Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/68

58 of several witnesses. His death took place on the 27th April, his burial on the 2d May 1685, at Haarlem. According to Houbraken he was taught by Frans Hals, at that time master of Adrian Brouwer. At twenty-six he joined a company of the civic guard at Haarlem ; at twenty- eight he married his first wife, who lived till 1642. He speedily married again, but again became a widower in 1666. Persons curious of matters connected with the lives of famous men may visit the house in the Konigsstraat at Haarlem where Adrian Ostade lived in 1657, or that of the Ridderstraat which he occupied in 1670. He took the highest honours of his profession, the presidency of the painters guild at Haarlem, in 1662. Amongst the treasures of the Louvre collection, a striking picture represents the father of a large family sitting in state with his wife at his side in a handsomely furnished room, sur rounded by his son and five daughters, and a young married couple. It is an old tradition that Ostade here painted himself and his children in holiday attire ; yet the style is much too refined for the painter of boors, and pitiless records tell us that Ostade had but one daughter. The number of Ostade s pictures is given by Smith at three hundred and eighty-five. It is probable that he painted many more. At his death the stock of his unsold pieces was over two hundred. His engraved plates were put up to auction, with the pictures, and fifty etched plates most of them dated 1647-48 were disposed of in 1686. At the present time it is easy to trace two hundred and twenty pictures in public and private collec tions, of which one hundred and four are signed and dated, seventeen are signed with the name but not with the date, and the rest are accepted as genuine by modern critics. Adrian Ostade is the contemporary of David Teniers and Adrian Brouwer. Like them he spent his life in the delineation of the homeliest subjects tavern scenes, village fairs, and country quarters. Between Teniers and Ostade the contrast lies in the different condition of the agri cultural classes of Brabant and Holland, and the atmo sphere and dwellings that were peculiar to each region. Brabant has more sun, more comfort, and a higher type of humanity; Teniers, in consequence, is silvery and sparkling; the people he paints are fair specimens of a well-built race. Holland, in the vicinity of Haarlem, seems to have suffered much from war ; the air is moist and hazy, and the people, as depicted by Ostade are short, ill- favoured, and marked with the stamp of adversity on their features and dress. Brouwer, who painted the Dutch boor in his frolics and passion, imported more of the spirit of Frans Hals into his delineations than his colleague ; but the type is the same as Ostade s, only more animated and vicious. How was it that the disciples of Hals should have fallen into this course, whilst Hals himself drew people of the gentle classes with such distinction 1 It was probably because of his superiority and the monopoly which he and a few colleagues at Haarlem enjoyed that his pupils were forced into a humbler walk, and into this walk Hals was able to lead them, because he was equally able in depicting the strolling waif or fishwife, or the more aristocratic patrician who strutted about in lace collar, with his racier at his side. But the practice of Hals in this form was confined to the city, or to those wanderers from the country who visited towns. Brouwer and Ostade went to the country itself and lived in the taverns and cottages of peasants, where they got the models for their pictures. Neither of them followed the habits of the artists of the Hague, who took sitters into their studios and made compositions from them. Their sitters were people, unconscious that they sat, taken on the spot and from life, and transferred with cunning art to pictures. There is less of the style of Hals in Adrian Ostade than in Brouwer, but a great likeness to Brouwer in Ostade s early works. During the first years of his career, Ostade displayed the same tendency to exaggeration and frolic as his comrade. He had humour and boisterous spirits, but he is to be distinguished from his rival by a more general use of the principles of light and shade, and especially by a greater concentration of light on a small surface in con trast with a broad expanse of gloom. The key of his harmonies remains for a time in the scale of greys. But his treatment is dry and careful, and in this style he shuns no difficulties of detail, representing cottages inside and out, with the vine leaves covering the poorness of the outer side, and nothing inside to deck the patch-work of rafters and thatch, or tumble-down chimneys and ladder staircases, that make up the sordid interior of the Dutch rustic of those days. His men and women, attuned to these needy surroundings, are invariably dressed in the poorest clothes. The hard life and privations of the race are impressed on their shapes and faces, their shoes and hats, worn at heel and battered to softness, as if they had descended from generation to generation, so that the boy of ten seems to wear the cast-off things of his sire and grandsire. It was not easy to get poetry out of such materials. But the greatness of Ostade lies in the fact that he often caught the poetic side of the life of the peasant class, in spite of its ugliness and stunted form and misshapen features. He did so by giving their vulgar sports, their quarrels, even their quieter moods of enjoy ment, the magic light of the sungleam, and by clothing the wreck of cottages with gay vegetation. It was natural that, with the tendency to effect which marked Ostade from the first, he should have beee fired by emulation to rival the masterpieces of Rembrandt. His early pictures are not so rare but that we can trace how he glided out of one period into the other. Before the dispersion of the Gsell collection at Vienna in 1872, it was easy to study the steel-grey harmonies and exaggerated caricature of his early works in the period intervening between 1632 and 1638. There is a picture of Rustics, dated 1632, in the Koslolt collection at St Petersburg ; a Countryman having his Tooth Drawn, in the Belvedere of Vienna, of a similar date though unsigned ; a Bagpiper of 1635 in the Lichtenstein gallery at Vienna; Cottage Scenes of 1635 and 1636, in the museums of Carlsruhe, Darmstadt, and Dresden ; Smokers in the House of Count Berchem at Munich ; and Card Players of 1637 in the Lichtenstein palace at Vienna, which make up for the loss of the Gscll collection. The same style marks most of those pieces. About 1638 or 1640 the in- lluence of Rembrandt suddenly changed his style, and he painted the Annunciation of the Brunswick museum, where the angels appearing in the sky to Dutch boors half asleep amidst their cattle, sheep, and dogs, in front of a cottage, at once recall the similar subject by Rembrandt, and his effective mode of lighting the principal groups by rays propelled to the earth out of a murky sky. But Ostade was not successful in this effort to vulgarize Scripture. He might have been pardoned had he given dramatic force and expression to his picture ; but his shepherds were only boors without much emotion, passion, or surprise. His picture was a mere effect of light, as such masterly, in its sketchy rubbings, of dark brown tone relieved by strongly impasted lights, but without the very qualities which made his usual subjects at tractive. When, in 1642, he painted the beautiful interior at the Louvre, in which a mother tends her child in a cradle at the side of a great chimney near which her husband is sitting, the darkness of a country loft is dimly illumined by a beam from the sun that shines on the casement ; and one might think the painter intended to depict the Nativity, but that there is nothing holy in all the surroundings, nothing attractive indeed except the wonderful Rembrandtesrjue trans parency, the brown tone, and the admirable keeping of the minutest parts. The sparkle of Brouwer is not there; nor as yet the concen trated evenness of such pictures of Rembrandt as the Meditative Philosopher at the Louvre. Yet there is perhaps more conscien tiousness of detail. Ostade was more at home in a similar effect applied to the commonplace incident of the Slaughtering of a Pig, one of the masterpieces of 1643, once in the Gsell collection at Vienna. In this and similar subjects of previous and succeeding years, he returned to the homely subjects in which his power and wonderful observation made him a master. He never seems to have gone back to gospel illustrations till 1667, when he produced the admirable Nativity of Mr Walter of Bearwood, which is only surpassed as regards