The three greatest masters of Holland genre, Vermeer, Terborch, and Jan Steen, must be considered separately. Meanwhile we will summarize the method and manner of some of the most important among the able but lesser artists. ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE VAN OSTADE, who was a pupil of Hals and later became influenced by Rembrandt, stands midway between the earlier and the later motives of genre. His favorite and, on the whole, most characteristic subjects are groups of peasants reveling or squabbling in the kitchens or around the doors of inns. The figures are squat and lumpish, curiously like animated roly-poly puddings, only redeemed from commonness by the limpid coloring and the suave, facile manner of the brushwork that he had derived from Hals. Sometimes, however, he selects a few figures and gives them an individual characterization. In fact, the latter pictures, as well as his groups of peasants, show a remarkable affinity to Brouwer’s treatment of similar subjects. For this eccentric and original artist, an “Adonis in rags,” as he has been called, a refined painter of coarse themes, though Flemish by birth, seems to have come under the influence of Frans Hals, lived in Haarlem and Amsterdam, and was really in his art representative of the Holland School of genre. Van Ostade, therefore, must have known him and may well have been affected by his example. At any rate, the character and spirit of his earlier pictures correspond with those of Brouwer’s, though the latter’s work exhibits a more refined artistic sense. In time, however, Van Ostade came under the Rembrandtesque manner; the thinness of his painting develops into a richer impasto, the feeling of the composition becomes larger, the choice of subject more distinguished, and his treatment more studied and sympathetic, while the tone is warmer and more luminous in consequence of the shrewder use of chiaroscuro. Later his manner again changes to one of extreme refinement, almost finical. The surface, to use an expressive French word, _léché_, seems licked into glossiness; the tone has become cold and grayish; the compositions are more studied but less picturesque; yet the colors have an extraordinary transparency. The whole canvas has less the air of intimate observation than of something wrought over in the studio. These three phases of Van Ostade’s development can be studied side by side in the examples of his work in the Gallery of The Hague. Representative of his first manner is _Peasants’ Holiday_, painted in 163-(the last figure is undecipherable); of the second, _Marriage Proposal_, which belongs to the period between 1650 and 1655; and of the third manner, _Peasants in an Inn_ and _The Fiddler_, painted respectively in 1662 and 1673.