Dutch Seventeenth Century Drawings

The drawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools, and of all Schools besides, have these sources of interest, always admitted -- they reveal to us, as studies must, the personal thought of the master in his theme, and they may often be identified as preparations for some long recognised picture with whose history we are henceforth to be the better acquainted. But some among the drawings of the Dutch School, though coming late indeed in the procession of the world's Art, are still the earliest to possess for us that different and self-contained interest which belongs to work done for its proper sake, itself realising the intention with which it was begun, and so, in the first form in which it comes down to us, at once final and complete.

The School of Holland -- that northern School to which at last, in the great Seventeenth Century, supremacy in Art had moved -- was perhaps the first to adequately feel the value of those immediate impressions which the Italians and the early Flemish had recognised chiefly to control, to alter, to enlarge. And in the many methods of their Art, the masters of Holland sought to perpetuate for the beholders of their work the impressions which to themselves who recorded them had perhaps been as fleeting as vivid. Sketches in oil, sketches in water-colour, sketches in chalk, in bistre, and with the reed pen, and sketches with the etching needle -- these all, in the hands of the great Dutchmen, were not merely studies for themselves, but possessions for their public, just as expressive and interesting as work more prolonged and elaborate. Therefore the amount of finish which each of such finished sketches received was not the important matter: with the greatest artists the amount was often but small: they knew that the important matter was the sufficiency of finish -- its capacity for conveying to one mind the impression received by another.