and line is the
composition, how tender in modeling are the forms, how bewitching to
the eye the fine enamel of the surface!

In the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, is one characteristic example:
"The old rat comes to the trap at last," which badly needs cleaning, and
one new purchase attributed to Steen in the lists of his work but hardly
typical or even characteristic. The subject is a kitchen scene. In it we
have neither Steen's charm of color nor his perfection of finish. Yet
the turn of the woman's head, the unaffected merriment of her expression
and that of the youth, and the type to which her face belongs
sufficiently recall such examples of the artist's work as "_Das Galante
Anerbieten_" at Brussels with which indeed it has more in common than
with any other of Jan Steen's pictures known to me.

Steen's own portrait, painted by himself and hanging now in the
Amsterdam Museum, shows a face upon which neither wild living nor ardent
toil has left unhappy marks. His serious eyes look frankly out from
under arched brows. His mouth is firm though smiling slightly. The high,
bold nose and strong chin, the well-shaped head and thoughtful brow
indicate a character more decided and more praiseworthy than the legends
adrift concerning his life would lead us to expect in him.

ONE SIDE OF MODERN GERMAN PAINTING

XI

ONE SIDE OF MODERN GERMAN PAINTING

The best substitutes for the judgments of posterity are the judgments of
foreigners. A group of pictures by the artists of one country, taken to
another country for exhibition and criticism, is subjected to something
the same test as the pictures of one generation coming under the
scrutiny of another generation.

When a collection of pictures by modern German artists was exhibited in
America in 1909, the American people were prompt in their recognition of
a certain quality which they termed national. The critics--many of
them--saw this quality from the adverse side and were far from
complimentary to the Germans in their comparisons between American art
and German art, but a general impression was given of a vitality
sufficiently marked to make itself felt by the least initiated observer.
A number of the pictures by the older men had little enough of this
vitality, but where it existed it was so decided as to leaven the mass.
And there was almost none of the sentimentality characterizing the
Teutonic ideal as it had manifested itself in the pictures form