All these details of his career are pertinent, for they point not only to the various influences, successively of Hals, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, under which he came, but also to the scarcely less important fact that he had mixed with a variety of men of parts and consequence and become acquainted with various kinds of civilizations. His experiences enabled him to form a very distinguished technique of his own, and at the same time cultivated in him an extraordinarily refined taste and a very high regard for the dignity of human nature. In technique, taste, and point of view he became essentially a true aristocrat. His portraits eminently epitomize these qualities. Usually very small in size, they suggest Velasquez in miniature; exhibiting the same discretion in avoiding unnecessary accessories, the same eloquent use of blacks and grays, occasionally relieved with old rose or blue, and, despite their minuteness, a corresponding breadth and distinction of fluency and simplicity. All these traits of technique are the expression of his attitude toward his subject, which is essentially one of respect for its humanity. This attitude is a rarer one in portrait-painting than might be expected. Certainly in the Dutch School one is not impressed with its prevalence. There is characterization, good, bad, and indifferent, and the suggestion of the subject’s position in his or her social [Illustration: OFFICER WRITING A LETTER GERARD TERBORCH DRESDEN GALLERY] environment, but of the reverence for humanity as such, very little. Indeed, outside of the portraits by Rembrandt, Terborch, and occasionally Maes, I question if you will often find it. A similar reverence for humanity and its environment--the product, I take it, of the artist’s high-bred respect for himself and his art--distinguishes also Terborch’s genre pictures. He began by painting guardroom scenes and continued to be fond of subjects in which officers and soldiers figured. Sometimes the circumstances are equivocal, but their salience is not enforced; indeed, as Bode points out, the models for the ladies appear to have been his sisters, while his brothers posed for the military. The scene and the occasion are but an excuse for a picture. In fact, the subject counts with him for very little; it is the pretext that it offers for pictorial representation in which he is interested first and last. And to this he brings an extraordinary degree of refined sensibility and of virile and at the same time exquisite realization.