the painter's native
country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is
considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse,
representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's
later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle
feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now
regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider
scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of
Paul Potter in the National Gallery.

Jan David de Heem[26] and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603,
the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were
eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom
and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish
and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description.
I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well
represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how,
as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they
are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted
and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch
full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern
flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to
introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every
cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.

From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and
Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am
sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to
other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into
one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde,
etc., etc.

CHAPTER IX.

SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682.

Spanish art, from its dawn to the time of Velasquez, had been of a
'severely devotional character,' austere and formal; and although one
man did not work a revolution by his independent example, he did
something to humanize and widen art. In the rich city of Seville in
1599, Diego Rodriguez, de Silva y Velasquez,--and not, as he is
incorrectly called, Diego Velasquez de Silva, was born, and, according
to an Andalusian fashion, took his mother's name of Velasquez, while his
father was of the Portuguese house de S