Unfortunately the Dutch artists loved the interior of the tavern still better than its façade, otherwise we should find still more of the old signs in their pictures. Jan Steen, a genius in the art of living as well as in the art of painting, was a brewer’s son and occasionally he played the landlord himself, in 1654, in the tavern “Zur Schlange,” and in 1656 “In der Roskam,” both in Delft. In his latter days, when he had returned to his birthplace, Leyden, where he once was enrolled as a student of the university, he obtained a license from the city fathers “de neringh van openbare herbergh.” Who could deny æsthetic influence to tavern rooms bedecked with genuine Steens? Other artists like Brouwer paid their tavern debts in pictures, and thus created an artistic atmosphere in which young artists like Steen himself felt most naturally at ease. In a picture in Brussels, “The Assembly of the Rhetoricians,” the president of a debating society reads the prize poem to the peasantry assembled outside a tavern, the speaking sign of which, pitcher and tankard, is hanging out on a large oaken branch. More frequent than this bush is the wreath--known to us already as a sign in antiquity--surrounding the jolly pitcher as we see it in Du Jardin’s sunny picture “The Trumpeter before a Tavern,” in Amsterdam. David Teniers gives the preference to the half moon and rarely omits to place a pitcher above the signboard. Sometimes he decorates his moon tavern with the escutcheon of Austria and the imperial eagle; for instance, in a picture in Vienna. In his great painting in the Louvre we see a mail-stage-driver’s horn, a kind of hunting-horn, although the master, who died in 1690, did not live to see the mail-coach introduced. [Illustration: The Half-Moon from a painting by Teniers in London] In the representations, then so popular, of corporations assembled at festive meals, we sometimes remark in the background, through an open window, the stately guild-houses crowned with their signs; the little lamb with the flag, for instance, in Bartholomæus van der Helst’s superb banquet of the city guard in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. But perhaps no other artist has given us a more vivid impression of the beauty of the street with its various glittering signs than the brothers Berkheyden in the picture of which we reproduce a section in our Frontispiece. The street itself has been the painter’s real object, the play of light and shade on its various architectural features fascinates him more than the people passing through it, who once acted the principal rôle and are now treated as mere accessories valuable for accenting the perspective of the picture. Gerrit Berkheyden has painted the same market-place of Harlem again in his sunny picture of 1674 in the London National Gallery, but this time the street, gayly decorated with signs, is more distant and lost in shadow.