Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some light tanning due to age. Very large book.. Year 1883. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> In estimating the genius of the Dutch masters the social aspect of the country in which they lived and the political tendencies then dominant must of necessity be taken into account. And this applies with especial force to the particular period when Frans Hals became famous. It must be remembered that Holland was severely Protestant and also Republican. There were therefore neither churches to adorn nor palaces to decorate. There were neither Madonnas nor saints to occupy the painter and the heathen mythology seems to have been under the same ban. No fields were available beyond portraiture and historical composition and as repositories for the works of art municipal halls and charitable institutions took the place of regal palaces and ecclesiastical establishments. The natural if not inevitable result was the production of paintings which were at once portraiti and records of events in the history of the country such as assemblages of magistrates companies of the civil guard official banquets and other similar groups varied occasionally by more humble gatherings in the wine-shop or junketings at a country fair. There was scarce any attempt at ideal invention in these works and the condition that each figure should be a portrait led insensibly to a neglect of the qualities of elegance in design and the substitution of a certain air of set formality. Foremost in the rank of painters of this particular style stands Frans Hals who though born at Malines in 1584 and therefore not a Dutchman by birth was taken when an infant by his parents to Haarlem their native town. There he lived and there he died in 1666 at the ripe old age of eighty two. (OS)