spectable painters of such pictures should arise in some force
to supply the need--just as wherever in this country at the present day
there are cricketers and actresses, there also are photographers. That
painters of ordinary merit should be forthcoming is, as I have said,
no wonder: the mystery is that masters of technique whose equal has
never been before or since should have arisen in such numbers; that
in the space of a few years--between say 1590 and 1635--should have
been born in a country never before given to the cultivation of the
arts Rembrandt and Jan Steen, Vermeer and De Hooch, Van der Helst
and Gerard Dou, Fabritius and Maes, Ostade and Van Goyen, Potter and
Ruisdael, Terburg and Cuyp. That is the staggering thing.

Another curious circumstance is that by 1700 it was practically all
over, and Dutch art had become a convention. The gods had gone. Not
until very recently has Holland had any but half gods since.

It may of course be urged that Italy had witnessed a somewhat similar
phenomenon. But the spiritual stimulus of the Renaissance among the
naturally artistic southerners cannot, I think, be compared with the
stimulus given by the establishment of prosperity to these cold and
material northerners. The making of great Italian art was a gradual
process: the Dutch masters sprang forth fully armed at the first
word of command. In the preceding generation the Rembrandts had been
millers; the Steens brewers; the Dous glaziers; and so forth. But
the demand for pictures having sounded, their sons were prepared to
be painters of the first magnitude. Why try to explain this amazing
event? Let there rather be miracles.

I have said that the great Dutch painters expressed no idea; and yet
this is not perfectly true. They expressed no constructive idea, in
the way that a poet or statesman does; but all had this in common,
that they were informed by the desire to represent things--intimate
and local things--as they are. The great Italians had gone to religion
and mythology for their subjects: nearer at hand, in Antwerp, Rubens
was pursuing, according to his lights, the same tradition. The great
Dutchmen were the first painters to bend their genius exclusively
to the honour of their own country, its worthies, its excesses, its
domestic virtues, its trivial dailiness. Hals and Rembrandt lavished
their power on Dutch arquebusiers and governors of hospitals, Dutch
burgomasters and physicians; Ostade and Brouwer saw n