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Room XXV. is rich in landscapes by Ruysdael, of which 2557, The Forest, and 2558, Tempest near the Dykes of Holland, are masterpieces: 2588, The Music Lesson, is a fine Terburg. Room XXVI., dedicated to Hobbema, contains his fine landscapes: 2403, A Forest Scene, and 2404, The Mill, and another exquisite Terburg, 2589, The Concert. Some typical Paul Potters also hang here.
The quaint old house possessed therefore something more quaint than itself, the portrait of a young girl worthy of Mieris, or Van Ostade, or Terburg, or Gerard Douw, framed in one of those old, defaced, half ruined windows the brushes of the old Dutch painters loved so well.
In 1865, Meissonier's son Charles, himself a very good painter, went to a costume-ball dressed like a Fleming of the seventeenth century and looking as if he had stepped out of a picture by Terburg. The costume had been made with the greatest accuracy, and Meissonier was so pleased with his son's appearance that he made a study and sold it for two thousand francs.
To the military student a mere cavalry affair, fought out upon an obscure Brabantine heath between a party of Dutch carabineers and Spanish pikemen, may seem of little account a subject fitted by picturesque costume and animated action for the pencil of a Wouvermanns or a Terburg, but conveying little instruction.
Leaving out the Three Maries of Perugino at Marseilles, and at Lyons the Ascension, which was once the glory of San Pietro di Perugia, the Moses of Paul Veronese, and Palma Giovanni's Flagellation, these two galleries put together cannot match Dublin with its Jan Steen, most characteristic without being coarse, its Terburg, a life-size portrait of the painter's favourite model, a young Flemish gentleman, presented to him as a token of regard, its portrait of a Venetian personage by Giorgione, with a companion portrait by Gian Bellini, its beautiful Italian landscape by Jan Both, its flower-wreathed head of a white bull by Paul Potter, its exquisitely finished "Vocalists" by Cornells Begyn, its admirable portrait of a Dutch gentleman by Murillo, and its two excellent Jacob Ruysdaels.
"You shouldn't give away your pictures in that way; they are money," said old Vervelle. At the third sitting pere Vervelle mentioned a fine gallery of pictures which he had in his country-house at Ville d'Avray Rubens, Gerard Douw, Mieris, Terburg, Rembrandt, Titian, Paul Potter, etc. "Monsieur Vervelle has been very extravagant," said Madame Vervelle, ostentatiously.
The furniture was such as beseemed a well-to-do artisan walnut-wood chairs with straw seats, a small walnut-wood dining table, a work table, some colored prints in black wooden frames, short muslin curtains to the windows, the floor well polished and shining with cleanliness, not a speck of dust anywhere, but all cold and dingy, like a picture by Terburg in every particular, even to the gray tone given by a wall paper once blue and now faded to gray.
Among them were choice specimens of Rubens, Ruysdael, Vandyke, Terburg, Gerard Dow, Teniers, Mieris, Paul Potter, Wouvermans, Rembrandt, Hobbema, Cranach, and Holbein. French and Italian pictures were in a minority, but all were authentic and masterly.
His artistic ancestry was Dutch; in the footsteps of De Hooch, the younger Teniers, Vermeer, Terburg, Kalf, he trod, rather plodded, producing miracles of light, colour, finish. A long patience his career, he never indulged in brilliancy for the mere sake of brilliancy; nevertheless he was an amazing virtuoso of the brush. He was born in the Rue de Seine, Paris, November 2,1699.
It was a living picture by Mieris or Terburg, without the pointed gray hats, the scarlet plumes, or the beautiful costumes of the sixteenth century. And yet, Balthazar's efforts to play the part of host, his constrained courtesy, his forced animation, left him the next day in a state of languor which showed but too plainly the depths of the inward ill.
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