Rembrandt is an exception to all rules, but most of the Dutch painters did not allow themselves these excursions within their studios to foreign scenes.  They faithfully depicted their own flat country as they saw it, and added neither hills nor mountains.  But they varied the lighting to express their own moods.  Ruysdael’s sombre tone befits the man who struggled with poverty all his life, and died in a hospital penniless.  Cuyp is always sunny.  In his pictures, cattle browse at their ease, and shepherds lounge contented on the grass.  He was a painter of portraits and of figure subjects as well as of landscapes, and his little groups of men and cattle are always beautifully drawn.  Ruysdael, Hobbema, and many others were landscape painters only, and some had their figures put in by other artists.  Often they did without them, but in the landscapes of Cuyp, cows generally occupy the prominent position.  The black and white cow in our picture is a fine creature, and nothing could be more harmonious in colour than the brown cow and the brown jacket of the herdsman.

There were some painters in Holland in the seventeenth century who made animals their chief study.  Theretofore it had been rare to introduce them into pictures, except as symbols, like the lion of St. Jerome, or where the story implied them; or in allegorical pictures, such as the ‘Golden Age.’  But at this later time animals had their share in the increased interest that was taken in the things of daily life, and they were painted for their handsome sakes, as Landseer painted them in England fifty years ago.

Thus the seventeenth century in Holland shows an enlargement in the scope of subjects for painting.  Devotional pictures were becoming rare, but illustrations, sacred and secular, portraits, groups, interiors, and landscapes, were produced in great numbers.  Dutch painters outnumbered those of Flanders, but among the latter were at least two of the highest eminence, Rubens and Van Dyck, and to these we will next direct our attention.

CHAPTER XI

VAN DYCK

The great painter Rubens lived at Antwerp, a town about as near to Amsterdam as Dover is to London.  Yet despite the proximity of Flanders and Holland, their religion, politics, social life, and art were very different in the seventeenth century, as we have already seen.

Rubens was a painter of the prosperous and ruling classes.  He was employed by his own sovereign, by the King of Spain, by Marie de Medicis, Queen of France, and by Charles I. of England.  His remarkable social and intellectual gifts caused him to be employed also as an ambassador, and he was sent on a diplomatic errand to Spain; but even then his leisure hours were occupied in copying the fine Titians in the King’s palace.

One day he was noticed by a Spanish noble, who said to him, ’Does my Lord occupy his spare time in painting?’ ‘No,’ said Rubens; ’the painter sometimes amuses himself with diplomacy.’