The room in which his great groups hang is perhaps in effect more filled with faces than any in the world.  Entering the door one is immediately beneath the bold and laughing scrutiny of a host of genial masterful arquebusiers, who make merry on the walls for all time.  Such a riot of vivid portraiture never was!  Other men have painted single heads as well or better:  but Hals stands alone in his gusto, his abundance, his surpassing brio.  It is a thousand pities that neither Lamb nor Hazlitt ever made the journey to Haarlem, because only they among our writers on art could have brought a commensurate gusto to the praise of his brush.

I have reproduced one of the groups opposite page 150, but the result is no more than a memento of the original.  It conveys, however, an impression of the skill in composition by which the group is made not only a collection of portraits but a picture too.  If such groups there must be, this is the way to paint them.  The Dutch in the seventeenth century had a perfect mania for these commemorative canvases, and there is not a stadhuis but has one or more.  Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and Hals’ Haarlem groups are the greatest; but one is always surprised by the general level of excellence maintained, and now and then a lesser man such as Van der Helst climbs very nigh the rose, as in his “De Schuttersmaaltyd” in the “Night Watch” room in the Ryks Museum.  The Corporation pieces of Jan van Ravesteyn in the Municipal Museum at The Hague are also exceedingly vivid; while Jan de Bray’s canvases at Haarlem, in direct competition with Hals’, would be very good indeed in the absence of their rivals.

Among other painters who can be studied here is our Utrecht friend Jan van Scorel, who has a large “Adam and Eve” in the passage and a famous “Baptism of Christ”; Jan Verspronk of Haarlem, Hals’ pupil, who has a very quiet and effective portrait (No. 210) and a fine rich group of the lady managers of an orphanage; and Cornelius Cornellessen, also of Haarlem, painter of an excellent Corporation Banquet.  In the collection are also a very charming little Terburg (No. 194) and a fascinating unsigned portrait of William III. as a pale and wistful boy.

Haarlem was the mother or instructor of many painters.  There is Dirck Hals, the brother of Frans, who was born there at the end of the sixteenth century, and painted richly coloured scenes of fashionable convivial life.  He died at Haarlem ten years before Frans.  A greater was Bartholomew van der Helst, who was Hals’ most assimilative pupil.  He was born at Haarlem about 1612, and is supposed to have studied also under Nicolas Elias.  His finest large work is undoubtedly the “Banquet” to which I have just referred, but I always associate him with his portrait of Gerard Bicker, Landrichter of Muiden, that splendid tun of a man, No. 1140 in the Gallery of Honour at the Ryks Museum (see opposite page 86).  One of his most beautiful paintings is a portrait of a woman in our National Gallery, on a screen in the large Netherlands room:  a picture which shows the influence of Elias not a little, as any one can see who recalls Nos. 897 and 899 in the Ryks Museum—­two very beautiful portraits of a man and his wife.