In the Art-History Museum of Vienna is _A Lady and Her Doctor_, in which he stands feeling her pulse as she sits beside a bed. It is sentimentally imagined, but extremely clever in a superficial way, the fabrics being imitated with extraordinary skill. Far more satisfactory is _Cavalier in a Shop_. On the right of the foreground is a mass of sumptuously colored stuffs, but the man’s costume and the jacket of the woman, who stands at a table offering something to his notice, are of black velvet. Beside her is a curtain of ashy purple, and the color of the background of the dim interior is a darkish olive, the whole forming a tonal scheme of subdued richness. But the cavalier is chucking the woman under the chin, her coy smile responding to his smile of amorous complacency, while an old man out of the shadow of the ingle-nook watches them. It is this sort of thing, coupled with the skill in imitating textures, that especially commended this artist to the taste of the eighteenth century. * * * * * THE decline of genre reflects the changed conditions of Holland society. For the old ideal of liberty had given way to one of money and the power that comes in its train. Statesmen, soldiers, and patriots had been succeeded by self-seeking politicians and ambitious tradesmen, who disdained to be burghers and aspired to the luxury and ostentation of merchant princes. “Taste” now became the shibboleth, and it was a taste that aped [Illustration: LADY AT THE CLAVICHORD CASPAR NETSCHER DRESDEN GALLERY] the standards and manners of the French, whose influence became more and more powerful in Holland as the seventeenth century drew to a close.