all in
Northamptonshire.

[Illustration: PLATE XXV.--FRANS HALS

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

_Louvre, Paris_]

The subject is an old beggar man playing in front of the door of a
cottage on a ridiculous instrument consisting of an earthen pot covered
over like a jampot with a lid of parchment, on which he makes a rude
noise with a stick, to the intense delight of a group of children. A
picture like this, then, it is evident, instead of hanging in solitary
confinement in the house of a great person, was so widely popular that
it was copied on all sides, and must have been seen by thousands of
people.

Next to Hals, in point of time, was HENDRIK GERRITZ POT, who was born,
probably at Haarlem, in 1585. It is to him rather than to Ostade, who
was a quarter of a century later, that we must trace the origin of
smaller _genre_ pictures of the Dutch School which in later years became
its principal product. Pot's works are neither very important nor very
numerous, but as a portrait painter he is represented in the Louvre by a
portrait of Charles I., which was probably painted when he was in
England in 1631 or thereabouts; while at Hampton Court is a beautiful
little piece by him which is catalogued under the title of _A Startling
Introduction_. This belonged to Charles I., for his cypher is branded on
the back of the panel on which it is painted, and it was sold by the
Commonwealth as "a souldier making a strange posture to a Dutch lady by
Bott." The painter's monogram H.P. appears on the large chimney piece
before which the "soldier" is standing.

GERARD HONTHORST, born at Utrecht in 1590, can hardly be said to belong
to the Dutch School at all. When he was only twenty he went to Rome,
where his devotion to painting effects of candle-light earned him the
sobriquet of "Gherardo della Notte." In 1628 he was elected Dean of the
Guild of St. Luke at Utrecht, but he was in no sense a national painter,
and neither took nor gave anything in the way of national influence. He
was in England for a few months in 1628, to which chance we are indebted
for the picture of the Duke of Buckingham and his family which is in the
National Portrait Gallery, and another group of the Cavendish family
which is at Chatsworth. Pictures of the nobility, or of celebrities like
Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, were more in his
line than those of his republican patriots, and consequently he plays no
part in the development of the schoo