to realistic effect. His subjects are apt
to be fanciful and are executed in a semi-playful spirit not in the
least familiar to an uninventive age, as where the spirit of the
Renaissance is represented by a young woman seated high on a
step-ladder, looking toward the sky, with Popes and Cardinals seated
on the rungs below gazing in adoration, while underneath them all yawns
the grave filled with skeletons, from which the Renaissance has risen.

[Illustration: A PAINTING BY CARL LARSSON]

On the subject of home arts and handicrafts Larsson has emphatic ideas
and urges on his compatriots the desirability of preserving their
national types. "Take care of your true self while time is," he says,
"again become a plain and worthy people. Be clumsy rather than elegant:
dress yourselves in furs, skins, and woolens, make yourselves things
that are in harmony with your heavy bodies, and make everything in
bright strong colors; yes, in the so-called gaudy peasant colors which
are needed contrasts to your deep green pine forests and cold white
snow." He has made designs for haute-lisse weaving which were executed
by the Handicraft Guild and which were practically open air painting
translated into the Gobelin weave. In all that he does he is free from
the trammels of convention; but his chief triumphs are in a field that
is sadly neglected in modern art. As a painter of family life he is
surpassed by none of his contemporaries.

JAN STEEN

X

JAN STEEN

Jan Steen was born in Leyden about 1626, which would make him nineteen
years younger than Rembrandt. He is said to have studied first under
Nicolas Knuepfer and then possibly under Adriaen van Ostade in Harlem,
and finally under Jan van Goyen at the Hague. In 1648 he was enrolled in
the Painter's Guild at Leyden, and the following year he married
Margaretha van Goyen, the daughter of his latest master. His father was
a well-to-do merchant and beer-brewer and Steen himself at one time ran
a brewery, though apparently not with great success. He incontestably
was familiar with the life of drinking places and houses in which rough
merrymaking was the chief business. Many of his subjects are drawn from
such sources and his brush brings them before us with their
characteristic features sharply observed and emphasized. He has been
accused of a moralizing tendency and it may at least be said that he
permits us to draw our own moral from perverted and unpolished facts. In