Johannes Bosboom was born at the Hague in 1817. He died in 1891, aged seventy-four, and in the artistic world of Holland he had by that time long enjoyed complete and cordial recognition; to painters and to the best critics--above all, perhaps, to that rich painter, M. Mesdag, collector as well as artist--belong the majority of the best of his works. The art of Bosboom is displayed to some extent in oil pictures, but more finely, on the whole, in the great series of his water-colours. He is a painter essentially of the succession of Rembrandt--a master of the arrangement of light and shade--holding his own honourably in the presentation of landscape, but known chiefly, and known on the whole most to his advantage, as a painter of church interiors. His earlier work is in method drier and smaller than his later. The maturity of his genius finds him as broad as Cotman or Dewint. He has the restfulness and dignity of these men when they are at their best. He has not Cotman’s gift of colour, and in those very church interiors to which Cotman would have given a colourist’s charm--as his kindred work in the possession of Mr. James Reeve and the late Mr. J. J. Colman assures us--Bosboom’s preoccupation is with tone, and with sense of space; though, of course, in his colour he is never inharmonious. Each is great in his own way, and the one is almost as profoundly poetic as the other, though Bosboom, if anything, excels Cotman in the restful picturesqueness of his vision. With him, invariably, as in the great artist we have mentioned by the side of him, the detail is nothing but a part of the whole. It is never aggressive; it is never importunate; it is even for the most part effaced. Bosboom, dealing with church interiors, is not, like Sir Wyke Bayliss, a painter of great scenes as well as of great architecture. For him the pageant has no attraction, and in the painting of a ceremonial or a service, such as the ‘Taking the Sacrament in Utrecht Cathedral,’ he is not really at his best. He is best when his church is quiet, and all its spaciousness ‘tells.’ See, for instance, the admirable ‘Church at Trier’--immense, velvety, solemn--and, likewise, the not less masterly water-colour, the ‘St. Joris Church at Amersfoort.’ An architectural draughtsman, in the technical or narrow sense, he is never, from beginning to end--a fact that is partly due to the broader and more poetic bent of his genius, and partly, too, no doubt, to his observation having been chiefly exercised and his imagination chiefly stirred by interiors quaint rather than elegant, massive and large rather than exquisite in detail, picturesque rather than perfect. The book of Mr. Max Rooses’ editing, will, in England, have not been without its service, if it, or even our own comments on it, should secure wider attention to the work of a master as eminently human and sympathetic as he is austere and sterling. But, for the fuller comprehension of Bosboom here, in England, there should be