It was natural that art, too, should feel this new influence. And in Haarlem, where the siege had destroyed so much of the old town, and modern buildings of warm red brick had sprung round the vast surviving monument of the middle ages, the Groote Kerk of St. Bavon; in Haarlem especially, a new spirit, intensely modern, began to possess the rising painters. From art which lavished its parade of dexterity on the old mythological fables, handled without heart or meaning, from the smooth and pallid conventionalities of Cornelis Corneliszoon, and the extravagant cleverness of Goltzius, these men turned to the life that was around them. Among them were artists like Jan de Bray, Esaias van de Velde, Dirk and Frans Hals. It was in the studio of Frans Hals that the young Ostade learnt to paint. Already in 1616, Hals had painted his superb group of the civic guard, and was now in the fulness of his extraordinary power. The exuberant joy and energy, the confident sincerity, the swift and certain touch, intimate with realities, that marked Hals, were typical of the country and the time. Life--that is the [Illustration: _Fig. 6.--The Barn. By Ostade. B. 23._] absolute necessity for such an artist: for him everything that has life is a possible subject, a possible realm to conquer. A subject that he cannot feel, as well as conceive, his instinct rejects at once. A great pride of life is what characterises Hals’ pictures human life in all its fulness he accepts: unhindered by the shrinkings of more fastidious natures, he enjoys with a robust enjoyment. It is the same also with Ostade; but the pupil was too individual an artist to repeat his master. Ostade felt, perhaps, that he could never rival those magnificent portrait-groups, and his own preferences, his own gifts, led him to a different choice of subject. Perhaps some who have seen Ostade’s pictures and found them coarse and ignoble, have imagined the painter of them to be equally coarse and ignoble-looking as his boors. His portrait shows him a man of somewhat severe, keen countenance, in plain attire; a grave man, one would say, with humour lurking in his gravity, as often happens; it is a portrait that might be taken for that of an Englishman of the Commonwealth. Ostade was, in fact, a well-to-do citizen of the middle class. His collection of pictures, sold at his death in 1685, was, as we know from the _Haarlem Gazette_, extensive; and the fact that it contained two hundred of his own paintings, proves that he was, unlike so many of his compeers, far removed from want.