But one must go to the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam to see his finest work of all—­“The Endless Prayer,” No. 1501, reproduced on the opposite page.  We have at the National Gallery or the Wallace Collection no Maes equal to this.  His “Card players,” however, at the National Gallery, a free bold canvas, more in the manner of Velasquez than of his immediate master, is in its way almost as interesting.

To “The Endless Prayer” one feels that Maes’s master, Rembrandt, could have added nothing.  It is even conceivable that he might have injured it by some touch of asperity.  From this picture all Newlyn seems to have sprung.

According to Pilkington, Maes gave up his better and more Rembrandtesque manner on account of the objection of his sitters to be thus painted.  Such are sitters!

Dordrecht claims also Ferdinand Bol, the pupil and friend of Rembrandt, and the painter of the Four Regents of the Leprosy Hospital in the Amsterdam stadhuis.  He was born in 1611.  For a while his pictures were considered by connoisseurs to be finer than those of his master.  We are wiser to-day; yet Bol had a fine free way that is occasionally superb, often united, as in the portrait of Dirck van der Waeijen at Rotterdam, to a delicate charm for which Rembrandt cared little.  His portrait of an astronomer in our National Gallery is a great work, and at the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam his “Roelof Meulenaer,” No. 543, should not be missed.  Bol’s favourite sitter seems to have been Admiral de Ruyter—­if one may judge by the number of his portraits of that sea ravener which Holland possesses.

By a perversity of judgment Dort seems to be more proud of Ary Scheffer than of any of her really great sons.  It is Ary Scheffer’s statue—­not Albert Cuyp’s or Nicolas Maes’s—­which rises in the centre of the town; and Ary Scheffer’s sentimental and saccharine inventions fill three rooms in the museum.  It is amusing in the midst of this riot of meek romanticism to remember that Scheffer painted Carlyle.  Dort has no right to be so intoxicated with the excitement of having given birth to Scheffer, for his father was a German, a mere sojourner in the Dutch town.

The old museum of Dort has just been moved to a new building in the Lindengracht, and in honour of the event a loan exhibition of modern paintings and drawings was opened last summer.  The exhibition gave peculiar opportunity for studying the work of G. H. Breitner, the painter of Amsterdam canals.  The master of a fine sombre impressionism, Breitner has made such scenes his own.  But he can do also more tender and subtle things.  In this collection was a little oil sketch of a mere which would not have suffered had it been hung between a Corot and a Daubigny; and a water-colour drawing of a few cottages and a river that could not have been strengthened by any hand.