Later on, in the Netherlands, there arose another style of painting. In abrupt contrast to the monumental works of the Italian school we have Jan van Eyck's tiny little pictures painted with a fine point, stroke by stroke, with the most minute exactitude. Every hair in the head, every vein in the hands, every ornament in the costume is drawn true to life. Jan van Eyck knew what he was about with this fine-point style of art, for his pictures did not lay claim to any effect from a distance; they were meant to be looked at, like miniatures in the prayer-books, from the closest point of view possible. They were little domestic altar-pieces: when anyone wanted to look at them, he drew the curtain aside and knelt or stood just in front of them. The style of painting of the later Dutch cabinet pictures is accounted for in the same way. These paintings were generally placed on an easel, as if to give the spectator a gentle hint, "If you wish to fully appreciate the beauties of this little picture, please stand right in front." Even when the pictures were meant to adorn the walls, the minute and dainty style of a Don or a Mieris was appropriate, for the narrowness of the old Dutch rooms precluded all possibility of the spectator's being able to stand far away from the picture. [Illustration: _Albert, Munich._ BOECKLIN. THE SHEPHERD'S PLAINT.] If by chance one of these Dutch artists, Weenix for instance, had to do work for a Flemish palace, he changed his style forthwith. He recognised the fact that a picture, to be effective in a large state-room, must differ not only in size, but in composition and style of painting from one that is meant for a small parlour. It is undoubtedly this lack of appreciation of the fact that a picture must be suitable to its surroundings that has robbed the nineteenth century of any claim to style. What abominable daubs mural painters have foisted upon us in our public buildings! The literary trend of the time drew away people's attention from the beauty of form and colour, and centred it upon the didactic value of the works. Instead of starting from the idea that a picture should "adorn," they covered the walls with historical genre painting, never troubling themselves about decorative effect, and offered the beholder instructive stories in picture cards. As to art in the home, well, we can all of us remember the time when small photographs and etchings, instead of being kept in an album or a portfolio, were put on the wall, where they looked like mere spots of dead black and white. It was the same sort of thing in galleries and exhibitions, confusion worse confounded. On one and the same wall you got the most heterogeneous collection, cabinet pictures by Brouwer or Ostade next to an enormous altar-piece by Rubens, a gigantic Delacroix flanked by neat little Meissoniers. In this way the power of appreciating the significance of a work of art as part of the decoration of a room was totally lost.