cing.

The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were
produced in the Netherlands. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external
world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and
most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiae.

The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an
easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of
Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in
the land of Reineke Fuchs. Carriere says about these masters of genre
painting[9]: 'Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not
only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into
the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so
producing works of art of a kind unknown to antiquity. That divine
element, which the Greek saw in the human form, the Germanic race
divined in all the visible forms of Nature, and so felt at one with
them and able to reveal itself through them.

'Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to
man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual
object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the
river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but
accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest
Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and
stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible
crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or
tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life. But
these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave
charm to the most trifling--it was the life of the universe divined
in its minutiae. In its treatment of landscape their genre painting
displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into
being.'[10]

The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting
too. No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add
such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the
development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp
contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams,
woods, meadows, and dales.

But it was in devotional pictures that the Netherlanders first tried
their wings; landscape and scenes from human life did not free
themselves permanently from religion and take independent place for
more than a century later