Although Gerard Honthorst (“Gerard of the Night”) was born as early as 1590, and was a pupil of Blomaert, he may he relegated to the period of decline. Almost invariably he resorted to the trick of lighting the figures in his pictures, whether he was painting religious subjects, portraits, or conversation-pieces, with a candlelight effect. This habit he had acquired in Italy by studying the style of Caravaggio. Of his five pictures here, the best is perhaps the _Portrait of Charles Louis, Duke of Bavaria_ (No. 2410), of 1640. His _Concert_ (No. 2409), painted sixteen years earlier, is an ill-balanced and overloaded composition. Such artists as Abraham Hondius, who paints a _Man Selling Pigeons_ (No. 2407A); Karel de Moor, who was a pupil of G. Dou, and gives us an insignificant _Dutch Family_ (No. 2477); Eglon van der Neer, whose name is signed on a small panel, _A Man Selling Pigeons_ (No. 2485); Egbert van Heemskerck, whose _Interior_ (No. 2393) is in the La Caze collection; Jan Verkolie, whose _Interior_ (No. 2602) has been engraved; H. van Limborch, whose _Pleasures of the Golden Age_ (No. 2446) was in the collection of Louis XVI.; Louis de Moni, the painter of a _Family Scene_ (No. 2476); and Willem van Mieris, a replica of whose _Soap Bubbles_ (No. 2473) is at The Hague,—all these mediocre painters are the despair of the critic, and afford merely momentary entertainment for the curious. It is apparent that by this period the art of Holland was marked by mechanical inventions, the surface of these eighteenth-century paintings being highly fused and metallic in appearance. The four panels of Adriaen van der Werff (1659-1722), which include an unpleasant _Magdalene in the Desert_ (No. 2617) and a repulsive _Dancing Nymph_ (No. 2619), are characteristic examples of his monotonous art. The _Disembarkation of Cleopatra_ (No. 2441) and the _Hercules between Vice and Virtue_ (No. 2443) of Gerard de Lairesse (1640-1711), have the enamel-like smoothness and meaningless expression of academic art, although they have their usefulness as museum pieces. It is a remarkable fact that the Louvre does not contain a single example of the revival of art in Holland in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. THE EARLY FRENCH SCHOOL