The new art, when it arrives, will be in response to a new common and collective need of a people, the product, in fact, of a new attitude of thought toward life. In place of the aristocratic it will be democratic, concerned with the rights of all instead of the privileges of the few. It will no longer set man in a pose of artificial supremacy against the background of the universe, but will begin to take account of his environment and to discover his true relation to it. It will be an era, not of magnificent mendacity and superb hypotheses, but of patient inquiry into the facts of life and of resolute adjustment of life to the facts. It will, indeed, be the dawning of the scientific era. And so firmly will it have taken hold of the thought and life of the then separated provinces of the north, that, even as they have parted absolutely from the old religion and politics, still adhered to by the southern states, so they will be impervious to the influence of the art by which the latter continue to be represented. When, fifty years from our opening date, Rubens shall return from Italy to give a brief lease of lustier life to the Italian motive by the vigor of his Flemish genius, the Hollanders of the seventeenth century will be absolutely unaffected by his influence. Their art will be as closed to the invasion of his masterful genius as their country is to the inroads of the German Ocean. Theirs will be an art not only new and original, but certainly most local.
The forty-five years, following the abdication of Charles V, yielded no indication of the harvest of painting that was to signalize the succeeding century. The earlier half of the period embraces the work of Pieter Aertz, first of the distinctively Dutch genre painters, and the latter half sees the growth to manhood of the portrait-painters Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt and Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, while the whole period covers the active life of Jan de Bray. He, like the other two, was an honest but entirely uninspired portrait-painter; and it was not until nearly the end of the century that three men were born who were subsequently to become notable. These are Frans Hals, Jan van Goyen, and another landscape-painter, less well known, Hercules Seghers.