Gerard de Lairesse, a painter of Flemish extraction, who settled in Amsterdam in the sixties, helped to establish the vogue of “taste.” He had a considerable following of students and _dilettanti_ to whom he expounded his views on art, assailing the vulgarity of such as Hals, and advocating the courtly style by which the theme is “ennobled.” He himself introduced the fashion for historical pictures, vapid and theatrical; and these qualities, interpreted in a minute and precise style, found their way into genre. The Dutch interiors became transformed into palatial chambers, decked with columns, amid which the inmates strut and pose with affectation of superior elegance and refinement. Such are the genre pictures of Caspar Netscher. Now and then, as in _A Lady at the Clavichord_ of the Dresden Gallery, his motive and execution remind us that he had the privilege of being a pupil of Terborch; but these moments are rare. Usually his pictures are but petty and meretricious echoes of the great days of genre. Nor are his portraits less trivial. They are numerously represented in the Rijks Museum and other galleries, suggesting the popularity that he enjoyed and also explaining it; for, with few exceptions, they exhibit the shallowness and display of a society that, like the jackdaw in the fable, has borrowed the plumes and is aping the manners of the peacock. The same is true of the portraits of Godfried Schalcken, who also indulged in genre that supplemented the poverty of the artistic motive by the mild humor of its subjects. To these names of the decadence may be added that of Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland.