It is the latter, one may observe in conclusion, that has most affected the modern revival of painting in Holland. While foreign painters, in portraiture especially, have been disposed to follow the direct example of Frans Hals, the Hollanders themselves, both in landscape and genre, have been influenced by the so-called “little masters,” and, in the case of Josef Israels, by Rembrandt himself. And the result of this influence has been to make modern Dutch painters, as a group, the best brushmen of their age. CHAPTER VII DUTCH GENRE The tendency toward genre painting began before the separation of the Holland Free State from the Spanish Netherlands. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who died in Brussels in 1570, is regarded as the leader of the group of painters who depicted the life of the people, particularly in open-air surroundings. His work, for example, and that of one of his pupils, Lucas van Valckenborch, make a very lively showing in one of the galleries of the Art-History Museum in Vienna. Here, in a number of canvases of considerable size, crowded with figures, are pictured scenes of peasants, merrymaking, harvesting, engaged in a vintage festival, or skating and sleighing, while there is even a representation of rich folk enjoying a picnic in a park. These painters and their contemporaries in similar subjects are to be reckoned in the Flemish School. But there is one, Pieter Aertz, surnamed “Long Pieter,” who, although he died in 1575, before any separation from Flanders was dreamed of, may be considered as a forerunner of distinctly Dutch genre, since he was born in Amsterdam and lived there for the greater part of his life. An interesting example of his work, _The Egg Dance_, is in the Rijks Museum. The scene is a kitchen, opening into a garden, and the floor is scattered with various articles--a bowl, a shoe, onions and eggs--among which a young man is jauntily dancing, while a group beside the hearth applauds. As far as the character and spirit of the scene go, the picture is thoroughly representative of the older kind of genre, which portrays the type rather than the individual, and numerous little episodes massed into a group, rather than a single incident or phase of life wrought out completely. For this becomes the tendency of the later and distinctively Holland genre, which, as the technical motives of the artists grew in refinement and possibly as the taste of the public became more refined, resulted in the subjects being drawn more and more from the home life of the well-to-do and fashionable. By this time the genre pictures have ceased to represent an amusing picture-book of manners and customs; they have in a sense lost their interest of subject, the matter of which they treat counting for very little in comparison with the charming manner of the treatment.