The art of Holland, like the national life, saw many vicissitudes during that eventful Seventeenth Century; and the second half of the century brought changes of taste and fashion, which cast for a while into the shade even such supreme art as the art of Rembrandt. Leaders of social opinion were not proof against the attractions of the work of Both and Berghem, which sacrificed so much that it might gain, as it did gain, the outland charm of southern colour and southern light; and the friend of Rembrandt, Jan Six, as one of many, showed himself in the later years of the century a convert to that newer and brilliant but bastard art. By the time that Cuyp and Wynants had died old and Adrian Van de Velde had died young--when the seventeenth century was entering its fourth quarter--there remained among the home-bred landscape painters hardly one to hold his own against the newer fashion. Hobbema, it is true, worked on, with great and patient fidelity, but he worked unregarded and died poor. And in other branches of Art, after this time, the school declined. William Van de Velde and Backhuysen--the two great painters of the sea and the fleet--had had a worthy precursor in Renier Zeeman, but they had no worthy successors. The best painters of gentle life and of the life of the tavern were falling away. In the comparatively humble but yet delightful field of ‘still life,’ only, could the early years of the Eighteenth Century surpass the achievements of fifty years before. The admired painter of flowers, Jan Van Huysum--whose drawings are seen in large numbers at the British Museum, and whose work is known, perhaps, at its best and boldest in his drawings--then arose. He was one of a whole family of flower and fruit painters; and not the only one who gave some excuse for the ecstasy of a French novelist who was also a connoisseur. Balzac declared of him that his work would hardly be paid for if it were covered with diamonds. But Michael, his kinsman, was perhaps almost as worthy of that praise. To their work succeeded, far on in the Eighteenth Century, the vulgar mimicry of Van Os, with the colours of the chromo-lithograph. And as to Landscape Art--that, free once more from Italian influence, was indeed natural and Dutch again in its aim, with Van Stry especially; but in its practice it insisted rather upon the importance of detail than upon the value of effect. Jacob Cats carried to its last length the trivial elaboration which had become the fashion of his day. The virtue had gone out of Dutch Art, and Dutch Art faded imperceptibly into modern painting.