In a picture in the Dresden Gallery Dou has represented himself at work in his studio, a bare and homely room, lighted by a large window on the left. This window, with slight differences of shape and size, appears in many of his works, occupying a similar position; while, even when it is not shown, its effect is noticeable in the artist’s tendency to light his compositions from the left. Another instance of his tendency to repetition of motive may be traced in the frequency with which he used over and over again the same piece of furniture or object of furnishing. For example, in a still-life (No. 1708) in the Dresden Gallery appears the same candle-stick that is introduced in a number of other pictures. The point is interesting as showing the way in which Dou artificially arranged his subject-matter; and he was followed in this respect as in others by all the genre painters. Each had his particular motive of composition and freely repeated it; his particular bit of costume or article of furnishing that with variations of arrangement he used repeatedly. Holland genre, in fact, ceased almost from its beginning to be a direct representation of actual domestic life. It was based upon the latter, but the artist reserved a complete liberty of selection and arrangement. He was not intent upon illustrating the life, and only borrowed hints from it to assist him in creating a picture of his own invention. It is a point to be observed by the modern public, which is apt to resent, as shallow in motive and uninteresting in subject, a picture which has been designed mainly or solely as a picture; that is to say, for the beauty of form, color, light, and tone that may be expressed in a composition of objects, arbitrarily brought together for this purpose. Such an attitude on the part of an artist is, however, thoroughly justified by the example of the Holland School of genre, which it is the fashion to-day to admire so generously. NICOLAES MAES SOME may criticize this placing of Maes among the lesser artists of genre. Bode ranks him with Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch among the “great genre painters of Holland,” and adds that “there is scarcely any pupil of Rembrandt’s who approaches the great master so nearly as Maes does in this series of pictures.” He is alluding to _Dreaming_, or, as it is sometimes called, _A Reverie_, a young girl gazing out of a window, and to _Asking a Blessing_, in the Rijks Museum; to _The Young Card-Players_, in the National Gallery, and to _Nurse_ and _Children with Goat-Carriage_, in a private collection; and also to certain pictures of old women, such as the one owned by Mr. John G. Johnson of Philadelphia, that was recently seen in the Exhibition of Dutch Art in the Metropolitan Museum. In all of these pictures the figures are life-size, and, to quote Bode, “one weakness is common to all of them: that they present simple motives on a large canvas with rough execution and without the powerful