drawn together, like the drops of water of a fountain, into one splendid burst of elegance.
In the Van Dyck, however, the character of the woman is considerably smothered. Perhaps it was the case that she herself had little character—that she was simply a fine lady of fashion; or it may be that that aspect of her was the only one that interested the artist. He seems to have been particularly impressed with her eyes, which indicate at least a trait of character; and in a very subtle way he has made the attitude of the figure and the gesture of the hands and head correspond to it. So, in a limited way, the picture is representative of a type.
Hals, on the other hand, never fixed upon any particular trait or feature. He broadly surveyed all the externals of his sitter, and represented them as a whole; and with such clear seeing that, although he never penetrated into the mind of his subject, as we shall find Rembrandt did, he got at its heart, and in his straightforward characterization of what he saw, suggested that character lay beneath it.
In this respect his work is very like the man himself. He must have had fine qualities of mind, else how could he have seen things so simply and completely, and rendered them with such force and expression, inventing for the purpose a method of his own, which, as we have seen, was distinguished by placing his subject in the clear light and by working largely in flat tones? To get at the essential facts of a subject and to set them forth rapidly and precisely, so that all may understand them, represents great mental power, and places Hals in the front rank of painters. Yet, as a man, he allowed himself to appear to the world an idle fellow, overgiven to jollification, and so shiftless that in his old age he was dependent upon the city government for support. That he received it, however, and that his creditors were lenient with him seem to show that his contemporaries recognized a greatness behind his intemperance and improvidence; and when, in his eighty-second year, he died, he was buried beneath the choir of the Church of St. Bavon in Haarlem.
In great contrast to Hals’s mode of living was Van Dyck’s. He was early accustomed to Rubens’s sumptuous establishment, and when he visited Italy, with letters of introduction from his master, he lived in the palaces of his patrons, himself adopting such an elegant ostentation that he was spoken of as “the cavalier painter.” After his return to Antwerp his patrons belonged to the rich and noble class, and his own style of living was modeled on theirs; so that when at length, in 1632, he received the appointment of court painter to Charles I of England, he maintained an almost princely establishment, and his house at Blackfriars was the resort of fashion. The last two years of his life were spent in traveling on the Continent with his young wife, the daughter of Lord Gowry, Lord Ruthven’s son. His health, however, had been broken by excess of work, and he returned to London to die. He was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
He painted, in his younger days, many altar-pieces, “full of a touching religious feeling and enthusiasm"; but his fame rests mainly upon his portraits. In these he invented a style of elegance and refinement which became a model for the artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, corresponding, as it did, with the genteel luxuriousness of the court life of the period.
On the other hand, during the later century, Hals was thought little of, even in Holland, whose artists forsook the traditions of their own school and went astray after the Italian “grand” style. It was not until well on in the nineteenth century that artists, returning to the truth of nature, discovered that Hals had been one of the greatest seers of the truth and one of its most skilful interpreters. Now he is honored for these qualities, and also because, out of all the Dutch pictures of the seventeenth century now so much admired, his are the most characteristic of the Dutch race and of Dutch art.
Vol. XXXII.—52.
