One seems to hear an hilarious din merely from looking at it. The fiddler plays with a wild fantastic energy; one peasant accompanies him with crashing tankard and roaring chorus; another sits bent and sullen with his head on his hands. The landlord, with huge frame and round paunch, looks on with twinkling eyes. A woman by the great chimney, on which hangs the notice of a sale of tulips and hyacinths, “Tulpaan en Hyacinthen,” calls a child to her. The roomy background with its beams and rafters, is drawn and lighted with extraordinary skill. As a page of daily life, fresh and vivid, this etching deserves the fullest praise. Dusart in his later years devoted himself to mezzotint, and produced a great deal in this manner. These engravings, some of which represent in Dusart’s extravagant way, the joy in Holland at the taking of Namur in 1695 by William III., are more interesting historically than artistically. It was not till the middle of next century that mezzotint, the invention of which does not date from much earlier than Dusart’s birth, reached its perfection in the hands of the English engravers. THE ETCHERS OF LANDSCAPE I The seventeenth century, which inaugurated so much that is characteristic in modern art, permitted for the first time the recognition of landscape as a subject worthy for its own sake of painting. And feeling for landscape seems to be almost entirely a modern thing. Drawings of landscape by Titian and Campagnola among the Italians, and by Dürer among the Germans, had indicated the first beginnings of a preference; and there are a certain number of landscape subjects among the engraved work of the Little Masters. But these are occasional efforts by men whose chief work lay in other lines. In painting no one ventured as yet to concentrate his interest on the landscape, and though men like the Flemish Joachim Patinir evidently cared more for their backgrounds of mountain and river than for the human incidents which relieve them, they had not the courage to cast away compromise and brave authority by omitting the traditional foreground. Rubens is the first great Northern master who paints landscape with entire and frank abandonment to the subject. The broad prospects and swelling undulations of Flemish country are painted by him with a kind of glory that reflects his large and joyous mind. Lodowyck de Vadder and Lucas van Uden, his contemporaries, etched landscape for the first time in Flanders. But it was in Holland that this line was most abundantly developed. To tranquil, observant natures, such as seem typical of the nation, there was in landscape a strong appeal, a permanent delight. The majority of the Dutch etchers found here their chief material. II