The Dutch artists studied these animals in all their varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as one may say, their inner life and sentiments, animating the tranquil beauty of the landscape with their forms.  Rubens, Luyders, Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters, had drawn animals with admirable mastery, but all these are surpassed by the Dutch artists, Van der Velde, Berghum, Karel der Jardin, and by the prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous “Bull,” in the gallery of The Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican beside the “Transfiguration” by Rafael.

In yet another field are the Dutch painters great—­the sea.  The sea, their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever threatening their country, and entering in a hundred ways into their lives and fortunes; that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister colors, with a light of infinite melancholy beating forever upon a desolate coast, must subjugate the imagination of the artist.  He, indeed, passes long hours on the shore, contemplating its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its waves to study the effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his wife and family, observing and making notes, follows the fleet into battle, and takes part in the fight, and in this way are made marine painters like William Van der Velde the elder, and William the younger, like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.

Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the expression of the character of the people and of republican manners.  A people that without greatness had done so many great things, as Michelet says, must have its heroic painters, if we call them so, destined to illustrate men and events.  But this school of painting—­precisely because the people were without greatness, or, to express it better, without form of greatness, modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country, because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of many—­this school has to illustrate not a few men who have excelled, and a few extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizenship gathered among the most ordinary and pacific of burgher life.

From this come the great pictures which represent five, ten, thirty persons together, arquebusiers, mayors, officers, professors, magistrates, administrators, seated or standing around a table, feasting and conversing, of life size, most faithful likenesses, grave, open faces, expressing that secure serenity of conscience by which may be divined rather than seen the nobleness of a life consecrated to one’s country, the character of that strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so admirably combining grace and dignity; those gorgets, those doublets, those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons, those arms and banners.  In this field stand preeminent Van der Heist, Hals, Covaert, Flink, and Bol....