United States or Ghana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The locomotives must be made in Russia. The Emperor had given up the extensive premises of the Imperial China Manufactory, which were to be devoted to the manufacture of engines. The Major appointed Messrs. Eastwick, Harrison, and Wynants, to supply the entire mechanical plant of the railway.

It is a whole-length figure painted in misty semi-tones, the feeling sentimental, un-Whistlerian, and, as we before remarked, wraith-like and lacking in substance when compared to Hals. There is actually a Wouverman in which no white horse is to be discovered. On Van der Werff and the romantic landscapist Wynants we need not dwell. The miniatures, pastels, and framed drawings are of goodly array.

Some of them, not content with their native land, came to Italy in search of hills, bright skies, and great ruins, and became a circle of choice artists, such as Both, Swanevelt, Pijnacker, Breenbergh, Van Laer, and Asselin; but the palm remains with the true Dutch landscape painters with Wynants, the painter of morning; Van der Neer, the painter of night; Ruysdael, the painter of melancholy; Hobbema, the painter of windmills, cottages, and kitchen-gardens; and with others who contented themselves with expressing the charm of the modest scenes of their native land.

Wouverman's works have all the excellences that may be expected from high finishing, correctness, agreeable composition and colouring. It does not appear that he was ever in Italy, or even quitted the city of Haarlem, though it would seem probable that his more elaborate compositions owed something to other influences than those of Hals or Wynants.

JAN WYNANTS, born at Haarlem about 1620, and still living in 1677, was the first master who applied all the developed qualities of the Dutch School to the treatment of landscape painting. In general his prevailing tone is clear and bright, more especially in the green of his trees and plants, which in many cases, merges into blue.

But the palm remains with the landscapists of Holland, with Wynants the painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night, with Rusydael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the illustrator of windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with others who have restricted themselves to the expression of the enchantment of nature as she is in Holland.

The fine organisation and acute intelligence of Sebastian would have made him an effective connoisseur of the arts, as he showed by the justice of his remarks in those assemblies of the artists which his father so much loved. But in truth the arts were a matter he could but just tolerate. Why add, by a forced and artificial production, to the monotonous tide of competing, fleeting existence? Only, finding so much fine art actually about him, he was compelled (so to speak) to adjust himself to it; to ascertain and accept that in it which should least collide with, or might even carry forward a little, his own characteristic tendencies. Obviously somewhat jealous of his intellectual interests, he loved inanimate nature, it might have been thought, better than man. He cared nothing, indeed, for the warm sandbanks of Wynants, nor for those eerie relics of the ancient Dutch woodland which survive in Hobbema and Ruysdael, still less for the highly-coloured sceneries of the academic band at Rome, in spite of the escape they provide one into clear breadth of atmosphere. For though Sebastian van Storck refused to travel, he loved the distant enjoyed the sense of things seen from a distance, carrying us, as on wide wings of space itself, far out of one's actual surrounding. His preference in the matter of art was, therefore, for those prospects

He cared nothing, indeed, for the warm sandbanks of Wynants, nor for those eerie relics of the ancient Dutch woodland which survive in Hobbema and Ruysdael, still less for the highly-coloured sceneries of the academic band at Rome, in spite of the escape they provide one into clear breadth of atmosphere.

On my brother's first visit to London, accompanied by my father, he visited many collections where the old Dutch masters were to be seen, and he doubtless derived much advantage from his careful studies, more particularly from the works of Hobbema, Ruysdael, and Wynants. These came home to him as representations of Nature as she is.