an independent personality and one of force. It is Bartholomeus van der Helst, born in Haarlem in 1613, whose life, however, was spent in Amsterdam, where he died in 1670. It is in the Rijks Museum that he is most brilliantly represented, though his single portraits stud the galleries of Europe. Their usual feature is direct and vivid characterization, conveyed without much persuasiveness of manner, but singularly sincere. One example, however, the _Portrait of Paul Potter_, is an exception, being both in technique and feeling one of the most persuasive portraits to be met with. It has in it also a suggestion of the feeling for decorative arrangement, which was elaborated on so sumptuous a scale in the corporation pictures of the Rijks Museum. In the chapter on Hals I alluded to Van der Helst as his inferior in composition and characterization. And the judgment stands, especially when you find yourself at Haarlem in the presence of the superb facility and quality of Hals’s genius. None the less, when you face the prodigious output of Van der Helst’s talent in the Rijks Museum, you realize that, while he was less efficient as a painter, less gifted with the ease, as it were, of improvisation, in his compositions, he had yet an exuberance of invention and a gusto for characteristic generalization, so amazing that from a distance one may be disposed to question if Hals, after all, was so much greater. At his best he undoubtedly was, having the artist’s fine gift of heightening the significance of what he handled, and even in his less memorable work exhibiting more or less of that magical manipulation which is itself an inspiration. Beside him Van der Helst is less the artist than a mighty craftsman, and, when one grows enthusiastic over him, it is not because he has heightened the appeal of his material, but because he realizes so wonderfully the prodigal physical exuberance of his day. This reaches its culmination in his masterpiece, _The Banquet of the Civic Guard_ (No. 1135). Grouped around the standard-bearer, who is in black velvet with a sash of the same blue silk as the flag, are some two dozen figures, arranged in natural positions, with easy gestures and heads and hands individually characterized. In these particulars and the treatment of the fabrics there is more than mere craftsmanship. The latter has been regulated by a superior order of intellect.