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Rh grouping of a number of portraits, so that each should have the desired prominence while yet the effect of the whole was that of a unity. His masterpieces in this department in the townhall at Haarlem have never been equalled.

As portraitists the other great 17th-century masters fall into two sets, Rembrandt and Velazquez contrasting with Rubens and his pupil Van Dyck. The portraits of the two former are individualized studies in which the sitter has been envisaged in an artistic aspect, retaining his personality though sublimated to a harmonious display of tone and colour. The Flemings are more conventional, and representing rather the type than the individual, are disposed to sacrifice the individuality of the sitter to their predetermined scheme of beauty. Both Velazquez and Rubens have left portraits of Isabel de Bourbon, first wife of Philip IV. of Spain, but whereas the Spaniard's version gives us an uncomely face but one full of character, that of the Fleming shows us merely the big-eyed buxom wench we are accustomed to meet on all his canvases. Rembrandt was much less careful than Velazquez or Holbein or Hals to preserve the individuality of the sitter. He did not however, like the Flemings, conventionalize to a type, but worked each piece into an artistic study of tone, colour and texture, in the course of which he might deal somewhat cavalierly with the actual facts of the piece of nature before him. The result, though incomparable in its artistic strength, may sometimes, in comparison with a Velazquez, seem laboured, but there is one Rembrandt portrait, that of Jan Six at Amsterdam, that is painted as directly as a Hals, and with the subtUty of a Velazquez, while it possesses a richness of pictorial quality in which Rembrandt surpasses all his ancient or modern compeers (see fig. 28, Plate IX.).

In the i8th century, though France produced some good limners and Spain Goya, yet on the whole England was the home of the best portraiture. Van Dyck had been in the service of Charles I., and foreign representatives of his style carried on afterwards the tradition of his essentially courtly art, but there existed at the same time a line of native British portraitists of whom the latest and best was Hogarth. One special form of portraiture, the miniature iq-v.), has been characteristically English throughout. The greater English and Scottish portraitists of the latter part of the i8th century, headed by Reynolds, owed much to V'an Dyck, and their work was of a pronounced pictorial character. Every portrait, that is to say, was before everything beautiful as a work of art. Detail, either of features or dress, was not insisted on; and the effort was rather to generalize than to accentuate characteristic points. In a word, while the artist recognized the claims of the facts before him to adequate portrayal, he endeavoured to fuse all the elements of the piece into one lovely artistic unity, and in so doing he secured in his work the predominant quality of breadth. This style, handed on to painters of less power, died out in the first half of the 19th century in attenuated productions, in which harmony became emptiness. To this has succeeded in Britain, still the home of the best European portraiture, a more modern style, the dominant notes of which have been truth and force. While the older school was seen at its best when dealing with the softer forms of the female sex and of youth, these moderns excelled in the delineation of character in strongly-marked male heads, and some of them could hardly succeed wth a woman's portrait. The fine appreciation of character in portraiture shown by Sir John Watson Gordon about the middle of the 19th century marked the beginning of this forcible style of the later Victorian period, a style suited to an age of keen intellectual activity, of science and of matterof-fact. More recently still, with the rapid development in certain circles of a taste for the life of fashion and pleasure, the portrait of the showily-dressed lady has come again into vogue, and if any special influence is here to be discerned it may be traced to Paris.

§ 24. Genre Painting. The term " genre " is elliptical — it stands for genre has, and means the " low style, " or the style in which there is no grandeur of subject or scale. A genre piece is a picture of a scene of ordinary human life without

any religious or historical significance, and though it makes its appearance earher, it was in the Netherland schools of the first half of the 17th century that it was established as a canonical form of the art. In Egypt we have seen that the subjects from human life have almost always a quasi-religious character, and the earliest examples of genre may be certain designs on early black-figured vases of the 6th century B.C. in Greece. Genre painting proper was introduced at a later period in Greece, and attracted special attention because of its contrast to the general spirit of classical art. It had a special name about which there is some difficulty but which seems to denote the same as genre has. In early Christian and early medieval painting genre can hardly be recognized, but it makes its appearance in some of the later illuminated MSS. and becomes more common, especially north of the Alps, in the 15th century. It really begins in the treatment in a secular spirit of scenes from the sacred story. These scenes, in Italy, but still more among the prosaic artists of the north, were made more life-like and interesting when they were furnished with personages and accessories drawn from the present world. Real people of the day were as we have just seen introduced as actors in the scriptural events, and in the same way all the objects and accessories in the picture were portrayed from existing models. It was easy sometimes for the spectator to forget that he was looking at biblical characters and at saints and to take the scene from the standpoint of actuality. Rembrandt, one of whose chief titles to fame is derived from his religious pictures, often treats a Holy Family as if it were a mere domestic group of his own day. It was a change sure to come when the religious significance was abandoned, and the persons and objects reduced to the terms of ordinary life. This of course represented a break with a very long established tradition, and it was only by degrees, and in Germany and Flanders rather than in Italy, that the change was brought about. Thus for example, St Eloi, the patron of goldsmiths, might be portrayed as saint, but also as artificer with the impedimenta of the craft about him. The next stage, represented by a charming picture by Quintin Matsys at Paris, shows us a goldsmith, no longer a saint, but busy with the same picturesque accessories (fig. 29, Plate IX.). He has however his wife by his side and she is reading a missal which preserves to the piece a faint religious odour. Afterwards all religious suggestion is dropped, and we have the familiar goldsmith or money changer in his everyday surroundings, of which northern painting has furnished us with so many examples.

Genre painting, however, is something a little more special than is here implied. The term must not be made to cover all figure-pieces from ordinary life. There are pictures by the late Italian " naturalists " of this kind; Caravaggio's " Card Players " at Dresden is a famUiar example. These are too large in scale to come under this heading, and the same applies to the bodcgones or pictures of kitchens and shops full of pots and pans and eatables, which, largely influenced by the Italian pictures just noticed, were common in Spain in the early days of Velazquez. Nor again are the large and showy subject pictures, which constitute the popular items in the catalogues of Burlington House and the Salon, to be classed as " genre." The genre picture, as represented by its acknowledged masters, is small in scale, as suits the nature of its subject, but is studied in every part and finished with the most fastidious care. The particular incident or phase of life portrayed is as a rule of little intrinsic importance, and only serves to bring figures together with some variety of pose and expression and to motive their surroundings. It is rarely that the masters of genre charge their pictures with satiric or didactic purpose. Jan Steen in Holland and Hogarth in England are the exceptions that prove the rule. The interest is in the main an artistic one, and depends on the nice observance of relations of tone and colour, and a free and yet at the same time precise touch. All these qualities combine to lend to the typical genre picture an intimite, a sympathetic charm, that gives the masters of the style a firm hold on our affections. Probably the most