brick, every stone. And the marvel is, that in spite of his method, he
contrives to convey a certain spirit of largeness into his design. In fact,
though so minute in detail, he seems always to have kept his eye on the
whole. A pleasant temperate warmth of colour pervades his pictures,
the kind of light which on certain days suffuses old brick walls, as if dyed
in the sunshine of many summers : and that exquisite order, the almost
extravagant cleanliness of Dutch households, makes itself felt in these
glimpses of tree-bordered canals, and of trim house-fronts with their well-
proportioned windows.

Much of this colour persists even in the black and white of an etching
like that reproduced. It is the day after a fire, and a little crowd of
neighbours is gathered to look on the burnt remnant of the house. How

^

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 53

excellently are the groups and figures depicted ! This is not true etcher's
work ; but it is very skilful work, very good work, of its kind.

Neither Van der Heyden, nor any of the Dutch painters of architec-
ture, realised the capacity of outlines in stone or brick, attended by their
circumstance of light and shadow, to impress the imagination, to stir
emotion, as Meryon was to do later. But their work, by its soberness
and firm simplicity, wins us. In its own way, and in its own degree, it
will always give pleasure.

IX

From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth
century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally to
be expected : and among the several fine painters who now for the first
time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and Lu-
dolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger
painted, but did not etch marine subjects ; of Jan van de Capelle only
three indifferent plates are known ; and Willem van de Velde did not
etch at all.

Zeeman's real name was Nooms ; but his love of the sea procured
him early the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled
much, but worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born
in 1623.

Zeeman's etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of
Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They
passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture,
commissioned him to do them : and they were evidently popular. Such
work, nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a
pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose
his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher as
etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.

Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with
their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an end-
less fascination for him : for it is shipping, rather than the sea itself, which
he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable feeling, a simple and
effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of war move with royal

54 BUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENrEENTH CENTURT

stateliness ; and the battle-pieces have something of the magnificence one
imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in their way are plates like
the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at morning over the still sea, bathed
in a wash of limpid air and sunshine. Only in his clouds does Zeeman com-
pletely fail. Historically, too, these prints are interesting. Here, with
patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of showing the English ship of the line or
frigate, with her sails riddled, conquered at last, and with the Dutch
tricolour hoisted over the St. George's Cross. Nothing could more

^((tyrn^ •

Fig. 19. — Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38.

vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at
the time.

Backhuysen's etchings are later than Zeeman's, being all produced in
1 70 1, when the artist was seventy years old,^ and seven years before his
death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame
and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the
Tsar Peter the Great ; and from over much production his work suffered.
1 This assumes him to have been born 1631. Another date given is 1633.

DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 55

The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither
languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen's
drawings. It is the same with Zeeman : probably because the etching-
needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of foam and
the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No one, till
Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight of water
as the tides move it in deep seas ; but the easily agitated, breezy motion
of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a pleasant freshness
by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of the ship under sail,
crushing the water under her bows into foam.

X

So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists,
who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the
end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of
painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added
new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a few
years.

Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving
originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a second
and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.

Jan van de Velde,^ it seems probable, spent some years of his man-
hood in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any
rate, a number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer's manner. These
are so heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as
line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or
less important part in all Jan van de Velde's prints.

One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by
Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates
of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology being
at fault. Uytenbroeck's birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode has
pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist who died
in 1 61 2. The date must therefore be put back several years. Uyten-
broeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers. The

1 See supra: p. 41.

S6 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types, with
their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment of Italian
landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master's art.

Elsheimer's influence still persists strongly in Cornells Poelenburg, one
of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small, smoothly
glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in every

Fig. 20. — Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh. B. ly.

gallery. Poelenburg did not etch himself, but his friend Jan Gerritz
Bronchorst etched from his paintings and in his style, though with less
grace and elegance. We find here the beginnings of that school of
landscape, " Arcadian " as Bode calls it, which so soon received its fullest
and most perfect expression in the large and tranquil art of Claude.

'3>.'b.i'^'-'^f-

'Si.s/. zo&.s.

Fig. 21. — Landscape. By Both. B. 3.

58 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEFENTEENTH CENTURT

Pieter de Laer, of whose etchings of animals we shall say something
in the next chapter, etched one landscape at least in the delicate soft
manner of that master. And with him maybe associated Bartolomeus
Breenbergh, who lived in Rome from his twenty-first to his twenty-eighth
year, 1 620-1 627. He was married at Amsterdam in 1633 and died
there in 1659 or earlier ; but was at Rome again in the interval, during
which he published (1640) a set of very attractive little prints. Fig. 20
is an example of his work.

The same delicate, fine needle, and the same preference for the
picturesque, characterise the earlier etchings of Thomas Wyck. Later he
adopted a freer, broader style, and worked on a larger scale, but with less
success.

But the most conspicuous and important of this group is Jan
Both. Like Poelenburg, he was a man of Utrecht, where he was born
in 1 6 1 o and where he died in 1652. His portrait, taken in his later
days at home, is that of a stout, grave burgher. Quite young he left the
studio of his master Bloemart and travelled through France to Rome.
There the soft sunshine of Claude fascinated him and he began to follow
in the footsteps of that famous painter.

Every one knows the landscapes of Both, their smooth, rather insipid
grace, their premeditated balance of composition, their elegant monotony.
It is certain that -they were popular in Holland, whither they were
brought in ships from Italy to adorn the walls of wealthy buyers.
Probably in that day such painting of placid sunshine was a new thing ;
what we perceive to be a surface acquaintance with Nature savoured
almost of intimacy ; and doubtless Both's pretty and monotonous con-
ventions had then a permanent charm.

In his etchings, Both's weaknesses do not appear so strongly. And,
wisely, he did not produce many. Had there been more they would,
beyond doubt, have been precisely similar to what we have ; and from
mere fatigue at their monotony one would have rated them below their
worth.

As it is, the ten landscapes after his own designs are more than
enough to reveal Both's great limitations. Yet they are few enough
for us to enjoy them. For, after all, they are attractive and accomplished
etchings. From Claude, Both had learned how to produce, with a nice

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 59

management of the acid, an exquisite softness in his distances. The
atmosphere is limpid and bathed in sunshine, and the foregrounds
are suggested with that light touch and selection of detail which are
first requisites in an etching.

Here, again, it is only fair to the artist to judge him by the early
states of his work. The ruled lines defacing the sky which they are
meant to constitute, were added in the second state by the publisher. Of
that there can be little doubt. Unfortunately, Both's first states are
extremely rare.

Both's pupil, Willem de Heusch, approaches if he does not rival
his master. He is not independent enough, however, to merit special
notice.

Herman van Swanevelt, another artist whose birth-date must be put
further back than the traditional 1620,^ lived on to 1690, when he died at
Rome. His etchings are more considerable in number than in merit.
He began the school of reminiscences from Claude and Titian's land-
scapes which lingered on through paler and paler repetitions into the
eighteenth century, in the sad facility of Genoels and Van der Cabel and
Glauber. Never was art more bloodless and apathetic than in these
degenerate spoilers of a fine tradition.

1 A drawing of his is dated Paris^ 1623, And according to Bertolotti he was in
Rome by 1627.

THE ETCHERS OF PASTORAL

I

While landscape thus occupied the talent of so many Dutch painters,
a certain number struck out a branch apart, choosing subjects that may
briefly be called pastoral. For these men the foreground of cattle,
the goatherd or the shepherd with his flock, was of greater interest than
the background of often quite conventional scenery. Sometimes two or
more painters collaborated, and one painted the landscape while another
put in the animals.

And as in painting, so in etching. A certain group of men etched
nothing but animals, with now and then a landscape. Of these the chief
are Paul Potter, Claes Berchem, Adriaen van de Velde, Karel du Jardin.

This love of the domestic animals for their own sake in art seems
native and almost peculiar to Holland.

Many painters before this time had shown a remarkable love of
animals. From Benozzo Gozzoli to Bassano, individuals among the
Italian masters had introduced their favourites, wherever opportunity
off^ered, into sacred and historical compositions. And among the elder
contemporaries of the Dutchmen, Rubens, Snyders, and Velasquez had
painted dogs and horses as only they could paint them. But it is mainly
in hunting pieces, as servants or companions of man, that these painters
introduce animals ; cattle and sheep do not interest them.

It is the same with the great engravers who preceded the seventeenth-
century etchers. Diirer was undoubtedly very fond of animals and
engraved them frequently. And that singular master of the fifteenth
century, whose name we do not know, but who is generally called the
Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet from the fact that by far the fullest
collection of his prints is at Amsterdam, engraved dogs and horses with a

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 6i

freedom and a vivacity which Diirer never attained, and which were
in that period of Northern art unique. This master was long thought a
Dutchman, but the type of his faces, among other considerations, marks
him as a Swabian artist.

Yet in none of these men appears anything like the peculiar feeling
which in Potter, for instance, strikes so strong a note. The glory and

W-'^^

-— _ -e^r^ —

Fig. zz.—A Ram. By Berchem. ^.51.

excitement of the chase, so magnificently put on canvas by Rubens,
the relish of the boar's savage fury as the hounds hurl themselves at him,
are absolutely alien to that brooding intentness, as alert to catch every
curve in the attitude of cattle rising or lying down, as subtle to penetrate
to their mysterious non-human existence, so distant and aloof, pervading
the Dutchman's art. It is a mood which fuses the mind into the life it

62 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

watches, till the delight of cool running water to the cattle, as they
plunge in from the hot fields, is as intimately felt as the joy of battle
in their charging hounds, which is merely reflected human feeling, is felt
by the painters of the hunt.

Thus, while in Flanders painters and etchers like Jan Fyt carried on in
their animal pieces the tradition of Rubens and Snyders, a totally different
mode of animal painting and etching was springing up in Holland.

" Pastoral," it is most convenient to call it ; but it is not pastoral
in the same sense that the word has come to have, as applied to certain
types of poetry, whether the Idylls of Theocritus or the Eclogues of
Virgil. There, as with the early painters of animals, the human interest
is the preoccupying interest ; and the poet sings of the peasant's life in
the fields, his industries, his pleasures, his loves and quarrels, either from
native love and knowledge of that life, or in a desire no less genuine, if
•expressed through forms of more or less artificial colouring and outline,
for the real simplicity of the country. It is the herdsman, not his herd,
that is the pastoral poet's theme.

Now, for the first time, the artist disengages himself from the point
of view of man, and effaces himself before the dumb life he contemplates.

Already, in the engravings of Lucas van Leyden, who, by his early
maturity and his early death, his gentle nature and his exquisite skill,
seems to stand as a prototype of Paul Potter — a kind of foreshadowing
of this attitude appears. But not till the seventeenth century does the
vein begin to be developed. Then, by rapid degrees, not through any
single influence, but communicated imperceptibly as if '^' in the air," the
tradition grows.

II

Moses van Uytenbroeck and Claes Moeyart, whose etchings in the
style of Elsheimer were mentioned earlier, both produced a certain
number of purely pastoral plates. Of Uytenbroeck, we have a set of
groups of animals with backgrounds of Campagna landscape, which seem
to date from early in the century. And in the later manner of Moeyart,
dated 1638, is a group of cattle, sheep, and goats, under shady trees, in
a conventional landscape but with an unidealised Dutch herdsman.
Neither of these men etched cattle with much knowledge or spirit,

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 63

though Moeyart was an artist of many-sided talent, and painted pictures
that are excellent in their way.

Considerably better is an etching by Jan Gerritz Bleecker, also dated
1638. It is a group of cattle with a cowherd piping, conceived in the
pastoral vein of Potter's Shepherd. Here, already, the interest of the
artist begins to centre on the animals.

In Pieter de Laer this interest is still more frank. Born before 16 13,
de Laer found early a home in Italy, where his pictures were widely
appreciated. In the same year that we have just mentioned, 1638, he,
too, published a set of etchings of animals, in which attitude and action
are caught with far more vivacity and truth than hitherto, while the
design — though coarsely bitten — is light and free, compared with earlier
work. Another set of horses, which probably followed this, is the
prototype of studies like those of Potter's.

De Laer seems to have been one of the first Dutchmen to import
Dutch realism and the Dutch method of painting into Italy. The
Italians found in such art something fresh and vigorous. De Laer soon
gained immense vogue in the south, and had a corresponding influence
on his countrymen who came to work there.

Among these, probably, was Claes Pietersz Berchem. It is not
known for certain whether this artist visited Italy, but the internal
evidence of his pictures points strongly to the supposition that he did.
At any rate. Dr. Bredius is convinced of it, and for the present we may
safely accept the hypothesis on his authority.

Berchem was born at Haarlem in 1620, but was working at
Amsterdam before 1642, in which year his name occurs as member
of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. We also know that he was painted
by Rembrandt in 1647.^ ^2is this before or after his journey to Italy,
asks Bredius, and leaves the question open. The etchings, however, help
us towards an answer. 1 644 is the date on a set of cattle, with a milkmaid
for title ; also on the Return from the Fields (^U Homme Monte sur I'Ane)
(B. 5). These are etched with fine, delicate short strokes, in a manner
afterwards abandoned by Berchem. His most celebrated print, however,
the so-called " Diamond," or Joueur de Cornemuse (B. 4), and the
Fluting Shepherd (B. 6), are in the delicate early manner, and must be
^ Bredius gives the date as 1644.

64 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

assigned to the same date. Now, these are all unmistakably Italian in
character. If we may assume from Berchem's pictures that he had been
to Italy, we can assume it with equal safety from these etchings. We
may infer, then, that in 1647 he had already returned from Italy.
Berchem had many pupils, including Karel du Jardin, of whom we shall
speak later. He was evidently one of the popular artists of the day.
It is curious to compare the features of th^ man as they live in

w

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^mm

ATSriMTAIilA

kA cervttnfrcjjay -- ^■'

m S-tudio e1:,gir.t©.-

Fig. 23. — Title Piece. By Berchem. B. 35.

Ssa^^^^M

Rembrandt's magnificent portrait,^ with the characteristics of his art.
It is a face in which, for all its obvious strength, there is a want of
gentleness, fineness, impressibility ; a type of nature that succeeds easier
in life than in art : for the qualities which count for strength in the
world count often in art for weakness. And weak, in truth, is Berchem
the artist.

^ Exhibited last winter (1895) at Burlington House by the Duke of Westminster,

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 65

With his paintings we are not now concerned. Through them he
rivalled Both in popularity, and for facility and complacency it is hard
to say which bears the palm. Berchem is quite content to paint the
gnarled trunk of an oak, the hairy leaf of a burdock, the moss on a
stone and the stone itself, grass and leaping water, as of the same
polished, one might almost say, " slimy " texture. So long as he has
produced an agreeable composition, he is content.

In his etchings, this insensibility to the fine differences in the grain
and moulding of things, all that goes to give trees and rocks and plants
the charm and interest of character, is less obviously disclosed. At first
sight the plates have a pleasant look, they are touched by a cunning hand
which has attained no common skill in distributing light and in grouping.
But one has not to look at them long before wearying of their emptiness.
Berchem etches cows, and sheep, and goats, because they make pretty
groups in composition — they add to the effect of a pastoral landscape ;
but in themselves he shows no real interest whatever. His goats pose ;
his cows have a look of faded human sentiment ; his very sheep are
foolishly self-conscious. Though they are drawn with a certain spirit
and with a " touch " that mediocre artists and their admirers mistake for
an evidence of genius, the main truths in the lines of these animal
forms escape him.

In fine, Berchem was one of those men who have little of the artist
in them but skill of hand and facility in assimilation. Having invented
or concocted a recipe for producing a chosen class of subjects, he is
perfectly happy in repeating himself as long as the demand continues.
Berchem lived sixty-three years, and worked hard.

Ill

Who that has seen it can forget the portrait of Paul Potter by his
friend Van der Heist .^ The most beautiful portrait of that accomplished
painter, it has also an impalpable attraction that comes wholly from the
sitter, and of the many choice pictures in that choice gallery of the Hague,
the Mauritzhuis, its charm is not the least enduring.

The picture was painted in 1654, when Potter was already near death.
A certain drooping of the eyelids, a pallor of the face, indicate the

66 DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

fatigue which was overmastering his powers. He was not yet thirty
when he died, but his production had been immense. And in him,
as sometimes happens. Nature, as if by a kind of anticipation, had brought
the inborn gift to early flower, a compensation in some sort to the world
for its early loss.

It was at Enkhuisen, a village on the extreme point of jutting land

Fig. 24^.— The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. i.

that looks out upon the Zuider Zee, that Paul Potter was born, Nov. 20,
1625. But only his early boyhood was passed there, for in 1631 his father
Pieter, also a painter, removed to Amsterdam. From his father the boy
first learnt to draw, and perhaps from him also inherited the love of
animals which was so strong in him. M. van Westrheene, in his life of
Potter, conjectures that he was influenced by two artists, Aelbert Klomp

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 67

and Govert Camphuisen, who painted pictures of the kind that Potter
made famous. But these men appear to have begun painting too late
for this to have been possible. Dr. Bredius thinks Claes Moeyart was a
more likely source of influence. It is known also that at a certain period,
about 1642, Potter was in the studio of Jacob de Wet at Haarlem. But
whoever may have taught him, his early ripeness and the strong sincerity
of his nature assure us that Potter derived little from any teacher. With
vivid preferences, a habit of subtle observation, and an extraordinary
skill of hand, he would have been content to repeat no master's formulas,
however popular. His first signed picture and his first signed etching
bear the same date, 1643. ^^ ^^^ eighteen years old. The etching
(B. 14) shows already skill in grouping and a hitherto unknown know-
ledge in etching of animal forms. Its fault is over-much elaboration.
Three years later Potter was at Delft, and there in 1647, ^^ ^^^ ^g^ of
twenty-two, painted his most famous picture. The Toung Bull^ now at
the Hague. It was one of the pictures carried off by Napoleon, and of
all those masterpieces from all countries which were restored by France in
1 8 1 5, this was esteemed the second in value. Since then its fame has fallen,
but with all its obvious demerits it has suffered more — to borrow an
expression applied by Mr. Swinburne to Byron's Address to Ocean in Childe
Harold — from praise than from dispraise. In 1649 Potter removed to
the Hague, and it was here that he met his wife, Adriana Balcheneynde,
daughter of an architect in that town. They were married in the fol-
lowing year. His marriage did not stop the artist's ceaseless industry,
but rather increased it by his desire to provide for his household.
Thinking perhaps to find more patrons there than at the Hague, he was
induced by Dr. Tulp, the professor of anatomy, famous from Rembrandt's
picture, to come to Amsterdam. In a letter by a Frenchman who was in
Amsterdam at this time, looking for pictures on behalf of Queen Christina
of Sweden, we have a glimpse of Potter in his studio, working with pro-
digious assiduity. The Frenchman found Potter at work on a painting
which had already cost him. five months of continuous toil. " Rien ne se
peut voir plus curieusement fait," says the Frenchman. When we con-
sider that the painter produced considerably over one hundred pictures
in his brief life, it is amazing to realise his powers of work. He was
only to live two years longer.

E 2

68 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEE.NTH CENTURT

IV

The etched work of Potter that has come down to us consists of
eighteen plates ; not many, considering how prohfic he was as a painter,
but all the plates are important.

Taking them in chronological order, we have first the etching already
spoken of, done when the artist was only eighteen. The Cowherd (B. 14).
In 1649, ^^^ years after its original execution, the plate was reduced in
length by Potter and the new date affixed. A reedy hollow, with a
pool, was substituted for the group of three cows at the left ; and an
alteration was also made in the feet of one of the cows descending the
hill on the right. The etching, we know, was popular. For, after it
had been cut down, it was issued by at least three publishers in turn ; by
F. de Wit, by P. Schenk, and by an anonymous publisher who effaced
the two former names. Probably in the first instance it was issued by
Potter himself, as was the series of cattle published in 1650.

Full of skill in grouping and knowledge of form as this plate is, it
is certainly inferior to the later etchings. Already, by the next year.
Potter was able to produce a print. The Shepherd (B. 15) which surpasses
it in every way, and which to more sound drawing adds a pastoral atmo-
sphere of lightness and sunshine and repose.

Berchem, Potter's senior by five years, was at Haarlem in 1642,
when Potter, as we know, was in De Wet's studio. We may assume,
therefore, that the two met. Perhaps it was in emulation of Berchem's
set of etchings, published in 1 644, that Potter produced his Cowherd and
Shepherd. If so, he succeeded in surpassing them.

There now occurs an interval of some years in Potter's etched work.
His next publication, so far as we know, was the series of eight plates
(B. I — 8) representing cattle, and beginning with the fine Bull (Fig. 24).
This title-piece is dated 1650, so that we may refer the production of
the plates to 1649, and possibly the year or two immediately preceding.
However, the fact that 1 649 is the date of the revised Cowherd seems to
point to Potter's having resumed his interest in etching in that year, and
to his having executed the whole set after the re-publication of that plate.

cq

c^

70 DUrCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

He would hardly issue an immature work, when he had by him much
more triumphant specimens of his skill.

As studies of animals, these eight little plates are as good as they can
be. But they are not more than studies. As we saw, it had become a
fashion for artists to etch such studies, and so spread their fame among
those who could not buy their pictures. This at once suggests the reason
of Potter's deficiency as an etcher. Strictly speaking, he was not an
etcher at all. He used etching because it was the favourite medium for
multiplying sketches of his time. But one feels that the burin would
have been the apter instrument for that sure and cunning hand. There
is a deliberation, a want of immediacy in these designs, that are not of
the born etcher. Between the treatment of cattle in these etchings and
their treatment in line-engraving by Lucas van Leyden there is no
essential difference.

But we must take things as they are, and as specimens of subtle and
certain drawing, the plates are astonishing. The attitudes and move-
ments of oxen have never been better given. But it is not in mere
correctness of drawing that Potter excels his rivals. Berchem was only
interested in animals so far as they helped him in the composition of a
landscape, but with Potter they were the main interest, he loved them for
themselves. And in expressing that vague inarticulate soul that is in the
look of cattle, that mildness and acquiescence which are in their attitudes
and motions, he is a master, greater than any.

There is something in Dutch landscape, so 'open, tranquil, large,
which seems to look for the presence of these peaceful creatures as its
natural complement ; their spirit is so entirely in harmony with the spirit
of their pastures. Not accidental, perhaps, nor without its due effect,
was the Dutch strain of blood in the American poet who seems to have
first suggested in words what Potter expressed in art —

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain, or halt in the leafy shade,

What is it that you express in your eyes ?

It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life, ^

^ Compare also a little-known piece of Whitman's " The Ox-Tamer," in Autumn
Rivulets^ which ends :

Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them . . .

I confess I envy only his fascination — my silent, illiterate friend.

Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,

In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 71

Like Whitman, Potter is possessed by the fascination of animals ; he, too,
*' stands and looks at them long and long." And with a feeling so
reticent that its intensity escapes a superficial notice, he puts into these
etched lines the breath that moves their bodies, and the dumbness that
looks out of their eyes.

Two years after the publication of the cattle series, appeared the five
larger plates of horses. These have less the air of being mere etched
studies for pictures ; they seem to have been made for their own sake,
and make a kind of history, such as Tolstoi in the strange story of
Kohlstomir has written ; a kind of Horse's Progress.

The fourth (B. 12), the Two Plough Horses^ is reproduced on Plate
III. This and the Horse Whinnying (B. 10) seem to the writer the finest
of the series, and the finest of all Potter's etchings. The work is entirely
simple and unaffected : there is immense skill, but no apparent conscious-
ness of it, still less parade of it. Nothing adventitious is brought in, no
artifice is used of setting or surrounding : bathed in light and air, on
their own level pastures, the horses stand clearly outlined. But what a
feeling of morning freshness, of careless and free joy, is in the breeze that
tosses the mane of the whinnying horse, and makes him tremble with felt
vitality ! It is a triumph of the untamed energy of life. How different
a picture from this of the two tired creatures, set free from their heavy
labour at the plough, but no longer rejoicing in their freedom, except as
a respite. By some magic of sympathy Potter makes us feel the ache of
their limbs, stiff with fatigue, just as he expresses the patience in their
eyes. Yet tender as is the feeling of the drawing, it is so restrained that
" pity " seems a word out of place. It is rather the simple articulation
by means of sensitive portrayal, of an else inarticulate pathos. Such
drawing as this is in a true sense imaginative.

The studies of dogs, reproduced in Fig. 25 are an admirable example
of Potter's gift. It is interesting to compare them with a drawing by
Berchem, also in the British Museum, representing a hunting scene, with
the boar at bay and dogs springing at him or struggling in the leash.
Unfortunately, it has been impossible to find room for a reproduction of

72 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

it ; but whoever looks at it will perceive at once a vital difference
between such drawing and that of Potter's. Berchem sketches the scene
in a rapid, summary manner, using a few strokes only for each figure. It
is Rembrandt's method ; but what a difference in the result ! There is
a sketch by Rembrandt of a lion springing at and seizing a man on
horseback. Only a few lines are used, but the whole action of each
figure is expressed perfectly. Berchem thinks to do the like, but his

Fig, 26 — The Cow. By Paul Potter. ^.3.

lines are all just beside the truth. His mind, which has not sufficient
love for things to brood upon their forms, is incapable of the swift act
of sympathy necessary to seize their movement in action ; and its power
of reproduction, by nature probably a delicate and precise faculty, has
been warped and blunted by the man's satisfaction in his own cleverness,
till it gives an inaccurate image.

Berchem's work is therefore false, and deserves to be called un-
imaginative. It convinces only the incompetent spectator of things.

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 73

Potter's work is never faJse, and its imaginative quality is rather
obscured than absent in his poorer productions. The fact is that, having

Fig. z-j.— Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. z.

given the vital image of an animal, he could not resist the temptation of
adding to it non-essential facts. He had not that transcendent intelli-
gence which instinctively practises the economy called " style." But it

74 DUTCH ErCHERS OF THE SEVENrEENTH CENTURT

was on the side of intelligence, certainly not of tenderness or sympathy,
that he was lacking. He sat down to Nature's feast, and the delight
of his eyes seduced him.

Before leaving this plate of the Two Plough Horses^ we may notice a
point which does not seem to have been remarked before, that there was
apparently a kind of tradition of subjects among the animal painters and
etchers. This plate was published, in the set of horses, in 1652. But in
a set of etchings published the year before, 1651, by the artist Dirk
Stoop, this identical subject appears. The horses stand towards the left
of the plate in precisely the position of Potter's horses.

Stoop, though as good as many of the Dutch etchers, was no
consummate draughtsman, and his horses are not to be compared with
Potter's. Yet they do not look in the least like a copy, while the dates
discountenance such a supposition. If there be any direct relation
between the two etchings it must have been Potter who took a hint from
Stoop. But it seems equally likely to suppose that the subject, two
plough-horses released from labour, was a traditional one. The life of
cattle and horses does not offer more than a certain number of typical
pictures, and hence the tendency of painters and etchers to repeat the
same subject, always with an eye to improving on the best yet done ; just
as earlier painters would choose a Saint Sebastian as the typical subject in
which to display their power of painting the human figure. In the
same way Potter's fifth etching of horses, where he depicts the forlorn
death that overcomes the worn-out beast, has its prototype in a similar
etching by Pieter de Laer, and the subject is repeated by Du Jardin.

The etcher mentioned above. Dirk Stoop, led a wandering life, went
to Lisbon, became painter to the Court there, and, being brought over
to England with the Infanta, worked also in London. His etchings
of horses and dogs are less good than those of the court fetes ^ processions,
and spectacles at Lisbon, at Hampton Court, and at London.

VI

If Potter did not produce many etchings himself, Marcus de Bye,
who etched in most cases after Potter's designs, was comparatively
prolific. He produced over a hundred prints. Some of these, pur-

1

al

.»•>»»
'» »',»•>

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENrH CENTURl" 75

porting to be after drawings by Potter, are studies, not of cattle and
sheep or horses, but of wild animals — lions, tigers, and wolves. If these
could be taken as fairly representative of Potter's work, we should have
to infer that Potter was far less fortunate in his drawing of wild creatures
than of tame. And it would be unlike Potter to have made such studies
except from the life. De Bye, however, lost a great deal of the subtlety
and life of his original in working from Potter's sketches. Karel du
Jardin is a more independent artist. Born at Amsterdam in 1622, he
was trained in Berchem's studio, but went to Italy still young. There
he found De Laer's pictures in great esteem, and developed a manner
and a choice of subject very similar to his. Some time before 1656 he
returned to Holland, and remained at the Hague till 1659, when he
remc'ved to Amsterdam. There he painted some fine portraits, quite
unlike his ordinary pictures in style, being stirred to emulation pre-
sumably by the superb Corporation pieces then produced there. In
1675 ^^ started again for Italy, but died three years later in Venice.

The British Museum possesses a red-chalk drawing of Du Jardin by
himself. It is an agreeable portrait, but the face does not suggest much
power.

Though a pupil of Berchem, Du Jardin in his etchings follows Potter
much more than that artist. Dr. Lippmann, in fact, speaks of him as
" Schuler Potters," but the expression must only mean a follower, not a
pupil, of Potter.

Twenty-four of Du Jardin's etchings are dated, the dates being 1652,
1653, 1655, 1656, 1658, 1659, 1660, and 1675. Only one piece belongs to
the last year, while the other years have two, three, four, and five pieces
each. So that, whenever the undated etchings were produced, the bulk
of Du Jardin's work on copper may safely be assigned to the eight years
1652 — 1660; that is to say, to the first years after his return to
Holland, and possibly to the last year or two of his first stay in
Italy. Most of the etchings are from sketches made in Italy. Fig. 27
is an example, and is a good specimen of Du Jardin as an etcher. There
is nothing very original about such art, but its agreeable qualities will
always give pleasure. Du Jardin, in his drawing and in his painting, has
a light and happy touch ; yet beyond such craftsman's merits there is

76 DUTCH ErCHERS OF THE SEVENrEENTH CENTURT

little to be said for him. He seems to have painted and etched what was
the fashion with a facile grace and commendable skill, but without any
strong inborn love of the subjects he handled.

As an etcher he is of the same order as Potter. A good many of the
prints are pastoral landscapes ; these are less good than those in which
animals are the main subject. To turn from some of these small land-

Fig. 28.— Pigs. By X. Du Jardin. B. 15.

scape studies of Du Jardin's, in which nothing is seized strongly while
everything is made a little dull, to an etching of Rembrandt's, say Six's
Bridge^ is to receive a most vivid impression of Rembrandt's immense
superiority. Rembrandt's light sketch is instinct with style ; Du Jardin,
in these prints at any rate, has no style at all. Such etchings as that of
the pigs (Fig. 28) are of far higher quality.

DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT 77

Another etcher from Amsterdam, Adriaen van de Velde, came strongly
under Potter's influence. Bern in 1635-36 Van de Velde, like Du Jardin,
studied with Berchem. It has sometimes been assumed that he, too,
followed up his studies with a journey to Italy, but Dr. Bredius decides
against this supposition. There is Italian scenery in many of Adriaen's
pictures, but there were plenty of fellow artists to borrow materials for
such backgrounds from. And with him the landscape is never much more
than a background. His interest lay more in his cattle and his figures
than in their surrounding. It is known, indeed, that he inserted figures
for several of the landscape painters, including Ruisdael and Hobbema.

Van de Velde's etchings are nearly all of cattle, and here he sometimes
comes near Potter in drawing, while in management of the acid he is
decidedly Potter's superior. His earliest dated etching of 1653 is a large
plate, which though not powerful has a real beauty. The cow which
forms the centre of the composition is almost identical with that in the
foreground of Potter's Cowherd. Perhaps this was deliberate imitation,
and if so, is evidence of the recognition Potter's knowledge of animal
form commanded, but it may equally well have been an accident. The
whole plate is bathed in drowsy sunshine, with which the man asleep by
the roadside, drawn with an admirable suggestion of repose, harmonises
well. This print is one of those which must be seen in the silvery
earliest state to be appreciated.

The original design for this plate is in the British Museum. In the
same collection is also the design for The Cow Lying Down (B. 2). On
the same sheet of paper is a study of part of the cow in a slightly
altered position, and this has been adopted in the etching. Except for
this insignificant change, the two etchings are copied from the pencil
studies with entire fidelity. And probably this was always Van de Velde's
practice, as it was with Potter and Du Jardin. It is, therefore, strictly
speaking, incorrect to describe the drawings as being made for the
etchings. The studies were etched simply that they might be
multiplied.

None of the studies of cattle, etched by the Dutch masters, surpasses
Van de Velde's set of three, numbered 11, 12, and 13 in Bartsch. The
second is reproduced (Plate IV.). Potter never produced an effect so

78 DUTCH ETCHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURT

delicate and so rich in colour as Van de Velde in these three etchings.
At the same time there is no ostentation of skill ; rather there seems a.

Fig. 29. — J Goat. By A. Van de Velde. B. 16.

kind of modesty in the workmanship that is winning. Equally excellent
is the charming little study of a goat (Fig. 29).

Van de Velde, if not a great artist, was a true one, and his early death,
at the age of thirty-seven was a loss to the art of Holland.

INDEX

Altdorfer, 12

Amsterdam Cabinet, Master of, 60

Elsheimer, 13, 14, 37, 55
Everdingen, A. van, 44 — 46

Backhuysen, 53, 54, 55

Bartsch, 5, 23

Bassano, 60

Bega, 26, 31, 32

Berchem, 60, 63—65, 68, 71, 72

Beresteyn, C. van, 50

Bleecker, 63

Bode, 13, 55» 56

Both, A. 13

Both, J. 57, 58, 65 •

Bray, J. de, 18

Bredius, 8, 37, 63, (>■], 77

Breenbergh, 57

Bronchorst, 56

Brouwer, 21

Bye, M. de, 74, 75

Cabel, A. van der, 48, 58
Callot, 12, 13
Campagnola, 35
Camphuisen, 67
Capellc, J. van de, 43, 53
Caravaggio, 13
Claude, 13, 55, 56, 57
Constable, 49
Cornells Cornelisz, 18
Crome, 49, 50

Fyt, J, 62

Genoels, 58
Glauber, 58
Goltzius, 18, 39
Goudt, Count de, 37
Goya, 32

Goyen, J. van, 42, 43
Gozzoli, 60
Groot, Hofstcde de, 8
Grotius, 9

Haeften, N. van, 31
Hals, D., 18
Hals, F., 6, 18, 20
Hamerton, 6, 30
Heist, B. van der, 65
Heusch, W. de, 58
Heyden, J. van der, 52, 53
Hirschvogel, 12
Hobbema, 6, 49, 50, 77
Honthorst, 13
Hooch, P. de, 6, g, 28
Hopfer, 12

Du Jardin, 60, 64, 74, 75
Diirer, 11, 35, 60
Dusart, 31, 34
Dutuit, 24, 26, 38

Keene, 31
Klomp, dd
Koehler, 40
Koninck, P. de, 39

8o

INDEX

Laer, P. de, 57, 63, 74

Lautensack, 12

Leblond, 39, 40

Le Ducq, 5

Leech, 31

Leyden, Lucas van, 62, 70

Lippmann, 43, 75

Matham, 42
Metsu, 9
Miel, 13
Moeyart, 62, 67
Molyn, P. de, 42, 43

Naiwincx, 50

Ostade, A. van, 6, 17 — 32

Pater, Walter, 9, 38

Patinir, 35, 37

Picart, 25

Potter, 6, 60, 62, 63, 65—75, 77

Rembrandt, 5, 6, 13, 15, 24, 28, 38, 63,

72, 76
Roghman, 50, 52
Rousseau, Th., 49
Rubens, 11, 14, 15, 35, 60, 61
Ruisdael, 6, 7, 46—50, 77

Seghers, H., 36 — 40
Snyders, 60, 62
Spinoza, 9

Steen, 6, 9
Stoop, 74
Swanevelt, 13, 48, 58

Terborch, 9, 42
Theocritus, 62
Titian, 35
Tolstoi, 71

Uden, L. van, 35
Uytenbroeck, M. van, 55, 62

Vadder, L, de, 35

Vandyck, 15

Velasquez, 1 3, 60

Velde, A. van de, 60, 77, 78

Velde, E. van de, 18,41

Velde, J. van de, 41, 55

Velde, W. van de, 44, 53

Verboom, 50

Vermeer, 6, 28

Vlieger, S. de, 43, 53

Vosmaer, 17

Waterloo, 5, 38, 48, 50
Watteau, 9
Westrheene, van, 66
Wet, J. de, 67, 68
Whitman, 70
Willigen, van der, 8, 17
Wyck, 57

Zeeman, 53, 54

14 DAY USE

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