n a number of small portraits remarkable for their distinction and
aristocratic grace.

Steen (1626?-1679) was almost the opposite of Terburg, a man of
sarcastic flings and coarse humor who satirized his own time with
little reserve. He developed under Hals and Van Ostade, favoring the
latter in his interiors, family scenes, and drunken debauches. He was
a master of physiognomy, and depicted it with rare if rather
unpleasant truth. If he had little refinement in his themes he
certainly handled them as a painter with delicacy. At his best his
many figured groups were exceedingly well composed, his color was of
good quality (with a fondness for yellows), and his brush was as
limpid and graceful as though painting angels instead of Dutch boors.
He was really one of the fine brushmen of Holland, a man greatly
admired by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many an artist since; but not a
man of high intellectual pitch as compared with Terburg, for
instance.

Pieter de Hooghe (1632?-1681) was a painter of purely pictorial
effects, beginning and ending a picture in a scheme of color,
atmosphere, clever composition, and above all the play of
light-and-shade. He was one of the early masters of full sunlight,
painting it falling across a court-yard or streaming through a window
with marvellous truth and poetry. His subjects were commonplace
enough. An interior with a figure or two in the middle distance, and a
passage-way leading into a lighted background were sufficient for him.
These formed a skeleton which he clothed in a half-tone shadow,
pierced with warm yellow light, enriched with rare colors, usually
garnet reds and deep yellows repeated in the different planes, and
surrounded with a subtle pervading atmosphere. As a brushman he was
easy but not distinguished, and often his drawing was not correct; but
in the placing of color masses and in composing by color and light he
was a master of the first rank. Little is known about his life. He
probably formed himself on Fabritius or Rembrandt at second-hand, but
little trace of the latter is apparent in his work. He seems not to
have achieved much fame until late years, and then rather in England
than in his own country.

Jan van der Meer of Delft (1632-1675), one of the most charming of all
the _genre_ painters, was allied to De Hooghe in his pictorial point
of view and interior subjects. Unfortunately there is little left to
us of this master, but the few extant examples serve to sho