Seven Millets, one the large exhibition picture Hagar and Ishmael, another the wonderful Resting Vintager.  Alone these Millets would cause a sensation if exhibited elsewhere.  The Hagar seems a trifle too rhetorical for the simple-minded painter.  Brown predominates in the colour scale, the composition is rather conventional, an echo, perhaps, of the artist’s Delaroche apprenticeship, but the Vintager is a masterpiece.  Seated among the vines in the blaze of the sun, he is resting and has removed his heavy sabots.  The relaxed attitude after arduous labour is wonderfully expressed.  The atmosphere indicates stifling sultriness.

Ricard, Roelofs, Theodore Rousseau—­halt!  There are twelve of this French master, dramatic and rich.  Descente des Vaches dans le Jura is the celebrated canvas refused at the Salon, 1834.  But it is too bituminous in parts.  A greater composition, though only a drawing, is Les grands chenes du vieux Bas-Breau.  Four large trees illumined by sun-rays.  Two Segantinis, a drawing in chalk and pastel; Storm Van’s Gravesande; seven Troyons, one, Le retour du Marche, a masterpiece; Vollon, still-life, fish, ivory goblets, violets; Weissenbruchs; Zilcken etchings and two De Zwarts.  There is old Rozenburg pottery, designed by Colenbrander, scarce to-day; Dutch and Gothic brass, Oriental portieres and brass, old Delft, Japanese armour, various weapons and lanterns, Gobelin tapestry, carved furniture, Dutch and Scandinavian, and a magnificent assortment of Satsuma pottery, Cmail cloisonne, Japanese bronzes, Persian pottery, Spanish brasses, majolica and bronzes and sculptures by Mattos, Constantin, Meunier, and Van Wijk—­the list fills a pamphlet.  Next door is the studio of the aged Mesdag, a hale old Dutchman who paints daily and looks forward to seeing his ninety years.  In Holland octogenarians are not few.  The climate is propitious; above all, the absence of hurry and worry.  To see The Hague without visiting this collection would be a regrettable omission.

HALS OF HAARLEM

In writing of Holland more is said of its windmills than its flowers.  It is a land of flowers.  Consider the roll-call of its painters who their life long produced naught but fruit and flower pieces.  Both the De Heems, the cunning Huysums, whose work still lives in the mezzotints of Earlom—­like David de Heem, he was fond of introducing insects, flies, bees, spiders, crawling over his velvety peaches and roses—­Seghers, Van Aelst and his talented pupil Rachel Ruysch, Cuyp, Breughel (Abraham), Mignon, Van Beyeren, Van den Broeck, Margaretha Rosenboom, Maria Vos, Weenix, A. Van der Velde, Kalf, and many others who excelled in this pleasing genre.  Their canvases are faded, the colours oxidised, but on the highways and by-ways the miracle is daily renewed—­flowers bloom at every corner, fill the window-boxes of residences, crowd the hotel balconies, and are bunched in the hands