Studio: international art (58.1913)

Dutch Pictures for South Africa

The Dominion has thus had the advantage of the intimate association with the realities of his daily

employment of one of the most discriminating life; their impression of landscape was that of a

connoisseurs of our time, and the certainty that the view from the window of a living room'; and their

gallery will start with a basis of works of the presentation of still-life is always as incidental to a

first order from which to extend its operations. serene drama of domestic life.

In referring to the collection as ideal we especially The collection to which we are alluding having

have in mind the care which has been taken been once formed, Sir Hugh Lane's share in the

to represent the four separate aspects of Dutch matter for the moment ended. It is to Mr. Max

painting in the seventeenth century, as respectively Michaelis that South Africa is indebted for the

shown in portraiture, landscape and still-life paint- seizure of one of those golden opportunities by

ing, and the painting of Interior genre. It is in the which successful schemes go through. It was

case of the last named only that there is room for from Mr. Michaelis that the cost of the collection

regret that the genius of the Dutch school is was immediately forthcoming—and a gift unique

inadequately represented. In portraiture it is repre- in its romantic appropriateness made to the

sen ted among other works by the remarkable Dominion of South Africa. When it reaches the

Rembrandt, Portrait of a Young Lady, which Cape it will be lodged in a building provided

as long ago as 1880 created a sensation by realising by the Union Government, as a nucleus to further

the highest sum that had hitherto been obtained treasures which men of spirit may present, there

for a Dutch picture, and by Frans Hals's Portrait to represent for ever that art in the appreciation of

of a Lady, originally in the Kann collection ; in which the two races whose influence has controlled
still-life by the Still-life of
Barentvan der Meer, which

we reproduce in colour,
the Fruit and Still-life by
van Beyeren and the Vase
of Flowers by William van
Aelst. In the hearing of
the writer these have been
described as probably the
best in the world by one
of the few English painters
whose genius is every-
where acknowledged. And
then in landscape there
are the two beautiful Ruis-
daels, The Hill of' Bent ham
and the Mountainous
Landscape, in which land-
scape art reaches the
supreme level.

It is to be hoped that
the deficiency in the repre-
sentation of that side of
Dutch art which is ex-
pressed in Interior genre
will be corrected at the
earliest possible oppor-
tunity—for it is not merely
a side of Dutch art, it also
explains the whole spirit
of it. The Dutch painters'
conception of portraiture
was that of representing
the individual in the most

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