MEN I HAVE PAINTED
and Brussels, or northward to Rotterdam, The Hague, Haarlem, and Amsterdam, to study the masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish Art, in private as well as public galleries.
It was at this time that the portraits by Franz Hals were revealed to me in that little museum in Haarlem; and although I was inclined then to admire the Syndics by Rembrandt, I soon discovered, by frequent visits to Haarlem and close study of the painting, in the groups of burghers by Hals, in the purity and freshness of his colour, and the consummate skill displayed in the handling, in the deftness of touch and the accuracy of form, that the mastery lay with Hals and not with Rembrandt. Frequent pilgrimages to that Mecca of portraiture over a period of nearly fifty years has only tended to convince me of the correctness of an early judgment.
We young, ambitious, and hopeful aspirants to fame were rather inclined to look upon the bituminous colours of the old canvases with questioning eyes, for the crudities of nature appealed strongly to senses that had not yet learned to discriminate between nature chaste and nature prurient, and Art was then entering upon the period that has ended with the cult of the ugly and the worship of the commonplace and the abnormal.
We could not believe that the Rembrandts and Franz Hals and Ver Meers were just as fresh in colour when they left the easels as nature seems to be, and that time and dust and varnish had given that warmth and glow of colour that we called vieux jeu. We were not revolutionaries, we were simply ignoramuses. We were not wicked, but we were also not virtuosi.
After a separation that lasted about two years, Tyndale
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