ADRIAN VAN OSTADE, said to have been born at Lubeck, was baptized in 1610 at Haarlem, where he studied under Frans Hals, and he formed a very good taste in colouring. Nature guided his brush in everything he undertook; he devoted himself almost entirely to painting peasants and drunkards, whose gestures and most trifling actions were the subject of his most serious meditation. The subjects of his little pictures are not more elevated than those of Brouwer, and considerably less than those of Teniers--they are nearly always alehouses or kitchens. He is perhaps one of the Dutch masters who best understood chiaroscuro. His figures are very lively, and he sometimes put them into the pictures of the best painters among his countrymen. Nothing can excel his pictures of stables, in which the light is spread so judiciously that all one could wish is a lighter touch in his drawing, and a little more height in his figures. Many of his brother Isaak's pictures are improperly attributed to him, which, though painted in the same manner, are never of the real excellence of Adrian's. The _Interior with Peasants_ at Hertford House, and _The Alchymist_ at the National Gallery are a characteristic pair of his pictures, which were sold in the collection of M. de Jully in 1769 for L164, the former being purchased by the third Marquess of Hertford and the latter passing into the Peel Collection. _Buying Fish_, at Hertford House, dated 1669--when the artist was nearly sixty years old, is remarkable for its breadth of effect and brilliancy of colour.