Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 1, 1908.djvu/278

 254 GABRIEL METSU SECT. subjects that he has once chosen, namely, the manners of the middle class. Only in exceptional cases does he essay and not with equal success a portrait or a mythological or allegorical scene. For the rest he never tires of painting the middle class of his time in the daily round of affairs and in the quiet home life. The scenes of his pictures are not full of boisterous humour like those of Jan Steen. He never paints a drunken or an excited man. Self-control is his first principle. He lacks both the humour and the talent for composition displayed by his great contemporaries. Metsu's pictures contain as a rule only one or two, or at most three figures. A quiet conversation, a homely toilet, a music-lesson, or a simple meal, are his favourite scenes in the living-room. The housewife's purchases at the market and the preparation of meals in the kitchen are kindred themes. In the pictures of single figures he chooses as his subject a man smoking or drinking, an old woman praying or reading, or a woman writing a letter. In the scenes depicted by Metsu there is never any element of the sudden or the unexpected. At most he shows in one case how a young lover tries to surprise his lady at her toilet ; but the youth appears to be as little in earnest about entering as the maid-servant is in the effort to repulse him. Though one must not, therefore, expect from Metsu a searching study of character, and though his talent is in this direction limited, yet that talent is all the greater in the pictorial handling of a scene. In genre painting no one has attained a higher degree of success in the delicate gradation of light and shade, in the harmonious combination of colours, and in executive skill. Metsu is a painter of detail, but the details are not excessively prominent as in the work of Dou and Mieris. He paints textures at least as well as Jan Steen, and his effects of light and colour remind one of Vermeer's palette. It is especially notable how he contrives to rival masters of widely different styles without suppressing his own individuality. Those of his pictures, which are cool in tone, remind one of G. Ter Borch, such as the picture of the Dutuit collection (89), just as there are occasionally pictures by Ter Borch which bring the name of Metsu to one's lips. Smith, for instance, regarded " The Knife-grinder," by Ter Borch, now at the Berlin Museum, as a work of Metsu's (see Sm. 56). Metsu's "Twelfth Night," at Munich (see 58 below), looks at first sight like a Jan Steen, not only in composition, but also in its prominent tones of blue and red. The celebrated pictures in the Alfred Beit collection and " The Sick Boy " in the Steengracht collection seem to be foreshadowings of the finest works of Jan Vermeer of Delft. I formerly assumed that Vermeer had influenced Metsu, but as the Steengracht picture is dated 1656, this theory is unsound. Some of the figures of old women reading or eating seem as if they might have been taken from compositions by Rembrandt or Nicolas Maes, and some of the marketing scenes and the pictures of figures at a window remind one of Metsu's master Dou. Yet in spite of all his borrowings and his wide sympathies with various styles, Metsu remains an independent painter. One never finds him guilty of slavish imitation. His remarkable individual qualities secure him for ever in an honoured position as the leading genre painter of the Dutch school.