2. The Butch School. Turning now to Holland, we find the Dutch School — no longer an offshoot of that of Flanders — occupying the middle of the seventeenth century an important independent position, its masters painting chiefly familiar subjects of every-day life, landscapes, sea-pieces and battle- scenes — large historic and allegoric compositions being seldom attempted. Before we come to the great Dutch Revival un Rembrandt, we must notice one master who, when regarded historically, stands almost alone. Frans Hals (1584 — 1666), the celebrated portrait- painter, is supposed to have studied under Carel van Mander, the painter and historian. In 1611, he was in Haarlem : and in that town he passed a not too reputable life, and there his best works are still to be found. Whatever Hals's private life may have been, few painters have equalled him in his branch of art. He stands pre- eminent among the Dutch portrait-painters. Among the best of his paintings we may mention the Portrait of him- self and his wife Lysbeth, in the Amsterdam Museum ; a Young man with a flat cap, and Two Boys singing, both in the Cassel Gallery ; the Banquet of the Officers of the Civic Guard, and the Regents and Begentes of the hospital, in which he died, painted when he was eighty years of age, all in the Haarlem Museum ; a Portrait of Hille Bobbe, of Haarlem, in the Berlin Museum; and lastly, three por- traits in the Dresden Gallery. Numerous good pictures by
