of Israels and Matthew Maris are ou view at the French Gallery in Pall Mall. The visitor whose associations with Dutch art-abstraction made of the great names of Rembrandt and of Franz Hals-were with the minute and terre-à-terre painting which delighted our grandfathers, the painting of the Maeses, the Metsus, the Terburgs, the Teniers, would find it difficult to believe that the modern "Hague school" had its birth in the same country. But if he wished to be more "modern" still he would go on to watch the imaginative vein which distinguished Dutch painting in the sixties and the seventies toppling over into pure fantasy in the later work of Matthew Maris, and at last into something like insanity in Vincent van Gogh. He might be tempted then to conclude that imagination was too dangerous a merchandise for the land of dunes and canals, were it not that the same type as Van Gogh's, of halfinsanity in art, is nowadays very fully represented by other names, is common in certain Paris exhibitions, and is in no way a stranger to some of our own. As certain as that the influenza found its way into Western Europe in '89, the year of the French Exhibition, is it that within the last ten years whole classes or schools of artists have been attacked by an epidemic of fantasy, an itch to outrival one the other in extravagance which seems not compatible with mental equilibrium.

With this latest phase, the Van Gogh phase of Dutch art, we need not at present concern ourselves. We turn to Mr. Marius' pages first to find traces of a natural transition from the painters of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century and those who are our contemporaries, or who have but lately left us. There are not many such signs. The latest of the older Dutch "masters," meaning by that

painters of whom the world knows aught, died before the middle of the eighteenth century. When Mr. Marius' book opens on the art of the nineteenth we find that English influence counts for a great deal in the painting of Holland. Charles Howard Hodges, whom Mr. Marius speaks of as a "painter of great importance" in Holland at the beginning of this century, was himself an Englishman by birth. His work bears most resemblance to that of Lawrence, of whom, if he has not the charm, he is almost the equal in the "easy, fluent modelling" which Lawrence inherited from his greater predecessors. Another Dutch painter

was as well known here as in Holland in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. This was Jan Willem Pieneman, who painted a Battle of Waterloo in 1819-22. During the greater part of this period he was the guest of the Duke of Wellington and made in England studies for most of his figures. If this picture makes a concession to Dutch sentiment in that in the foreground we see the Prince of Orange borne wounded from the battlefield, the glory of the work falls on the Duke, the central figure, who looks "like an equestrian statue" rather than a commander in the thick of a battle. Engravings of this picture were very frequently to be seen in England half a century ago. "It would be impossible," says Mr. Marius, "to write the history of Dutch painting in the nineteenth century without naming Jan Willem Pieneman as its founder, even though it were only because he was the valued master of Josef Israels." These last words, however, show where in the author's opinion lies the chief interest of the book before us. We may therefore pass over the respectable if commonplace portraits of the two Pienemans (Jan Willem the father and Nicolas the son) and the hardly respectable religious pictures of

Only three classes of intermediate Dutch art may claim a moment's attention. The first is the work of Ary Scheffer, a painter so celebrated in his day. so slightly esteemed in ours. Scheffer was German by origin, and his work and fame lay chiefly in Paris. Heine's saying that Scheffer "painted with snuff and green soap" is now the thing best remembered about him, but in fact this phrase appears in the midst of a highly laudatory notice. "His enemies say that he paints only with snuff and green soap: I do not know how far they do him an injustice." That is of course a characteristic touch of Heine's sly malice. But there is no doubt that Scheffer excited a genuine enthusiasm in this critic. In the "Allgemeiner Augsburger" of 1831 Heine devoted a chapter to the praise of "Gretchen at the Spinningwheel," Scheffer's most celebrated picture, and his "Faust." The large "Gretchen at the Fountain" and the certainly beautiful "Paolo and Francesca" by Scheffer are in the Wallace Collection. The National Gallery possesses his "Augustine and Monica," the gift of Mrs. Robert Hollond. Marius says that the women so doted on Scheffer that it became an act of courage to publish any hostile comment on his work. This work is at once so purely literary and so ultrasentimental as to be out of sympathy with our realistic age. Yet it has its place alongside of, and on the whole superior too, the product of the Munich

The two other classes of Dutch pictures intermediate between the earliest nineteenth-century work and The Hague school, which cannot be passed over, both seem inspired directly by the work of the seventeenth century. One is a series of landscapes of varying but distinguished merit, in which much of the old tradition survives. There are landscapes with cows by H. van de Sande Bokhuizen, seascapes by Schotel and Meijer, trees by B. C. Koekkoek and Bilders the elder (John). In one case, "The Old Mill," by Nuyen, we seem to light upon original genius; but Nuyen died in his twenty-seventh year and the hopes which he raised were unfulfilled. Behind him, but still more, much more, behind all the others seem to stand greater shades, the Hobbemas, the de Konincks, the Van der Veldes, the Cuyps, the Van Goyens. In like manner the de Hooghs, the Metsus, the Terburgs stand behind the pictures of another modern school (our third class) of small genre subjects and interiors, the doorkijkjes, to use the name given to a special type of vista picture showing two open doors and the court between. The names associated with this ancient-modern genre art in Holland are Hubert van Hove, Petrus Franciscus Grieve, and David Bles. An earlier

production, ranging from the beginning of the century, came from a large family, the Van Os, whose work extends into the sixties. With Auguste Allebé (1838-80), especially in his "Well-watched Child," we seem suddenly to awake in a new era.

We have seen that the author of "Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century" not only, as every patriot is bound to do, attributes a distinctive character to the painting of his countrymen, forming out of it a "school" in Professor Middleton's widest acceptation of the term; but that even in recent years he distinguishes "The Hague," "the Amsterdam," and other schools within the narrow limits of his country. He is half conscious that there seems hardly room for such "in our little Holland," but urges that in general Amsterdam and The Hague differed so greatly in their methods of painting that the distinction is justified. And then he goes on to claim for this Hague school, and to claim justly, that its name expresses "the loftiest point reached by Dutch painting since the seventeenth century." We have in England played with the name of "school" even in recent years: we have had our St. John's Wood school and such like. Almost the only legitimate application of the term with us is to the Norwich school-that is, if really distinctive character and influence be demanded. And that takes us back to the beginning of last century. In France, however, in the fifties and sixties had come into being an artistic movement and a body of production which more than any others of this century seem to justify the use of the word school as applied to their authors. This it need not be said is the Barbizon school. What is not easy to determine is whether Mr. Marius' "Hague school" is to be regarded as a movement by itself, or whether it were not really an outgrowth from Barbi

zon, an offshoot of the one great and distinctive school of modern France.

The great men of the revival of a high art in Holland are Josef Israëls, the three Marises, Anton Mauve (all these names are well known in England), and the less known Bosboom and the younger (Albert) Bilders, who are also less distinctly "Haguean" in their workmanship. But the last of these (he died at twenty-four before he had time to realize his ambition) was perhaps the earliest to stretch out toward that new tone of coloring, that point of departure which definitely turned its back upon the brown-sauce tradition of ancient Dutch art: "he gave the formula" for a quality of coloration which had not yet come into existence." "I am looking" (Bilders wrote) "for a tone which we call colored gray, that is a combination of all colors, however strong, harmonized in such a way that they give the impression of a warm and fragrant gray." And again: "To preserve the sense of the gray in the most powerful green is amazingly difficult, and whoever discovers it will be a happy mortal." This indeed was written in 1860; and as Corot was at the time sixty-five years of age it sounds no remarkable discovery. But there seems no reason to suppose that Bilders knew Corot's work. For in the same year the painter speaks of the revelation which were to him a group of French painters (including several of the Barbizon school) whose work had just been exhibited at Brussels, "a revelation," adds our author, "which the painters who came after him received in the same manner":

"I have seen pictures," he wrote, speaking of Brussels, "of which I had never dreamed and in which I found all that my heart desires, all that I nearly always miss in the Dutch painters. Troyon, Courbet, Diaz, Dupré, Robert Fleury have made a great im

pression on me. I am a good Frenchman, therefore; but, as Simon Van den Berg says, it is just because I am a good Frenchman that I am a good Dutchman, since the great Frenchmen of to-day and the great Dutchmen of the past have much in common. Unity, restfulness, earnestness, and, above all, an inexplicable intimacy with nature are what struck me most in these pictures. There were certainly also a few good Dutch pieces, but, generally speaking, when you place them next to the great Parisians, they lack that mellowness, that quality which, so to speak, resembles the deep tones of an organ. And yet this luxurious manner came originally from Holland, from our steaming, fat-colored Holland! They were courageous pictures; there was a heart and a soul in them."

In the passage quoted from Bilders there is no mention made of the greatest among the Barbizon men. But the work of the greatest Hague painter, Josef Israëls, suggests more than that of anyone else the influence of Jean François Millet. contemporaries. Israëls was yet later than Millet in finding his proper vocation. "Israëls first realized himself," writes an admirer, Max Lieberman, "at an age when most painters have already produced their best work; and had he had the misfortune to die at forty, Holland would have been unable to boast of one of her greatest sons."

The two were almost

Zandvoort, a fishing-village, was Israëls' Barbizon. He went there for his health, and stayed in the house of a shipwright, whose domestic life he shared. "Here, far from studios, painters, and the precepts of his masters, he began to observe for himself the daily routine of the fisherman's life"; even as Millet was in Barbizon observing the round of existence among his peasants. It is not possible to believe, however, that these two inspirations went on side by side quite

independently; as by 1856 much of Millet's work had been given to the world. We cannot then credit Israëls with the same sort of genius, with being the same sort of epochal man that was the Barbizon painter. But in many points of technique the Dutchman has the advantage. Israëls' coloring is not always satisfying; in many cases his pictures have a voulu dulness; in others-as, say, in his "Grace before Meat"-there is something of weakness in the yellows and blues. At times, however, he shows himself a really great colorist; and no better proof of this could be given than the "Dutch Fisher-girl" at this moment (while we write) on exhibition in the French Gallery. The complexion of the girl reaches the high-water mark of color-handling; such as we see indeed in the best work of the English Millais, but was beyond the reach of Millet of Barbizon.

The revolt against literary art and against the criticism of art from a purely literary standpoint (such as Ruskin was guilty of when he dealt with Pre-Raphaelite painting) has carried the present generation too far in the opposite direction. We are apt to ignore not alone the literary but the intellectual element in painting. Nothing, on the other hand, could better illustrate what the words "intellectual element" mean than a comparison of the work of the elder Israëls with that of Millet. The subjects chosen by the two artists seem exactly parallel. one has his wood-cutters, sowers, winnowers, potato-gatherers, shepherds and shepherdesses, his gleaners: once or twice, but most rarely, he steps into an almost lyrical art as in his "Angelus." Israëls has his fisher-folk, sometimes abroad, oftenest in their cottage homes, at grace, crouched before the fire; his philosopher with a guttering candle; his women sitting idle; his women making pancakes; and

The

in such pictures as "The Drowned Fisherman" he becomes in his way lyrical too. Yet the greatness of result in Millet is wanting in Israëls; and it is difficult to say where lies the defect in the Dutch painter. There is a something of intellectual power, something of intense sincerity which we miss in Israëls. The result is that while we enjoy each individual work of Israëls', the cumulative effect of the whole is wanting. There is no epic grandeur here as in the Frenchman. One felt that when brought face to face with a tolerably large selection of Josef Israëls' work in the French Exhibition of 1900. One felt, too, that his smaller canvases were the best; at that exhibition some were very large, and left on the memory an impression of gloomy space round some one figure, which was rather exaggerated than deeply impressive. On the other hand, as we have said, Israëls is capable of high achievement as a colorist, and in mere technical excellence each picture taken in itself is often a wonder. Take, for example, the "Grace before Meat," as that is now on exhibition in the French Gallery. Though the color-scheme leaves something to be desired, the atmosphere and lighting of the cottage are given with extraordinary subtlety. In no way inferior is "The Sexton and his Wife," which was formerly in the collection of Mr. Staats Forbes. Among Mr. Marius' illustrations are "The Woman at the Window," from one of the galleries in Rotterdam, and "When a Body Grows Old" in a private Dutch collection. The former is one of the most Milletlike of Israëls' peasant poses: it is full of character and individuality. The second, on the other hand, like "The Philosopher," at present in the National Gallery, is, so far as the figure goes, rather conventional: it is a study of surroundings or ensemble-a picture in fine not a subject.

This is of course (as we have already said) in accordance with modern theory; in accordance with the principle on which Willem Maris, though he is a modern Paul Potter, said, "I never paint cows, only effects of light." And if it were replied that Josef Israëls' effects of light are too often of interiors and have a certain monotony, there exist also by him-putting aside his more dramatic fishing scenes -some very charming idylls of out-ofdoor color, such as his "Children of the Sea" in the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam. His gamut therefore is wide. And if we cannot compare Israëls with such a unique genius as Millet, whose name has power to weld into an imposing whole the painters of the "Barbizon school," and serves to raise that school above the level of common experience in modern art, nevertheless Israëls, along with the great men his contemporaries, the Marises and so forth, makes up a group or school who hold their own against any other modern group in Europe save the Barbizon: hold their own against (say) the plein-air painters, or those who gathered about the atelier of Manet on Montmartre or have followed the steps of Monet.

Mr. Marius does not fully include Jacob Maris in his "Hague school." We have already said that there is something factitious in that classification. No doubt the reason why the author of "Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century" wishes to keep Israëls and Jacob Maris apart is that they have been rather like rivals in their influence. As the German students used to dispute over the rival merits of Michael Angelo and Raphael, or as men have done with Velasquez and Rembrandt, "so in our day," says our author, "they did and do over Josef Israëls and Jacob Maris":

"Israëls was the first to give us," he goes on, "life and living man in con