ray sky; but how they make one think! A few Dutch painters, not content
with nature in their own country, came to Italy in search of hills,
luminous skies, and famous ruins; and another band of select artists is
the result,--Both, Swanevelt, Pynacker, Breenberg, Van Laer, Asselyn.
But the palm remains with the landscapists of Holland; with Wynants the
painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night, with
Ruysdael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the illustrator of
windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with others who have
restricted themselves to the expression of the enchantment of nature as
she is in Holland.

Simultaneously with landscape art was born another kind of painting,
especially peculiar to Holland,--animal painting. Animals are the riches
of the country; that magnificent race of cattle which has no rival in
Europe for fecundity and beauty. The Hollanders, who owe so much to
them, treat them, one may say, as part of the population; they wash
them, comb them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen
everywhere; they are reflected in all the canals, and dot with points of
black and white the immense fields that stretch on every side, giving
an air of peace and comfort to every place, and exciting in the
spectator's heart a sentiment of Arcadian gentleness and patriarchal
serenity. The Dutch artists studied these animals in all their
varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as one may say, their inner
life and sentiments, animating the tranquil beauty of the landscape with
their forms. Rubens, Luyders, Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters,
had drawn animals with admirable mastery; but all these are surpassed by
the Dutch artists Van der Velde, Berghem, Karel du Jardin, and by the
prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous "Bull," in the
gallery of the Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican beside the
"Transfiguration" by Raphael.

In yet another field are the Dutch painters great,--the sea. The sea,
their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever threatening their
country, and entering in a hundred ways into their lives and fortunes;
that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister color, with a light of
infinite melancholy upon it, beating forever upon a desolate coast, must
subjugate the imagination of the artist. He passes, indeed, long hours
on the shore, contemplating its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its
waves to study the effects of tempests, bu