themselves as Guilds. For the first time in the history of
painting, neither Church nor Court were its patrons.

In any age or under any circumstances Frans Hals would have seemed a
remarkable painter, but to measure his extraordinary genius to its full
height we must try to realise what those times and those circumstances
were. In Florence and Venice, as we have seen, there were great schools
of painting, and in Florence especially, the whole city existed in an
atmosphere of art. There was no escape from it. In Haarlem, where Hals
spent his youth (he was born in Antwerp), there was no such state of
affairs. There were no chapels to be decorated, no courtiers to be
flattered. The country was seething with the effects of war, and the
whole population were ready for it again at a moment's notice. There
were plenty of heroes--every man was one--but not of the romantic sort.
They were all bluff, hardy fellows, who wanted to get on with their
business. Who would have thought that they wanted to have their
portraits painted? And who, accordingly, could have induced them to do
so except a bluff, roystering genius like Hals, who slashed them down on
canvas before they had time to stop him? Once it got wind that Hals was
such a good fellow, and that he dashed off a portrait to the life in as
little time as it took to pass the time of day with him, he had plenty
of business, and from painting single portraits he was commissioned to
glorify the Guilds by depicting their banquets, which he did with
almost as much speed and considerably more fidelity than the limelight
man at a City dinner in these times. His first great group--_The Archers
of S. George_, at Haarlem--has all the appearance of being painted
instantaneously as the banqueters stood around the table before
dispersing.

When we think of the cultured Rubens, brought up in the atmosphere of
Courts, and studying for years among the finest paintings and painters
in Italy, and compare him with this low, ignorant fellow, who had never
been outside the Netherlands, do we not find his genius still more
amazing? Nowadays we see a portrait by Hals surrounded with the finest
works of the greatest painters in all times and in all lands, and see
how well it stands the comparison. But our admiration must be increased
a hundredfold, when we know that he was without any of the training or
tradition of a great artist, and that it must have been by sheer
character and genius alone that h