in an atmospheric envelope, as is the case with Vermeer’s.  The Small Country House is the favourite.  In front of a house a well-dressed man and woman are seated at a table.  She is squeezing lemon juice into a glass.  Behind her a servant is carrying a glass of beer, and farther away a girl cleans pots and pans.  The composition is the apotheosis of domestic comfort, conjugal peace, and gluttony.  We like much more The Pantry, wherein a woman hands a jug to her little girl.  The adjoining room, flooded with light, is real.

There is one Van der Helst we could not pass.  It looks like the portrait of a corpulent woman, but is that of Gerard Bicker, bailiff of Muiden.  A half-length figure turned to the left, the bailiff a well-fed pig, holds a pair of gloves in his right hand which he presses against his Gargantuan chest.  His hair is long and curly.  The fabrics are finely wrought.  Holbein the younger is represented by the portrait of a young man.  It is excellent, but doubtless a copy or an imitation.  To view five Lucas van Leydens in one gallery is not an everyday event.  His engravings are rare enough—­that is, in good states; “ghosts” are aplenty—­and his paintings rarer.  Here they are chiefly portraits.  Rachel Ruysch, the flower painter, has a superior in Judith Lyster, a pupil of Frans Hals.  She was born at Haarlem, or Zaandam, about 1600, and died 1660.  She married the painter Jan Molener.  Her Jolly Toper faces the Hals of the same theme, in a cabinet, and reveals its artistic ancestry.  Judith had the gift of reproducing surfaces.  We need not return to the various Maeses; indeed, this is only a haphazard ramble among the less well-known pictures.  Consider the heads of Van Mierevelt; those of Henrick Hooft, burgomaster of Amsterdam, of Jacob Cats, and of his wife Aegje Hasselaer (1618-64).  Her hair and lace collar are wonderfully set forth.  Must we stop before Mabuse, or before the cattle piece of the Dutch school, seventeenth century?  A Monticelli seems out of key here, and the subject is an unusual one for him, Christ With the Little Children.  The Little Princess, by P. Moreelse, has the honour, after Rembrandt, of being the most frequently copied picture in the Rijks.  The theme is the magnet.  A little girl, elaborately dressed, is seated.  She strokes the head of a spaniel whose jewelled collar gives the impression of a dog with four eyes.  In Vermeer’s Young Woman Reading a Letter is a like confused passage of painting, for the uninstructed spectator.  She wears her hair over her ear, an ornament clasping the hair.  At first view this is not clear, principally because this fashion of wearing the hair is unusual in the eyes of a stranger.