And it is characteristic of Dutch Art, and especially of Dutch Landscape Art, that it had no period of painful and tentative labour, like that during which the art of earlier schools had had to struggle slowly towards freedom of expression. Profiting no doubt by the experience of the Past, and the recent Past especially of Bruges and of Leyden, it gained almost at once the power of finish always expressive, always economical, yet often very swift and summary. The work of its earliest masters--Roghman say, and Van Goyen--has neither pettiness of manipulation when it is most delicate, nor uncertainty when it is most rapid. The signs of an art mature and masculine--economy of means, decision of hand--are promptly upon it. Roghman, it appears, made few pictures, but many drawings. There are five-and-twenty in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. His drawings must have been acceptable to the public of his day, and they show that a public then existed capable of the intelligent interpretation of the work of an artist who left much to be interpreted. Van Goyen, if he did not make many drawings, painted many pictures with at least as marked an economy of means as he has used in the few drawings we know. His science of large design and the expressive completeness of his gradations of tone, enabled him--often in picture and drawing alike--to dispense with the easier attraction of various colour, so that even a modern master of colour, Théodore Rousseau, was wont to hold him up as a model to his own pupils. Van Goyen travelled, and Roghman travelled, but their art, like that of Rembrandt--their younger and greater contemporary, who remained at home--continued to be not an imported art, but an art of the soil; and it was only at a later period that the experience of travel, and the contact with an art very different from their own, were to bring to the Dutchmen a new method with a false ideal. There was first the true Dutch time, rich and fertile--a time in which Van Goyen painted, with a seeming monotony always delicately varied, the long river banks, the low-lying towns, and the great high skies of Holland; in which Cuyp fixed interest on the common aspects of the afternoon fields, steaming in moist sunshine; in which Adrian van Ostade passed from the vulgarities of the alehouse to the skilfully rendered charm of the cottage door and the bench in the sunlight; in which Jan Steen perfected himself in as keen and comprehensive a knowledge of the world of men as Art has ever displayed; and in which Rembrandt contentedly imaged Dutch life and landscape, always with nearly equal vigour, nearly equal artistic precision, though at one time in a style that formed the style of Gerard Dow and at another in one that was inherited by Philip de Koningh or by Nicholas Maas.