It was one of the characteristics of the great men of the Renaissance, that they tried many arts and were masters of many. It was one of the characteristics of the Seventeenth Century Dutchmen, that they tried many branches of Art, and were masters of all that they tried. Supreme in technicalities of painting and in technicalities of etching, they were the first to use with any large effect the medium of water-colour, and their use of that, in a manner not tentative and occasional, like Dürer’s, but often familiar and accomplished as our own (of our great last generation), is shown by many drawings. Coloured sketches assigned to Rembrandt, doubtless on good foundation, are in the collections of the British Museum and of M. J. De Vos, a veteran collector at Amsterdam; and on our Burlington Club walls--not to speak of the wonderful pen drawings, so decisive at once and free--is a sketch of a city gate, from the collection of Seymour Haden, a sketch in which line counts for little, and the effect is sought and gained by tender gradations of tinting in monochrome. Probably of the same period are the two drawings in which Philip De Koningh, who in landscape came nearest to Rembrandt, has used his orange-browns with subtle variation, to portray his wonted effects of infinite distance. Colour, or it may be a wash of sepia, used by Rembrandt and by De Koningh chiefly to suggest distance or tone, is used by Berghem more often to suggest the pleasantness and warmth of sunlight, which were so precious to him, and were the charm of his art. His artificial but agreeable landscape of ordered valley and well-disposed mountain and happy peasant of the opera, is represented notably by one of the many splendid drawings belonging to Malcolm of Poltalloch--a delicately coloured design, airy and sunny almost as De Koningh’s best paintings, and to be noticed, not only for the extreme rarity of such work in water-colour at that time and by that master, but also for its foretaste of the subtlety with which our own great art of water-colour learned, so many generations afterwards, to reach atmospheric effects.