Studio: international art (58.1913)

Dutch Pictures for South Africa

tion of the Dutch revelation, with its substantiality after a long period of oblivion. There is always, of
of form which cannot be blown away, and its course, the closest inter-dependence between style
simplicity of style. and intention in art, but the most significant in-

It is the sensibility of the Dutch and Flemish tentions of artists may often be almost unconscious,
artists that is generally overlooked. It is not always We are often inclined to credit artistic results with
remembered that the mirror-like qualities of their being more intentional than they really were. Thus
art represents this sensibility. In their still-life Hals's method, which is almost entirely the result of
pieces we only see one aspect of it, it shows itself reason and logic when applied again by a Sargent,
more profoundly in a portrait by Rembrandt—in a was with Hals instinctive, and we might almost say
receptiveness of attitude on his part towards what- immoral in its anxiety to arrive at results satisfactory
ever may have been stirring in the mind of his sitter, to an exacting sitter, with the minimum of expendi-
which in his own time was absolutely new to art. It ture of time to Hals. He arrived at breadth of style
is less sensitive in Hals, but Hals's eager interest in less by intention than through the embarrassment
his sitter is something to contrast with everything of over-employment. He found the only way
that preceded it. In a Hals portrait it is Hals which while meeting the necessity for rapid
himself who disappears in the revelation of human spontaneous work did not fail in the expression of
character, whereas in all Italian portraiture the that refinement of vision which was his artist's
portrait painter seems to stand beside his work birthright. An Impressionist, which Hals was,
and we are conscious of his artistic personality all cannot fail to include in his Impression everything
the time. However great the picture, its greatness in the order and in the exact degree to which it
is not of that particular kind which excludes from impressed him; and Hals's impressionableness to
the mind of the spectator all sense
that the creation has had an artist
creator. Perhaps it is just here
that the long-sought-for distinction
between realistic and idealistic art
could be found. All realism is
impersonal. And if, as in the case
of Hals, the impersonal artist and
his art are sometimes forgotten for
several generations, it is because,
while successful in challenging
reality, his art fails to introduce
that contrast with reality—that ad-
ditional real thing which it is the
privilege of the highest creation to
add to what is already in the
world.

In art the word " interpretation "
can be used in a wider or narrower
sense. We have shown the inter-
pretation the Dutch school put
upon life in the wider sense, but
there is the narrower use of the
the word as it applies to technical
methods employed by the painter in
translating the scene before him.
Hals's method of interpretation
provides us with the prototype of
the modern impressionist method,
and it was from this fact, and as
the discovery of later artists—and
only afterwards of connoisseurs—

that Hals's genius was recognised portrait of a man holding a glove by jan verspronck

276