Dutch paintings one may
discover the first quality of the nation--patience. Everything is
portrayed with the minuteness of a daguerreotype: the furniture with all
the graining of the wood, the leaf with all its veins, a thread in a bit
of cloth, the patch with all the stitches showing, the animal with every
hair distinct, the face with all its wrinkles,--everything is finished
with such microscopic precision that it seems to be the work of a fairy's
brush, for surely a painter would lose his sight and reason in such a
task. After all, this is a defect rather than a virtue, because painting
ought to reproduce not what exists, but rather what the eye sees, and the
eye does not see every detail. However, the defect is brought to such a
degree of excellence that it is to be admired rather than censured, and
one does not even dare to wish that it should not be there. In this
respect, Dou, Mieris, Potter, Van der Helst, and indeed all the Dutch
painters in greater or less degree, were famous as prodigies of patience.

On the other hand, realism, which imparts to Dutch painting such an
original character and such admirable qualities, is, notwithstanding,
the root of its most serious defects. The Dutch painters, solicitous
to copy only material truth, give to their figures the expression of
merely physical sentiments. Sorrow, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand
subtle emotions that are nameless, or that take different names from
the different causes that give them birth, are rarely or never
expressed. For them the heart does not beat, the eye does not overflow
with tears, nor does the mouth tremble. In their pictures a whole part
of the life is lacking, and that the most powerful and noble part, the
human soul. Nay more, by so faithfully copying everything, the ugly
especially, they end in exaggerating even that. They convert defects
into deformities, portraits into caricatures; they slander the
national type; they give every human figure an ungraceful and
ludicrous appearance. To have a setting for figures they are obliged
to select trivial subjects; hence the excessive number of canvases
depicting taverns and drunken men with grotesque, stupefied faces, in
sprawling attitudes; low women and old men who are despicably
ridiculous; scenes in which we seem to hear the low yells and obscene
words. On looking at these pictures one would say that Holland is
inhabited by the most deformed and ill-mannered nation in the world.
Some pai