accomplished lady who died in 1623, and four years later he married Eleonora Hellemans. In 1612 Hooft produced his national tragedy of Geeraerdt van Velzen (pr. 1613), a story of the reign of Count Floris V. In 1614 was performed at Coster’s academy Hooft’s comedy of Ware-nar, an adaptation of the Aulularia of Plautus, first printed in 1617. In 1616 he wrote another tragedy, Baeto, or the Origin of the Dutch, not printed until 1626. It was in 1618 that he abandoned poetry for history, and in 1626 he published the first of his great prose works, the History of Henry the Great (Henry IV. of France). His next production was his Miseries of the Princes of the House of Medici (Amsterdam, 1638). In 1642 he published at Amsterdam a folio comprising the first twenty books of his Dutch History, embracing the period from 1555 to 1585, a magnificent performance, to the perfecting of which he had given fifteen years of labour. The seven concluding books were published posthumously in 1654. His idea of history was gained from Tacitus, whose works he translated. Hooft died on a visit to the Hague, whither he had gone to attend the funeral of Prince Frederick Henry, on the 21st of May 1647, and was buried in the New Church at Amsterdam.
Hooft is one of the most brilliant figures that adorn Dutch literature at its best period. He was the first writer to introduce a modern and European tone into belles lettres, and the first to refresh the sources of native thought from the springs of antique and Renaissance poetry. His lyrics and his pastoral of Granida are strongly marked by the influence of Tasso and Sannazaro; his later tragedies belong more exactly to the familiar tone of his native country. But high as Hooft stands among the Dutch poets, he stands higher—he holds perhaps the highest place—among writers of Dutch prose. His historical style has won the warmest eulogy from so temperate a critic as Motley, and his letters are the most charming ever published in the Dutch language. After Vondel, he may on the whole be considered the most considerable author that Holland has produced.
Hooft’s poetical and dramatic works were collected in two volumes (1871, 1875) by P. Leendertz. His letters were edited by B. Huydecoper (Leiden, 1738) and by van Vloten (Leiden, 4 vols., 1855). The best original account of Hooft is given by G. Bradt in his Leven van P. C. Hooft (1677), and his funeral address (1647), edited together by J. C. Matthes (Groningen, 1874). There is an account of the Muiden circle in Edmund Gosse’s Literatures of Northern Europe. Many editions exist of his prose works.
HOOGSTRATEN, SAMUEL DIRKSZ VAN, Dutch painter,
was born, it is said, in 1627 at the Hague, and died at Dort
on the 19th of October 1678. This artist, who was first a pupil
of his father, lived at the Hague and at Dort till about 1640,
when on the death of Dirk Hoogstraten he changed his residence
to Amsterdam and entered the school of Rembrandt. A short
time afterwards he started as a master and painter of portraits,
set out on a round of travels which took him (1651) to Vienna,
Rome and London, and finally retired to Dort, where he married
in 1656, and held an appointment as “provost of the mint.”
Hoogstraten’s works are scarce; but a sufficient number of
them has been preserved to show that he strove to imitate
different styles at different times. In a portrait dated 1645
in the Lichtenstein collection at Vienna he imitates Rembrandt;
and he continues in this vein as late as 1653, when he produced
that wonderful figure of a Jew looking out of a casement, which
is one of the most characteristic examples of his manner in the
Belvedere at Vienna. A view of the Vienna Hofburg, dated
1652, in the same gallery displays his skill as a painter of architecture,
whilst in a piece at the Hague representing a Lady
Reading a Letter as she crosses a Courtyard, or a Lady Consulting
a Doctor, in the Van der Hoop Museum at Amsterdam, he
imitates de Hooch. One of his latest works is a portrait of
Mathys van den Brouck, dated 1670, in the gallery of Amsterdam.
The scarcity of Hoogstraten’s pictures is probably due to his
versatility. Besides directing a mint, he devoted some time
to literary labours, wrote a book on the theory of painting
(1678) and composed sonnets and a tragedy. We are indebted
to him for some of the familiar sayings of Rembrandt. He
was an etcher too, and some of his plates are still preserved.
His portrait, engraved by himself at the age of fifty,
still exists.
HOOK, JAMES CLARKE (1819–1907), English painter, was
born in London on the 21st of November 1819. His father,
James Hook, a Northumbrian by descent, Judge Arbitrator
of Sierra Leone, married the second daughter of Dr Adam
Clarke, the commentator on the Bible, who gave to the painter
his second name. Young Hook’s first taste of the sea was on
board the Berwick smacks which took him on his way to Wooler.
He drew with rare facility, and determined to become an artist;
and accordingly, without any supervision, he set to work for
more than a year in the sculpture galleries of the British Museum.
In 1836 he was admitted a student of the Royal Academy,
where he worked for three years, and elsewhere learned a good
deal of the scientific technique of painting from a nephew of
Opie. His first picture, called “The Hard Task,” was exhibited
in 1837, and represented a girl helping her sister with a lesson.
Unusual facility in portraiture and a desire to earn his own
living took the student into Ireland to paint likenesses of the
Waterford family and others; here he produced landscapes of
the Vale of Avoca, and much developed his taste for pastoral
art; later, he was similarly engaged in Kent and Somersetshire.
In 1842 his second exhibited work was a portrait of “Master
J. Finch Smith”: in this year he gained silver medals at the
Royal Academy, and in 1843 he was one of the competitors
in the exhibition of cartoons in Westminster Hall, with a 10
by 7 ft. design of “Satan in Paradise.” In 1844 the Academy
contained a picture of a kind with which his name was long
associated, an illustration of the Decameron, called “Pamphilius
relating his Story,” a meadow scene in bright light, with
sumptuous ladies, richly clad, reclining on the grass. The British
Institution, 1844 and 1845, set forth two of Hook’s idylls, subjects
taken from Shakespeare and Burns, which, with the above,
showed him to be cultivating those veins of romantic sentiment
and the picturesque which were then in vogue, but in a characteristically
fresh and vigorous manner. “The Song of Olden
Times” (Royal Academy, 1845) marked the artist’s future path
distinctly in most technical respects. It was in this year Hook
won the Academy gold medal for an oil picture of “The Finding
the Body of Harold.” The travelling studentship in painting
was awarded to him for “Rizpah watching the Dead Sons of
Saul” in 1846; and he went for three years to Italy, having
married Miss Rosalie Burton before he left England. Hook
passed through Paris, worked diligently for some time in the
Louvre, traversed Switzerland, and, though he stayed only
part of three years in Italy, gained much from studies of Titian,
Tintoret, Carpaccio, Mansueti and other Venetians. Their
influence thenceforth dominated the coloration of his pictures,
and enabled him to apply the principles to which they had
attained to the representation (as Bonington before him had
done) of romantic subjects and to those English themes of the
land and sea with which the name of the artist is inseparably
associated. “A Dream of Ancient Venice” (R.A., 1848)—the
first fruit of these Italian studies—“Bayard of Brescia”
(R.A., 1849), “Venice” (B.I., 1849) and other works assured
for Hook the Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1851.
Soon afterwards an incomparable series of English subjects was
begun, in many pastorals and fine brilliant idylls of the sea
and rocks. “A Rest by the Wayside” and “A Few Minutes
to Wait before Twelve o’clock” proved his title to appear,
in 1854, as a new and original painter. After these came
“A Signal on the Horizon” (1857), “A Widow’s Son going to
Sea,” “The Ship-boy’s Letter,” “Children’s Children are the
Crown of Old Men,” “A Coast-boy gathering Eggs,” a scene
at Lundy; the perfect “Luff, Boy!” (1859), about which
Ruskin broke into a dithyrambic chant, “The Brook,” “Stand
Clear!” “O Well for the Fisherman’s Boy!” (1860), “Leaving
Cornwall for the Whitby Fishing,” “Sea Urchins,” and a score
more as fine as these. The artist was elected a full Academician
on the 6th of March 1860, in the place of James Ward. He died
on the 14th of April 1907.
