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Pontiac Directory 02
Page 01
The real inaugurators of Dutch portraiture were Mierevelt, Hals, Ravesteyn, and De Keyser. Mierevelt (1567-1641) was one of the earliest, a prolific painter, fond of the aristocratic sitter, and indulging in a great deal of elegance in his accessories of dress and the like. He had a slight, smooth brush, much detail, and a profusion of color. Quite the reverse of him was Franz Hals (1584?-1666), one of the most remarkable painters of portraits with which history acquaints us. In giving the sense of life and personal physical presence, he was unexcelled by any one. What he saw he could portray with the most telling reality. In drawing and modelling he was usually good; in coloring he was excellent, though in his late work sombre; in brush-handling he was one of the great masters. Strong, virile, yet easy and facile, he seemed to produce without effort. His brush was very broad in its sweep, very sure, very true. Occasionally in his late painting facility ran to the ineffectual, but usually he was certainty itself. His best work was in portraiture, and the most important of this is to be seen at Haarlem, where he died after a rather careless life. As a painter, pure and simple, he is almost to be ranked beside Velasquez; as a poet, a thinker, a man of lofty imagination, his work gives us little enlightenment except in so far as it shows a fine feeling for masses of color and problems of light. Though excellent portrait-painters, Ravesteyn (1572?-1657) and De Keyser (1596?-1679) do not provoke enthusiasm. They were quiet, conservative, dignified, painting civic guards and societies with a knowing brush and lively color, giving the truth of physiognomy, but not with that verve of the artist so conspicuous in Hals, nor with that unity of the group so essential in the making of a picture.
The guilt of the Belgian Government in this matter consists, in the first place, in making and concerting plans with the English and French Governments as to what steps to take in case of war. A plan of the French mobilization was found in the same docket, and it cannot be presumed that the conference between British and French experts was unknown to the British Military Attache in Brussels. It is furthermore impossible to believe that the French railway for the shipping of British troops from Calais, Dunkirk, and Boulogne into Belgium in Belgian cars could have been used without the knowledge of the French authorities. Secondly, that Belgium did not heed the advice of Baron Greindl and did not try to insure her independence in the same way by approaching Germany and making a similar contract with her. This disposes of the contention that the Belgian conversation had a purely defensive character as against all comers. It shows the one-sidedness of the inclination, which is evidenced also by the placing of all Belgium's fortresses on the eastern frontier.
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