Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 2, 1909.djvu/267

vni PHILIPS WOUWERMAN 251 there is but a very slight connection. Most of Wouwerman's pictures are distinguished by a vivid and delicately harmonised colouring, in which the succulent green of the foliage is strongly contrasted with the local colour of the costumes, the animals and the buildings, while these are all relieved against a clear white sky. The white spot, which later is regularly formed by a white horse, 1 is not so inevitable a feature of the early works. Often there are no horses in these pictures. In Wouwerman's maturity his landscapes are for the most part secondary to his figures. The com- positions become more complete, the groups more numerous. Large companies of horsemen riding out to hunt or returning home, battle pieces, or crowded fairs take the place of the simpler groups of the early period. There is a noticeable tendency to give prominence to the doings of the upper classes rather than to the life of the people. The landscape, in which the episodes occur, becomes more spacious, and extends away into a light bluish-grey distance. Still Wouwerman, even in this period, painted some landscapes, mostly small in size. If one is inclined to regard Wouwerman primarily as the brilliant draughtsman and story-teller, these landscapes in which the figures are merely incidental if not almost entirely disregarded show him as a painter pure and simple. In the themes that he selected, the views of the dunes and the coast or the winter scenes, he restricted himself most narrowly to his native Haarlem district or its immediate neighbourhood. These pictures must be ranked among the choicest pearls of Dutch art. Those pictures by Wouwerman in which the contrasts between light and dark, sunlight and shadow, have become accentuated by time, in which storm-clouds or gunpowder smoke form an unpleasant dark smudge, and in which through the action of the oak panel the thin coats of paint have been worn away, belong to the master's later period if, that is, one may speak of the later period of a painter who died at forty-eight or forty-nine. The style of the signature enables one to date the pictures within wide limits. As a rule, one variant of the monogram used by Philips Wouwerman (composed of P, H, and W, linked) only occurs in the early works. However, the " full monogram " (composed of PHILS taken together and W) needs to be used with more care. All the late pictures have it, but it also occurs occasionally in the works of the early period. It is not easy to understand how an artist, whose working life lasted only thirty years probably from 1638 to 1668, though there are no pictures with genuine dates for the early years of this period could have produced such an immense mass of work as Wouwerman left. One has to notice in this connection not only the number of his pictures but also their comprehensive character, their rich composition, and their variety. Wouwerman must have been extraordinarily facile and incredibly in- dustrious. Houbraken recognised this and gave an appreciative estimate of his work, in which he emphasised both the multiplicity of Wouwerman's themes and the variety which he imparted to his treatment of the same 1 The white horse is almost always taken as a special sign of Wouwerman's authorship. It might with more reason be taken as a trade-mark of Isack van Ostade, who was dead by 1649 j in his landscape subjects he is much more consistent in introducing a white horse.