The spirit of the town’s aspirations is best reflected in her town-hall, which marks the culminating point of her evolution (about 1650). That imposing square building, still in existence in Amsterdam’s centre, called the Dam, must be familiar to all who have visited the town, and the interested art-lover may have noted that this building, grand and magnificent as it is, has no typical Dutch character such as marks Amsterdam’s earlier buildings. He will have remarked a strong tendency to the classic style of Italy, and the rich marble sculptures inside must have appeared to him as belonging to another school than the contemporary Dutch pictures, which he admired in Amsterdam’s Rÿksmuseum. In this circumstance we may find the clue to the disharmony which existed between Rembrandt and his surroundings in his later years. His art and the spirit of his contemporaries were going athwart with different aims. When the artist settled down in Amsterdam, at the age of twenty-five, circumstances were still favourable to a good mutual understanding: the ambitious and pulsating spirit of the growing commercial city must have felt akin to the boisterous aspirations of the young, gifted artist. His great material success during the first years furnishes a proof of this supposition. Then more and more came the alienation, and it is most instructive to compare the different results at which the artist and the intelligent population arrived: the artist, guided by the strength of his immense personality and talent, remained himself, but his fellow-citizens gradually changed their taste and predilections in matters of art and intellect, uncertain as they were of themselves in these matters. Being more gifted as traders than as artists, they showed that short-sightedness and narrowmindedness in judging their contemporary artists, which so often repeats itself in history (even in our time!). They were unable to understand the strength and value of the country’s native art, and turned to foreign taste, even to foreign workmanship, as in the case of the commission to Quellinus, the Flemish sculptor, to execute the sculptures in the town-hall, thus emphasizing their preference for the school of Rubens and Van Dyck above the one of Hals and Rembrandt. This tendency occasioned a preference for foreign theories and forms, and so we see between 1648 and 1660 a town-hall built, ten times bigger than the former one and costing, according to our money, about twenty million guilders, resulting in a work of art, imposing but not essentially Dutch (plates _2_, _3_, _4_). [Plate 3. The Ruins of the Old Town Hall in Amsterdam, after the Fire in 1652.] Plate 3. The Ruins of the Old Town Hall in Amsterdam, after the Fire in 1652. After the drawing by Rembrandt, formerly in the Heseltine Collection, now in the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam. [Plate 4. The New Town-Hall in Amsterdam, about 1660.]