Whether he was a pupil of Cornelis Cornelissen, Hendrick Goltzius, and Karel van Mander (the Dutch Vasari), is not known with any certainty, and no picture painted by him earlier than 1613, when he may have been thirty-three years of age, is known to-day. Early in the year 1616, when he painted his famous _Banquet of the Officers of the St. Joris Shooting Guild_, one of his early masterpieces still preserved in the small gallery at Haarlem, he was summoned before the Burgomaster of the “town of the tulip,” and reprimanded for his cruelty to his first wife. Exactly a year later he married a second time, and as the years went on he became the father of at least six sons who adopted the profession of the painter but earned no permanent success. The Louvre possesses no example of his Doelen-pieces of archer-groups which won him his earliest fame in his own country, but is fortunate enough to contain the famous _Gipsy Girl_ (No. 2384, Plate XXVII.), which alone would have earned for him the title of “the master of the laugh.” It passed through the Ménars sale in 1792 for 301 livres. The three pictures of the Beresteyn family were bought for £4000 in 1884, when his paintings were not as highly prized as they are to-day. They give an excellent idea of the virility his art had attained by about 1629. The best of these is the _Portrait of Nicolaes van Beresteyn_ (No. 2386), which is inscribed, “AETAT SUAE 40. 1629.” His hands are superbly painted; while the companion _Portrait_ (No. 2387) of his wife is equally striking. The large and imposing _Portrait-Group of the Beresteyn Family_ (No. 2388) is marred by the excessive use in places of a strong red, and has been enlarged by the addition down the right side of the canvas of a strip about fourteen inches broad, but yet shows a certain felicity of grouping, and a joyous and exuberant outlook. _The Portrait, of René Descartes, the French Philosopher_ (No. 2383) is so simple in treatment and so easy in pose, that it makes an instant appeal to the student. Another _Portrait of Descartes_ (No. 78), by Sébastien Bourdon, is in this gallery, and a third was in the Arsène Houssaye collection. The _Portrait of a Lady in a Black Dress_ (No. 2385, Plate XXVIII.) is unaffected and lifelike, while the subtle and hasty brushing in of the gloves could only have been done by a great painter. It seems to have been generally overlooked that a study for this picture is in the collection of Lord Ronald Gower, and has for some time past been on loan to the FitzWilliam Museum, Cambridge. In the study, however, the artist had not yet thought of the gloves.