For the modern world dates from the seventeenth century, and its pioneers were the Hollanders of that period. Practically everything that we recognize to-day as characteristic of the modern spirit in politics, religion, science, society, industry, commerce, and art has its prototype amid that sturdy people; being either the cause or the product of their struggle for independence and their self-development. Nor, in paying honor to the Dutch, need we attempt to suggest that they were the inventors of these characteristics. Most of the latter were, so to say, in the air. In the progress of things they had been evolved. But our debt to the Hollanders is that they attracted them and gave them practical application, and thus set the world upon a definite path of new progress. It is particularly with the newness of their art that we are here concerned, but we will try to study it in its relation to the material and mental environment of the nation itself, of whose newness it was so immediate a product and so manifest an expression. For it is in this way that the art of every country may be studied with most interest and profit. Although there will appear from time to time certain individual artists, whose genius cannot be satisfactorily correlated to its environment, but will indeed, as in the case of Rembrandt’s, seem to be actually contradictory to it, yet even they can be more fully comprehended through the very contrast that they offer to the mass of their contemporaries, whose relation to their environment is readily discernible. Apropos of this customary connection between the artist and the spirit of his time, may be quoted that phrase of Richard Wagner’s, that all great art is produced in response to a common and collective need on the part of the community. It may serve as an excellent touchstone for testing the quality of this new Dutch art which we are to study, so let us for a moment examine its face value, leaving the fuller application of its meaning to all the subsequent pages of this book.