University of Virginia Library

III.

Such, in this country, is the human plant; we
have now to examine its art, which is the flower.
Among all the branches of the Germanic trunk,
this plant alone has produced a complete flower
the art which developes so happily and so naturally
in the Netherlands proves aborative with the other
Germanic nations for the reason that this glorious
privilege emanates from the national character as
we have just set it forth.

To comprehend and love painting requires an eye
sensitive to forms and to colors, and, without education
or apprenticeship, one which takes pleasure
in the juxtaposition of tones and is delicate in the
matter of optical sensations; the man who would be
a painter must be capable of losing himself in viewing
the rich consonance of red and green, in watching
the diminution of light as it is transformed into
darkness, and in detecting the subtle hues of silks
and satins, which according to their breaks, recesses
and depths of fold, assume opaline tints, vague

luminous gleams and imperceptible shades of blue.
The eye is epicurean like the palate, and painting is
an exquisite feast served up to it. For this reason
it is that Germany and England have had no
great pictorial art. In Germany the too great domination
of abstract ideas has left no room for the
sensuousness of the eye. Its early school, that of
Cologne, instead of representing bodies, represented
mystic, pious and tender souls. In vain did the
great German artist of the sixteenth century, Albert
Dürer, familiarize himself with the Italian masters;
he retains his graceless forms, his angular folds,
his ugly nudities, his dull color, his barbarous,
gloomy and saddened faces; the wild imagination,
the deep religious sentiment and the vague philosophic
divinations which shine through his works,
show an intellect to which form is inadequate.
Examine the infant Christ in the Louvre, by Wohlgemuth,
his master, and an Eve, by Lucas Cranach,
a contemporary; you will realize that the men who
executed such groups and such bodies were born
for theology and not for painting. Again at the
present day they esteem and enjoy the inward
rather than the outward; Cornelius and the Munich
masters regard the idea as principal, and exe
cution as secondary; the master conceives and the
pupil paints; the aim of their wholly philosophic
and symbolic work is to excite the spectator to
reflect on some great moral or social verity. In
like manner Overbeck aims at edification and
preaches sentimental asceticism; and even Knauss,
again, who is such an able psychologist that his
pictures form idyls and comedies. As to the English,
up to the eighteenth century, they do but
little more than import pictures and artists from
abroad. Temperament in this country is too militant,
the will too stern, the mind too utilitarian,
man too case-hardened, too absorbed and too overtasked
to linger over and revel in the beautiful
and delicate gradations of contours and colors.
Their national painter, Hogarth, simply produced
moral caricatures. Others, like Wilkie, use their
pencil to render sentiments and characteristic traits
visible; even in landscape they depict the spiritual
element, corporeal objects serving them simply as
an index or suggestion; it is even apparent in their
two great landscapists, Constable and Turner, and
in their two great portrait painters, Gainsborough
and Reynolds. Their coloring of to-day, finally, is
shockingly crude, and their drawing literal minutiæ.
The Flemings and Hollanders alone have
prized forms and colors for their own sake. This
sentiment still persists. Proof of this is to be
found in the picturesqueness of their towns and in
the agreeable aspect of their homes; last year at
the Universal Exposition (1867) you could see for
yourselves that genuine art—painting exempt from
philosophic motive and literary deviation, capable of
manipulating form without servility and color without
barbarisms—scarcely exists anywhere but with
them and with ourselves.

Thanks to this national endowment, in the fifteenth,
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
circumstances became favorable, they were able to
maintain in the face of Italy a great school of painting.
But as they were Germans their school fol
lowed the German track. What distinguishes their
race from classic races is, as you have seen, a pref
rence for substance over form, of actual verity to

bautiful externals, of the real, complex, irregular
and natural object to the well-ordered, pruned,
efined and transformed object. This instinct, of
which you remark the aseendancy in their religion
and literature, has likewise controlled their art and
notably their painting. "The prime significance of
the Flemish school," says M. Wäagen, "proceeds
from its having, through its freedom from foreign
influences, revealed to us the contrast of sentiments
of the Greek and the German races, the two columnar
capitals of ancient and modern civilization. Whilst
the Greeks sought to idealize not merely conceptions
taken from the ideal world, but even portraits,
by simplifying the forms and accentuating the most
important features, the early Flemings on the contrary
translated into portraiture the ideal personifications
of the Virgin, the apostles, the prophets and
the martyrs, ever striving to represent in an exact
manner the petty details of nature. Whilst the
Greeks expressed the details of landscape, rivers,
fountains and trees under abstract forms, the Flemings
strove to render them precisely as they saw
them. In relation to the ideal and the tendency of
the Greeks to personify everything, the Flemings
created a realistic school, a school of landscape. In
this respect the Germans first and the English afterwards
have pursued the same course."[6] Run over
a collection of engravings containing the works of
German origin from Albert Dürer, Martin Schongauer,
the Van Eycks, Holbein and Lucas of Leyden,
down to Rubens, Rembrandt, Paul Potter, Jan Steen
and Hogarth; if your imagination is filled with noble
Italian or with elegant French forms, your eyes will
be offended; you will experience some difficulty in
taking the proper standpoint; you will often fancy
that the artist purposely studied the ugly. The
truth is he is not repelled by the trivialities and
deformities of life. He does not naturally enter into
the symmetrical composition, the tranquil and easy
action, the beautiful proportions, the healthiness and
agility of the naked figure. When the Flemings in
the sixteenth century resorted to the Italian school,
they only succeeded in spoiling their original style.
During seventy years of patient imitation they
brought forth nothing but hybrid abortions. This
long period of failure, placed between two long periods
of superiority, shows the limits and the power
of their original aptitudes. They were incapable of
simplifying nature; they aimed to reproduce her entire.
They did not concentrate her in the nude body;
they assigned equal importance to all her appearances—landscapes,
edifices, animals, costumes and
accessories.[7] They are not qualified to comprehend
and prize the ideal body; they are constituted to
aint and enforce the actual body.

Allowing this, we easily discern in what particulars
they differ from other masters of the same race.
I have described to you their national genius, so
sensible and so well-balanced, exempt from lofty
aspiration, limited to the present and disposed to
enjoyment. Such artists will not create the melancholy

beings in painful abstraction, weighed down
with the burden of life and obstinately resigned, of
Albert Dürer. They will not devote themselves
like the mystic painters of Cologne, or the moralist
painters of England, to the representation of spiritual
traits and characters; little will they concern
themselves with the disproportion between mind
and matter. In a fertile and luxurious country,
amidst jovial customs, in the presence of placid,
honest and blooming faces they are to obtain the
models suited to their genius. They almost always
paint man in a well-to-do condition and content
with his lot. When they exalt him it is without
raising him above his terrestrial condition. The
Flemish school of the seventeenth century does no
more than expand his appetite, his lusts, his energy
and his gayety. Generally they leave him as he
is. The Dutch school confines itself to reproducing
the repose of the bourgeois interior, the comforts
of shop and farm, out-door sports and tavern
enjoyments, all the petty satisfactions of an orderly
and tranquil existence. Nothing could be better
adapted to painting; too much thought and emo
tion is detrimental to it. Subjects of this order con
ceived in such a spirit, furnish works of a rare harmony;
the Greeks alone, and a few great Italian
artists have set us the example; the painters of the
Netherlands on a lower stage do as they did, they
represent man to us complete of his type, adapted
to things around him and therefore happy without
effort.

One point remains to be considered. One of the
leading merits of this art is the excellence and delicacy
of its coloring. This is owing to the education
of the eye, which in Flanders and in Holland is peculiar.
The country is a saturated delta like that of
the Po, while Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, Hague and Utrecht, through their rivers,
canals, sea and atmosphere resemble Venice. Here,
as at Venice, nature has made man colorist. Observe
the different aspect of things according as you
are in a dry country like Provençe and the neighborhood
of Florence, or on a wet plain like the Netherlands.
In the dry country the line predominates,
and at once attracts attention; the mountains cut
sharp against the sky, with their stories of architecture

of a grand and noble style, all objects projecting
upward in the limpid air in varied prominence.
Here the low horizon is without interest, and the
contours of objects are softened, blended and blurred
out by the imperceptible vapor with which the at
mosphere is always filled; that which predominates
is the spot. A cow pasturing, a roof in the centre
of a field, a man leaning on a parapet appear as one
tone among other tones. The object emerges; it
does not start suddenly out of its surroundings as if
punched out; you are struck by its modelling, that
is to say by the different degrees of advancing luminousness
and the diverse gradations of melting color
which transforms its general tint into a relief and
gives to the eye a sensation of thickness.[8] You
would have to pass many days in this country in
order to appreciate this subordination of the line to
the spot. A bluish or gray vapor is constantly rising
from the canals, the rivers, the sea, and from the
saturated soil; a universal haze forms a soft gauze
over objects, even in the finest weather. Flying
scuds, like thin, half-torn white drapery, float over
the meadows night and morning. I have repeatedly
stood on the quays of the Scheldt contemplating the
broad, pallid and slightly rippled water, on which
float the dark hulks. The river shines, and on its
flat surface the hazy light reflects here and there
unsteady scintillations. Clouds ascend constantly
around the horizon, their pale, leaden hue and their
motionless files suggesting an army of spectres, the
spectres of the humid soil, like so many phantoms,
always revived and bringing back the eternal show
ers. Towards the setting sun they become ruddy,
while their corpulent masses, trellissed all over with
gold, remind one of the damascene copes, the brocaded
simarres and the embroidered silks with which
Jordaens and Rubens envelope their bleeding martyrs
and their sorrowful madonnas. Quite low down
on the sky the sun seems an enormous blaze subsiding
into smoke. On reaching Amsterdam or Ostend the
impression again deepens; both sea and sky have no
form; the fog and interposed showers leave nothing
to remember but colors. The water changes in hue
every half hour—now of a pale wine tinge, now of a
chalky whiteness, now yellow like softened mortar,
now black like liquid soot, and sometimes of a sombre
purple striped with dashes of green. After a
few days' experience you find that, in such a nature
only gradations, contrasts and harmonies, in short,
the value of tones is of any importance.

These tones, moreover, are full and rich. A dry
country is of a dull aspect; southern France and
the whole of the mountainous portion of Italy leave
on the eye no sensation but that of a gray and
yellow checker-board. Besides this, all the tones
of the soil and of buildings are lost in the preponderating
splendor of the sky and the all-pervading
luminousness of the atmosphere. In truth, a southern
city, and a Provençe or Tuscan landscape are
simply drawings; with white paper, charcoal, and
the feeble tints of colored crayons you can express

the whole thing. On the contrary, in a country of
humidity like the Netherlands, the earth is green, a
quantity of lively spots diversifying the uniformity
of the wide prairie—sometimes it is the dark or
brown color of the wet mould, again the deep red
of tiles and bricks, again the white or rosy coating
of the façades, again the ruddy spots of reclining
cattle, again the flickering sheen of canals and
streams. And these spots are not subdued by the
too powerful light of the sky. Contrary to the dry
country it is not the sky but the earth which has
a preponderating influence. In Holland especially,
for several months, "there is no transparency of atmosphere;
a kind of opaque vail hovering between
sky and ground intercepts all radiance. In winter
darkness seems to come from above."[9] The rich
colors, accordingly, with which all terrestrial objects
are clothed, remain unrivalled. To their strength
must be added their gradation and their mobility.
In Italy a tone remains fixed; the steady light of the
sky maintains it so for many hours, and as it was
yesterday so it will be to-morrow. Return to it and
you will find it the same as you placed it on your
palette a month before. In Flanders it varies incessantly
along with the variations of light and the ambient
vapor. Here again, I should like to take you
into the country and let you appreciate yourselves
the original beauty of the towns and the landscape.
The red of the bricks, the lustrous white of the
façades are agreeable to the eye because they are
softened by the grayish atmosphere; against the neutral
background of the sky extend rows of peaked,
shell-like roofs, all of deep brown, here and there a
gothic gutter, or some gigantic belfry covered with
elaborate finials and heraldic animals. Frequently
the crenelated cornice of chimney and of ridge is
reflected as it glows in a canal or in an arm of the
sea. Outside the cities, as within them, all is
material for pictures—you have nothing to do but
to copy. The universal green of the country is neither
crude nor monotonous; it is tinted by diverse
degrees of maturity of foliage and herbage and by
the various densities and perpetual changes of haziness
and clouds. It has for complement or for relief
the blackness of clouds which suddenly melt away
in transient showers, the grayness of scattered and
ragged banks of fog, the vague, bluish network
enveloping distances, the sparkling of flickering
light arrested in flying scuds—sometimes the dazzling
satin of a motionless cloud, or some abrupt
opening through which the azure penetrates. A sky
which is thus filled up, thus mobile, thus adapted
to harmonizing, varying and emphasizing the tones
of the earth, affords a colorist school. Here, as at
Venice, art has followed nature, the hand having
been forcibly guided by optical sensations.

If, however, the analogies of climate have endowed
the Venetian eye and that of the inhabitant of the
Netherlands with an analogous education, differences
of climate have given them a different education.
The Netherlands are situated three hundred leagues
to the north of Venice. The atmosphere there is
colder, rains more frequent, and the sun the oftenest
concealed. Hence a natural gamut of colors, which
has provoked a corresponding artificial gamut. A
full light being rare, objects do not reflect the imprint
of the sun. You do not meet with those golden
tones, that magnificent ruddiness so frequent in the

monuments of Italy. The water is not of that deep
sea-green resembling silkiness, as in the lagoons of
Venice. The fields and trees have not that solid and
vigorous tone visible in the verdure of Verona and
Padua. The herbage is pale and softened, the water
dull or dark, the flesh white, now pink like a flower
grown in the shade, now rubicund after exposure to
the weather and rendered coarse by food, generally
yellow and fiabby, sometimes, in Holland, pallid and
inanimate and of a waxy tone. The tissues of the
living organism, whether man, animal or plant, imbibe
too much fluid, and lack the ripening power of
sunshine. This is why, if we compare the two schools
of painting, we find a difference in the general tone.
Examine, in any gallery, the Venetian school, and
afterwards the Flemish school; pass from Canaletto
and Guardi to Ruysdael, Paul Potter, Hobbema,
Adrian Van der Velde, Teniers and Ostade; from
Titian and Veronese to Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt,
and consult your optical impressions. On
going from the former to the latter, color loses a portion
of its warmth. Shadowed, ruddy and autumnal
tones disappear; you see the fiery furnace enveloping
the Assumptions going out; flesh becomes of the
whiteness of milk or snow, the deep purple of draperies
grows lighter, and paler silks have cooler reflections.
The intense brown which faintly impregnates
foliage, the powerful reds gilding sunlit distances,
the tones of veined marble, amethyst and
sapphire with which water is resplendent, all decline,
in order to give place to the deadened whiteness of
expanded vapor, the bluish glow of misty twilight,
the slaty reflections of the ocean, the turbid hue of
rivers, the pallid verdure of the fields, and the grayish
atmosphere of household interiors.

Between these new tones there is established a
new harmony. Sometimes a full light falls upon
objects, and to which they are not accustomed; the
green campagna, the red roofs, the polished façades
and the satiny flesh flushed with blood show extraordinary
brilliancy. They are adapted to the subdued
light of a northerly and humid country; they
have not been transformed as at Venice by the slow
scorching of the sun; beneath this irruption of luminousness
their tones become too vivid, almost crude;
they vibrate together like the blasts of trumpets,

leaving on the mind and senses an impression of
energetic and boisterous joyousness. Such is the
coloring of the Flemish painters who love the full
light of day. Rubens furnishes us with the best
example; if his restored canvasses in the Louvre
represent his work to us as it left his hands, it is certain
that he did not discipline his eyes; in any event
his color lacks the rich and mellow harmony of the
Venetian; the greatest extremes meet; the snowy
whiteness of flesh, the sanguine red of the draperies,
the dazzling lustre of silks have their full force and
are not united, tempered and enveloped, as at Venice,
in that amber tint which prevents contrasts from
being discordant and effects from being too startling.
Sometimes, on the contrary, the light is feeble or
nearly gone, which is commonly the case, and especially
in Holland. Objects issue painfully out of
shadow; they are almost lost in their surroundings;
at evening, in a cellar, beneath a lamp, in an apartment
into which a dying ray from a window glides,
they are effaced and seem to be only more intense
darks in a universal duskiness. The eye is led to
noticing these gradations of obscurity, this vague
train of light mingling with shadow, the remains of
brightness clinging to the lingering lustre of the furniture,
a reflection from a greenish window-sash, a
piece of embroidery, a pearl, some golden spark
astray upon a necklace. Having become sensitive to
these delicacies, the painter, instead of uniting the
extremes of the gamut, simply selects the beginning
of it; his entire picture, except in one point, is in
shadow; the concert he offers us is a continuous sordine
in which now and then occurs some brilliant
passage. He thus discloses unknown harmonies,
those of chiaroscuro, those of modeling, those of
emotion, all of them infinite and penetrating; using
a daub of dirty yellow, or of wine lees, or a mixed
gray, or vague darks, here and there accentuated by
a vivid spot, he succeeds in stirring the very depths
of our nature. Herein consists the last great picturesque
creation; it is through this that painting
nowadays most powerfully addresses the modern
mind, and this is the coloring with which the light
of Holland supplied the genius of Rembrandt.

You have seen the seed, the plant and the flower.
A race with a genius totally opposed to that of the

Latin peoples makes for itself, after and alongside of
them its place in the world. Among the numerous
nations of this race, one there is in which a special
territory and climate develope a particular character
predisposing it to art and to a certain phase of art.
Painting is born with it, lasts, becomes complete,
and the physical milieu surrounding it, like the
national genius which founds it, give to and impose
upon it its subjects, its types and its coloring.
Such are the remote preparatives, the profound
causes, the general conditions which have nourished
this sap, directed this vegetation, and produced the
final efflorescence. It only remains to us now to
expose historical events, the diversity and succession
of which have brought about the successive and
diverse phases of the great flowering epoch.