Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought after in travel and in books of travel:  the new.

Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of Holland.  As long as the northern and southern provinces of the Low Countries remained under the Spanish rule and in the Catholic faith, Dutch painters painted like Belgian painters; they studied in Belgium, Germany, and Italy; Heemskerk imitated Michael Angelo, Bloemart followed Correggio, and “Il Moro” copied Titian, not to indicate others:  and they were one and all pedantic imitators, who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a certain German coarsenesss, the result of which was a bastard style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish, stiff in design, crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro, but at least not a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude of the true Dutch art that was to be.

With the war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting also were renewed.  With religious traditions fell artistic traditions; the nude nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology, the ideal—­all the old edifice fell to pieces.  Holland, animated by a new life, felt the need of manifesting and expanding it in a new way; the small country, become all at once glorious and formidable, felt the desire for illustration; the faculties which had been excited and strengthened in the grand undertaking of creating a nation, now that the work was completed, overflowed and ran into new channels.  The conditions of the country were favorable to the revival of art.  The supreme dangers were conjured away; there was security, prosperity, a splendid future; the heroes had done their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to the front; Holland, after many sacrifices, and much suffering, issued victoriously from the struggle, lifted her face among her people and smiled.  And that smile is art.

What that art would necessarily be, might have been guessed even had no monument of it remained.  A pacific, laborious, practical people, continually beaten down, to quote a great German poet, to prosaic realities by the occupations of a vulgar burgher life; cultivating its reason at the expense of its imagination; living, consequently, more in clear ideas than in beautiful images; taking refuge from abstractions; never darting its thoughts beyond that nature with which it is in perpetual battle; seeing only that which is, enjoying only that which it can possess, making its happiness consist in the tranquil ease and honest sensuality of a life without violent passions or exorbitant desires;—­such a people must have tranquillity also in their art, they must love an art that pleases without startling the mind, which addresses the senses rather than the spirit; an art full of repose, precision, and delicacy, though material like their lives:  in one word, a realistic art, in which they can see themselves as they are and as they are content to be.