At Haarlem you may follow his development; his first big picture painted in 1616; his last in 1664.  He died at eighty-four.  But at eighty odd he painted two important canvases, the portraits of the regents and of the lady regents.  More summary as regards the execution, with a manifest tendency toward simplifications, these two pictures are very noble.  The group of ladies, each a portrait of character, pleases some more than the male group.  They are not so firmly modelled, and into them all has crept a certain weariness as of old age; but what justness of expression, what adjustment of puzzling relations!  One lady follows you over the gallery with her stern gaze.  It recalls to us the last judgment look which a maiden aunt was wont to bestow upon us years ago.  The men regents will live into eternity if the canvas endures.  The shiny varnish is not pleasing, yet it cannot destroy the illusion of atmosphere that circulates about the vigorously modelled figures at the table.  What a colourist!  What nuances he produces on a restrained key-board!  The tones modulate, their juxtaposition causes no harsh discords.  The velvet black, silvery grays, whites that are mellow without pastiness, and the reds and yellows do not flare out like scarlet trumpets; an aristrocratic palette.  Really you begin to realise that what you formerly considered grandfather tales are the truth.  The great painters have been and are not with us to-day.  It is not a consoling pill to swallow for apostles of “modernity.”  Hals is more modern than Sargent.

These corporation and regent pieces are chronologically arranged.  No. 88 is considered the masterpiece.  It shows the officers of the Arquebusiers of St. Andrew, fourteen life-sized figures.  Again each man is a portrait.  This was painted in 1633.  The Regents of the Elizabeth Hospital (1641) has been likened to Rembrandt’s style; nevertheless, it is very Halsian.  Why, that chamber is alone worth the journey across the Atlantic.  Hals shows us not the magic of life but the normal life of daylight in which move with dignity men and women undismayed by the mysteries that hem them about.  He has a daylight soul, a sane if not poetic soul, and few painters before him so celebrated the bravery of appearances, the beauty of the real.

PICTURES IN AMSTERDAM

I

The wonderful Rijks Museum is the representative home of old Dutch art.  The Louvre, the Prado, the National Gallery excel it in variety, but the great Rembrandts are in it, and The Syndics and The Night Watch are worth a wilderness of other painters’ work.  The Night Watch has been removed from the old room, where it used to hang, facing the large Van der Heist, Captain Roelof Bicker’s Company.  But it is only in temporary quarters; the gallery destined for it is being completed.  We were permitted to peep into it.  The Night Watch will hang in