How to Study Pictures.
By Charles H. Caffin.
A series of articles for the older girls and boys who read “St. Nicholas.”
Fifth Paper
Comparing Van Dyck with Frans Hals.
When the Emperor Charles V abdicated, in 1553, he allotted Austria and Germany to Ferdinand I, and Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip II. The rule of Spain was in one way beneficial to the Netherlands or Low Countries (Holland and Belgium), since it opened to them the trade with the New World and the West Indies. Antwerp rose to greatness. “No city except Paris,” says Mr. Motley, “surpassed it in population or in commercial splendour. The city itself was the most beautiful in Europe. Placed upon a plain along the bank of the Scheldt, shaped like a bent bow with the river for its string, it enclosed within its walls some of the most splendid edifices in Christendom. The stately Exchange, where five thousand merchants daily congregated, and many other famous buildings were all establishments which it would have been difficult to rival in any other part of the globe.”
Such it was before the “Spanish Fury,” when the Duke of Alva arrived with ten thousand Spanish veterans for the purpose of stamping out the Reformed faith. Then the people rose under William the Silent, and the war for independence was begun. In 1579, by an agreement at Utrecht, the seven northern provinces united for mutual defense. Antwerp, however, though not in the League of United Provinces, became a focus point of the struggle, and in 1585 capitulated to the Duke of Parma,
Thirty-one years later the English ambassador paid a visit to the place, and wrote home to a friend: “This great city is a great desert, for in the whole time we spent there I could never sett my eyes in the whole length of the streete uppon 49 persons at once; I never mett coach nor saw man on horseback; none of our own companie (though both were worke dayes) saw one pennieworth of ware either in shops or in streetes bought or solde. Two walking pedlars and one ballad seller will carry as much on their backs at once, as was in that royall exchange either above or below.”
When Philip II died, in 1598, Spain was exhausted almost to prostration, and his successor was glad to conclude an armistice of twelve years with the United Provinces. But at its conclusion war was resumed, and it was not until 1648 that, by the peace of Westphalia, the independence of Holland was finally assured.
Meanwhile, during those seventy years of conflict, in which a new nation was in the forming, a new art had been born. While the country was fighting for its Liberties a number of painters came to manhood whose work was of such originality as to constitute a new school of painting: “the last,” as Fromentin says, “of the great schools.”
Across the Scheldt, in Antwerp, Rubens was in the prime of his pawers (among his retinue of pupils was Van Dyck); but though his fame must have crossed to the Dutch, his influence did not. That people, stubborn against foreign domination, was stubbornly fashioning a kind of art of its own. Bent upon independence, its artists, too, were independent of Rubens, of the great Italian traditions, of everything but what concerned themselves. A nation of burghers, busy with war and commerce, they developed out of their own lives, their love of country, and their pride in themselves, a new art.
In one word, it was an art of portraiture. It began with the painting of portraits, and then proceeded to the painting of landscapes and of405
