with
Ruisdael, the popularity of the former being derived from qualities of a
totally different nature from those which raise Ruisdael far above any
of his contemporaries as a landscape painter.

JAN VAN HUYSUM was born at Amsterdam in 1682. His father, Justus Van
Huysum, who dealt in pictures, was himself a middling painter in most
kinds of painting. He taught his son to paint screens, figures and vases
on wood, landscape, and sometimes flowers; but the son being arrived at
a reasoning age perceived that to work in every branch of his art was
the way to excel in none, therefore he confined himself to flowers,
fruit, and landscape, and quitting his father's school set up for
himself.

No one before Van Huysum attained so perfect a manner of representing
the beauty of flowers and the down and bloom of fruit; for he painted
with greater freedom than Velvet Breughel and Mignon, with more
tenderness and nature than Mario di Fiori, Andrea Belvedere, Michel de
Campidoglio or Daniel Seghers; with more mellowness than de Heem, and
with more vigour of colouring than Baptist Monoyer.

His pictures of flowers and fruit pleasing an English gentleman, he
introduced them into his own country, where they came into vogue and
yielded a high price. To express the motions of the smallest insects
with justice he used to contemplate them through the microscope with
great attention. At the times of the year when the flowers were in
bloom, and the fruit in perfection, he used to design them in his own
garden, and the Sieur Gulet and Voorhelm sent him the most beautiful
productions in those kinds they could pick up.

His reputation rose to such a height that all the curious in painting
sought his works with great eagerness, which encouraged him to raise his
prices so high that his pictures at last grew out of the reach of any
but princes and men of the greatest fortune. He was the first flower
painter that ever thought of laying them on light grounds, which
requires much greater art than to paint them on dark ones.

Van Huysum died at Amsterdam in 1749. He never had any pupil but a young
woman named Haverman, and his brother Michael. Two other brothers have
distinguished themselves in painting, one named Justus, who painted
battles, and died at twenty-two years old, the other named James, who
ended his days in England in 1740. He copied the pictures of his brother
John so well as to deceive the connoisseurs: he had usually L20 for each