Two fine examples of the artist’s middle and later period are in the Berlin Gallery: _View of Arnheim_ (1646) and _View of Nimwegen_ (1649). The former shows a horseman in the foreground and a cart farther back, where a gleam of light strikes, while the distant town is in shadow; and above this striking contrast is a magnificent height of sky filled with light and scattered with a few loose, well-constructed clouds. The tonality is composed of cream, gray, brown, and green. The later example already shows the prevalence of brown. The architecture is constructed in tones of pale brown and buff; the water in front is grayish white, and the ample sky admits a little rose amid the grayish blue. It is a picture of large feeling, and yet the details are still drawn in with that wriggling stroke of the brown brush which characterizes Van Goyen’s work, especially in the beginning and more or less to the end. It exhibits the feeling of one who is an engraver, as indeed he was; it is drawing rather than painting. The result is that some of his pictures seem more than a trifle niggling in their method. On the other hand, while he never gets away from it, he gets the better of it. He continues to model with these diminutive curlicues of vermicelli, now brown, now green, but the method disappears in the big impression aroused by the ensemble. Other notable examples of his later period are _The River_ and _Banks of a Canal_, in the Louvre. But in the final analysis it is not the manner of an artist that is of most account, but the quality of his appeal. In the case of Van Goyen it is _spirituel_, not infrequently expressive of spirituality. Transmuted by his vision, the corporeality of the scene has been dissolved into a spiritual impression. It is, as it were, a mirage of nature that is offered to one’s imagination. Van Goyen lacks at once the height and depth of Jacob van Ruisdael; his moods are dreamy rather than poignant, and he appeals where the other compels. But his moods are those of a highly rarefied spirit, that seeks to interpret the bigness and the subtlety of what it feels by means as abstract as possible. MEINDERT HOBBEMA HOBBEMA is the very contrary to Van Goyen. A plain, practical, matter-of-fact man, he is content to paint what he sees, the objective appearances of the landscape, viewed through the unimaginative medium of a healthy naturalism. He was as little addicted to moods of feeling as to dreams; neither curious for new experiences nor moved to artistic ambition, for, having found a motive to his liking, he repeated it again and again with slight variations. Gifted with a strong sense of form and with an unusual faculty of representing it, he learned from Jacob van Ruisdael to cultivate both, but was too phlegmatic to receive inspiration from the master’s genius. Now and then he rose from his usual level to a height of objective grandeur; but for the most part was a prosy bourgeois, pottering round the parish.