Bosboom and His Contemporaries

The English _cognoscenti_ of the modern type have now for some time recognised that in Dutch Art there is more than one great period that has to be reckoned with -- that the great Seventeenth Century does not exhaust the achievements of this people. It may not be quite true to say of Dutch painting, as of French sculpture, that the traditions have been invariably preserved, and that there has been little break in the school; for the last century in Holland was a barren one -- just as barren there as in France and England it was brilliant. The revival has been for later generations, and of those who did most to accomplish it some are yet living, in an old age not so very advanced, and others are lately dead. A history of this revival would be a great and worthy subject: it may yet, one hopes, be undertaken by some one writer qualified to treat it. Such a writer could not possibly be a person who had lived wholly within its influence. He would have to bring with him something better and wiser than the ungoverned admirations of the modern studio. A knowledge of the Past must be his. Meanwhile, we receive, and experience a certain satisfaction in receiving, even that fragmentary contribution to the subject which is made in the volume called _Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century_. Max Rooses -- the keeper of the Musée Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp -- furnishes a general introduction, which is readable and fairly comprehensive, if not particularly critical.

And many writers, whose collaboration is of necessity destructive of unity of idea, but whose individual opportunities of personal knowledge give the book something it might yet have lacked had it been written by one serious and capable critic, contribute biographical notes, authentic and amiable. The painters have been caressed, not analysed. That is exactly what the least instructed and least studious portion of the public is supposed to like, in the ‘text' of its big Christmas picture-books -- which, of course, is why that text is written so seldom by the serious professional writers who, if they chose to do it at all, could do it best.