But it was in the painting of interiors that the resources of the art of water-colour were used most fully by the Dutchmen, and they were used only most fully in the old age of Berghem, and after the death of Rembrandt, when Adrian van Ostade, himself now old, had come from Haarlem to Amsterdam, and they were used best by that master of ignoble conception and often repulsive work. The special virtues of Ostade--accomplished management of light and shade, and faultless composition of mean subjects--an instinct, that is, for the spacing out, the perfectly balanced filling, the never crowding, of his given area of paper or canvas--have long ago been acknowledged; and his sense of beauty in colour and beauty in grouping, and beauty indeed sometimes in line, in inanimate things, has gone far to atone for that vulgar indifference to charm of figure and face, common indeed to many of the Dutchmen, but Ostade’s to an exceptional degree. Drawings of Mr. Malcolm’s and Mr. Cook’s show him, once for all, the consummate practitioner of a branch of art, the precedence in which--the invention of which, almost--our own country has liked to claim. Rich and mellow, tender and luminous, beyond all that has thus far been acknowledged, was the best work of Ostade in his old age, in the English art of water-colour. Dusart followed him in elaboration of work, but not at all in felicitous adaptation of the means to the end. There are naturally certain masters rightly famed for their work in oil painting, who are seen at a disadvantage in drawings, whether by pen or chalk or washes of colour. It is not all who gave to their smaller designs, with whatever purpose of immediate sale, completion so brilliant and expressive as that which we see, for instance, in a little red chalk drawing of Wouvermans--a group of figures, horses and dogs--a sharply finished work, exquisite in its possession of every quality for which the master may be praised. Again, some men dependent on glow of colour or gradations of tone beyond the art of limited material, or at least beyond their command of it--Cuyp, for instance--might be judged hardly by drawings. The pleasantness of Cuyp is not in his drawings.