Page:Woman in Art.djvu/53

WOMAN IN ART broader grasp of life because it pictured their lives; a domestic folk living their religion, believing that cleanliness is next to godliness, that no service is too menial if honest or of necessity. Their portrait painters, true to life, brought out the strong national type, the practical, kindly, common-sense variety of womanhood that makes life comfortable and neighborly. Principles, moral and religious, were not merely personal but of a radiating influence that made for uplift in their country, environment and spirit, hence the art of The Netherlands illustrates an unconscious development in much that their painters recorded.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we find the broadening of woman's interests, sympathies, and benevolence in her solicitude and care for the aged, sick, and orphaned.

Jan de Bray and Franze Hals painted from life the good mothers, needlework in hand, as they sat in council three hundred years ago, the burden of helpless little ones weighing on their motherly hearts. It was the time when Holland was giving refuge to families whom persecution had driven from their native England. They still had in mind the trials of adverse political winds blowing from the Spanish Main. Their water-gates had not been free so very long. For fifteen years they extended hospitality mingled with sympathy and helpfulness.

It is but little more than three centuries since an hundred and one of those Pilgrims landed on an unknown shore, and even yet we trace the spread of example, principle, and tolerance, gathered in large measure from the Netherlanders who gave our ancestors shelter in time of need.

Portraits and domestic scenes painted by Rembrandt, de Hooch, and Van der Meer speak of the thrift, enterprise, and home life of the people of that period. Strength of features, poise and bearing are emphatically of the Dutch type, the type that could and did build a New Amsterdam on the western shore of the Atlantic. Their painters portrayed Netherland people; scenes they were familiar with and loved, not primarily for foreign galleries or prizes, but because of a national appreciation of everything Dutch. Nor can we blame them; rather we thank them.

They literally made the most of their land. They dyked and dammed and locked encroaching waters from the lowlands. Building materials were brought from a distance; tidal waves wiped out their fortifications and cultivated fields time and time again; they planted, drained, and drudged; learned the value of work, of patience, of persistence. 37