Part 6 (2/2)

[Illustration: THE AVENUE OF MIDDELHARNAIS

_Hobbema_]

What is most admired in this picture of the Dutch Master? The firmness of touch, the brilliancy of the key, the ease and breadth of execution without the slightest sign of hesitation or alteration, or the extraordinary perfection hich the perspective is rendered? We do not know Despite the coht lack of unity in the coeneral effect of the picture is siradation of colour haro any farther than this artist has done in the interpretation of this tranquil Dutch landscape The deep values of the trees, the yellowish greys of the road, and the sluggish water of the ditches, together with the blue sky flecked with little grey and white clouds produce an enseive life to this canvas are so fine and delicate in execution that they leave nothing to be desired

Here, as very rarely happens, the multiplication of details does not spoil the effect of the whole

This is a picture absolutely without a peer, and a page by itself in Hobbema's work This is true in every sense, even in the choice of subject; for most frequently the painter borrows the motives for his pictures from a different phase of nature Ordinarily he interprets forest-clearings; the skirts of a ith poor huts hidden by great trees; cal humble reat a predilection and which he reproduced under so many varied aspects

But whatever may be the subject he treats, he always remains the happy interpreter of the calm scenery of his own country of low and drowned horizons; the painter attracted by the light which with hiround, waters, and distances bathed in delicious depths

Nature, gentle and friendly to man, which he saith a simplicity and a clearness approached by no other painter, attracted and charmed him above all else, in contrast to his contemporary and friend, J Ruysdael, who, led away by heart-breaking etic and lugubrious, the sad and troubled

In his forests, on the banks of his ponds and rivers, in the neighbourhood of his huts and mills, Hobbema wants to have coures, and they are constantly aniures always his own? It would be ih they harmonize in most cases so marvellously with the rest of the picture, and it would therefore seem difficult for them to be by another hand However, if we must defer to his historian, von Wurzbach, they are very frequently the work of Nicholaas Bergheelbach, Philip Wouwerman, Isack van Ostade, Pijnacker, etc, which would prove, at least, that he kne to select his collaborators

The painter of the _Avenue of Middelharnais_ in the National Gallery, of the _Mill_ in our Louvre, and of many other masterpieces was yet unknown, or rather despised, not very long ago, and it is quite recently that his nalect in which it was buried This great name of Hobbema had fallen into such discredit that when one of his pictures fell by chance into the hands of an anature would be effaced as quickly as possible and replaced by that of J Ruysdael, the sole painter worthy of entering into competition with him

Who then is this Meindert Hobbema? Where was he born? Where did he live?

What was his life? Alas, we know very little concerning this ilories of Dutch painting The principal historians of the Netherland school are ignorant of hienville are du him Those who, by chance, treat of him, commit so many errors that it is best to take no account of their words Three cities, Ae, Middelharnais, in the province of Guelder, which he has made famous by the marvellous picture, the subject of our notice, dispute the honour of being his birthplace But, it see can be affirht in Aeant in the Netherland army and spent his early life in Koeverden, where he was baptized and where his father was in garrison At a later period he established himself in Amsterdam, where he became the pupil and soon the comrade and friend of J Ruysdael, who served as witness to his e with Eeltie Vinck, celebrated in this same city, Oct 2, 1668 From that time he scarcely ever left Amsterdam, where he died, Dec 14, 1709, five years after his wife, in the sad Roosegraft, which had seen Rembrandt expire thirty years before He was sixty-seven years of age Have we any need to add that, like Rembrandt, the painter of painters, he died poor?

That is all we know of Meindert Hobbeh, but quite sufficient Have we not the man complete in his work? What more could ish?

Jouin, _Chefs-d'oeuvre: Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture_ (Paris, 1895-97)

THE DANCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS

(_ANDREA DEL SARTO_)

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

With the an, at the landelo; and are coiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than this of ours His art is to me as the Tuscan April in its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, but lulled and kindled by such air and light as fills the life of the growing year with fire At Florence only can one trace and tell how great a painter and how various he was There only, but surely there, can the influence and pressure of the things of time on his immortal spirit be understood; how ed, how much of hi enius in hiht in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of ht and of flight had passed froy of enjoye fell upon hiht, any one may see who compares his later with his earlier works, with the series, for instance, of outlines representing the story of St John Baptist in the desolate little cloister of Lo Scalzo In thesepower, of fresh passion and inize the hand of the master whoift of grace had survived the gift of invention This and all other gifts it did survive; all pleasure of life and power of mind, all the conscience of the man, his will, his character, his troubles, his triumphs, his sin and honour, heart-break and shame All these his charm of touch, his sweetness of execution, his ”Elysian beauty, race,” outlived, and blossomed in their dust Turn from that cloistral series to those later pictures, painted when he was ”faultless” and nothing ain, all the change and all the loss, one to whom the second was unknoould feel and foreknow his story and his sorrow In the cloister, what life and fullness of growing and strengthening genius, what joyous sense of its growth and the fair field before it, what draht in character and action! where St John preaches in the wilderness and the few first listeners are gathered together at his feet, old people and poor, soul-stricken, silent--woed eyes that feeds heartily and hungrily on his words--all the haggard funereal group filled froradual fire and white-heat of soul; or where Salorave and graceful, light and glad, the song of a bird ht body from the maiden face to the melodious feet; no tyrannous or treacherous Goddess of deadly beauty, but a siirlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she stands before Herodias and when she receives the severed head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure bright ani but instinct and motion In her mother's mature and conscious beauty there is visible the voluptuous will of a harlot and a queen; but, for herself, she has neither malice nor pity; her beauty is a uiltiness; the King hangs upon thelife in her fair fleet limbs, as one who listens to a tune, subdued by the rapture of sound, absorbed in purity of passion I know not where the subject has been touched with such fine and keen iination as here The time came when another than Salome was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her hands With the coe upon his heart and hand; ”the work of an imperious whorish woman” Those words, set by the prophet as a brand upon the fallen forehead of the chosen bride, come back to mind as one studies in her husband's pictures the full cale and serene beauty of Lucrezia del Fede; a predominant and placid beauty, placid and iainst Voluptuous always and slothful, subtle at times no doubt and sweet beyond race, her features bear no sign of possible love or conscience Seen side by side with his clear sad face, hers tells h two poets of our age have taken it up In the feverish and feeble edy, hardly a shadow of passionate and piteous truth; in Mr Browning's noblest poeedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh One point only is but lightly touched upon--missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skilful--the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love How his life was corroded by it and his soul burnt into dead ashes, we are shown in full; but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he ht have been without it This is what I think the works of his youth and age, seen near together as at Florence,and studious eye In those later works, the inevitable and fatal figure of the worown into his art, and made it even as herself; rich, monotonous in beauty, calm, complete, without heart or spirit But his has not been always ”the low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand” it was then He had started on his way towards another goal than that Nothing now is left him to live for but his faultless hand and her faultless face--still and full, suggestive of no change in the steady deep-lidded eyes and heavy lovely lips without love or pudency or pity Here aain and ever the salory and the joy and the majesty of the flesh When the luxurious and subtle sense which serves the woman for a soul looks forth and speaks plainest fron and stately still; there is in her beauty nothing common or unclean We cannot but see her for what she is; but her iveness

_Essays and Studies_ (London, 1875)

[Illustration: THE DANCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS

_Andrea del Sarto_]

ADORATION OF THE MAGI

(_GENTILE DA FABRIANO_)

FA GRUYER