Themselves
illustrating, as every student of their history knows, the good-
fellowship of family life, it was the ideal of that life which these
artists depicted; the ideal of home in a country where the
preponderant interest of life, after all, could not well be out of
doors. Of the earth earthy--[88] genuine red earth of the old Adam--
it was an ideal very different from that which the sacred Italian
painters had evoked from the life of Italy, yet, in its best types,
was not without a kind of natural religiousness. And in the
achievement of a type of beauty so national and vernacular, the
votaries of purely Dutch art might well feel that the Italianisers,
like Berghem, Boll, and Jan Weenix went so far afield in vain.
The fine organisation and acute intelligence of Sebastian would have
made him an effective connoisseur of the arts, as he showed by the
justice of his remarks in those assemblies of the artists which his
father so much loved. But in truth the arts were a matter he could
but just tolerate. Why add, by a forced and artificial production,
to the monotonous tide of competing, fleeting existence? Only,
finding so much fine art actually about him, he was compelled (so to
speak) to adjust himself to it; to ascertain and accept that in it
which should least collide with, or might even carry forward a
little, his own characteristic tendencies. Obviously somewhat
jealous of his intellectual interests, he loved inanimate nature, it
might have been thought, better than man.
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