Haarlem and Oudenarde both claim the birth of Adrian Brouwer, a painter of Dutch topers.  As to his life little is known.  Tradition says that he drank and dissipated his earnings, while his work is evidence that he knew inn life with some particularity; but his epitaph calls him “a man of great mind who rejected every splendour of the world and who despised gain and riches”.  Brouwer, who was born about 1606, was put by his mother, a dressmaker at Haarlem, into the studio of Frans Hals.  Hals bullied him, as he bullied his first wife.  Escaping to Amsterdam, Brouwer became a famous painter, his pictures being acquired, among others, by Rembrandt in his wealthy days, and by Rubens.  He died at Antwerp when only thirty-three.  We have nothing of his in the National Gallery, but he is represented at the Wallace Collection.

At Haarlem was born also, in 1620, Nicolas Berchem, painter of charming scenes of broken arches and columns (which he certainly never saw in his own country), made human and domestic by the presence of people and cows, and suffused with gentle light.  We have five of his pictures in the National Gallery.  Berchem’s real name was Van Haarlem.  One day, however, when he was a pupil in Van Goyen’s studio, his father pursued him for some fault.  Van Goyen, who was a kindly creature, as became the father-in-law of Jan Steen, called out to his other pupils—­“Berg hem” (Hide him!) and the phrase stuck, and became his best-known name.  Nicolas married a termagant, but never allowed her to impair his cheerful disposition.

Haarlem was the birthplace also of Jacob van Ruisdael, greatest of Dutch landscape painters.  He was born about 1620.  His idea was to be a doctor, but Nicolas Berchem induced him to try painting, and we cannot be too thankful for the change.  His landscapes have a deep and grave beauty:  the clouds really seem to be floating across the sky; the water can almost be heard tumbling over the stones.  Ruisdael did not find his typical scenery in his native land:  he travelled in Germany and Italy, and possibly in Norway; but whenever he painted a strictly Dutch scene he excelled.  He died at Haarlem in 1682; and one of his most exquisite pictures hangs in the Museum.  I do not give any reproductions of Ruisdael because his work loses so much in the process.  At the National Gallery and at the Wallace Collection he is well represented.

Walking up and down beneath the laughing confidence of these many bold faces in the great Hals’ room at Haarlem I found myself repeating Longfellow’s lines:—­

    He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
    And carried away the Dean of Jaen
      And sold him in Algiers.

Surely the hero, Simon Danz, was something such a man as Hals painted.  How does the ballad run?—­

    A DUTCH PICTURE.

    Simon Danz has come home again,
      From cruising about with his buccaneers;
    He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
    And carried away the Dean of Jaen
      And sold him in Algiers.