you feel the dread moment is
at hand. How to persuade the patient to swallow the dose? She is
stubborn-looking. The Pieter de Hoochs are now in the same gallery
with Rembrandt's Jewish Bride. These interiors, painted with a minute,
hard finish, lack the charm and the colour quality of Vermeer. With
sunlight Hooch is successful, but his figures do not move freely in an
atmospheric envelope, as is the case with Vermeer's. The Small Country
House is the favourite. In front of a house a well-dressed man and
woman are seated at a table. She is squeezing lemon juice into a
glass. Behind her a servant is carrying a glass of beer, and farther
away a girl cleans pots and pans. The composition is the apotheosis of
domestic comfort, conjugal peace, and gluttony. We like much more The
Pantry, wherein a woman hands a jug to her little girl. The adjoining
room, flooded with light, is real.

There is one Van der Helst we could not pass. It looks like the
portrait of a corpulent woman, but is that of Gerard Bicker, bailiff
of Muiden. A half-length figure turned to the left, the bailiff a
well-fed pig, holds a pair of gloves in his right hand which he
presses against his Gargantuan chest. His hair is long and curly. The
fabrics are finely wrought. Holbein the younger is represented by the
portrait of a young man. It is excellent, but doubtless a copy or an
imitation. To view five Lucas van Leydens in one gallery is not an
everyday event. His engravings are rare enough--that is, in good
states; "ghosts" are aplenty--and his paintings rarer. Here they are
chiefly portraits. Rachel Ruysch, the flower painter, has a superior
in Judith Lyster, a pupil of Frans Hals. She was born at Haarlem, or
Zaandam, about 1600, and died 1660. She married the painter Jan
Molener. Her Jolly Toper faces the Hals of the same theme, in a
cabinet, and reveals its artistic ancestry. Judith had the gift of
reproducing surfaces. We need not return to the various Maeses;
indeed, this is only a haphazard ramble among the less well-known
pictures. Consider the heads of Van Mierevelt; those of Henrick Hooft,
burgomaster of Amsterdam, of Jacob Cats, and of his wife Aegje
Hasselaer (1618-64). Her hair and lace collar are wonderfully set
forth. Must we stop before Mabuse, or before the cattle piece of the
Dutch school, seventeenth century? A Monticelli seems out of key here,
and the subject is an unusual one for him, Christ With the Little
Children. The Little Princess