The Dutch and Flemish schools were formerly hung together at the National Gallery. They are now separated, and with the early Flemish school we have already dealt. We take up the story here at the point where it leaves off there, and proceed to discuss the Dutch school; passing afterwards to the later Flemish school. The confusion between Dutch and Flemish art is, it may first be remarked, historical. Just as Flanders derived its earliest artistic impulse from German painters, so did the Dutch derive theirs from the Flemings. In the two first periods of Flemish art, Dutch art runs precisely parallel with it. During the sixteenth century a new development began in both schools. This is the period of Italian influence, of the "Romanists" or "Italianisers," as they are called, represented typically by Bernard van Orley and Mabuse.

At the end of the sixteenth century, however, a national movement began in both schools—corresponding closely to political changes. In 1579 the "Union of Utrecht" was effected, whereby the Dutch "United Provinces" (= roughly what is now Holland) were separated alike from the Spanish Netherlands and from the Empire, and Dutch independence thus began. Within the next fifty years nearly all the great Dutch painters were born—Berchem, Bol, Cuyp, Frans Hals, Van der Helst, De Keyser, Rembrandt, Ruysdael. In characteristics, as well as in chronology, Dutch art was the direct outcome of Dutch history. This art has come to be identified in common parlance, owing to its chief and distinguishing characteristic, with what is known as "genre painting,"—the painting, that is, which takes its subject from small incidents of everyday life. Three historical conditions combined to bring this kind of painting into vogue. First, the Reformation. The Dutch, when they asserted their independence, were no longer Catholics; but Protestantism despised the arts, and hence the arts became entirely dissociated from religion. There were no more churches to ornament, and hence no more religious pictures were painted[31] whilst religious rapture is superseded by what one of their own critics describes as "the boisterous outbursts which betoken approaching drunkenness" (Havard: The Dutch School, p. 12).[32] Secondly, the Dutch were Republicans. There was no reigning family. There were no palaces to decorate, and hence no more historical or mythological pictures were in demand. This point of distinction may best be remembered by the supreme contempt which the great King Louis XIV. of France entertained for the genre style. Eloignez de mot ces magots, he said, "take away the absurd things," when some one showed him some works by Teniers. But the "plain, simple citizens" of the United Provinces did not want their faces idealised—hence the prosaic excellence of Dutch portraiture,—nor had they any ambition to see on their walls anything but an imitation of their actual lives—of their dykes, their courtyards, their kitchens, and their sculleries. Thirdly, the Dutch were a very self-centred people. "With the Dutch," says Sir Joshua Reynolds (Discourse iv.), "a history piece is properly a portrait of themselves; whether they describe the inside or outside of their houses, we have their own people engaged in their own peculiar occupations; working or drinking, playing or fighting. The circumstances that enter into a picture of this kind, are so far from giving a general view of human life, that they exhibit all the minute particularities of a nation differing in several respects from the rest of mankind." "Those innumerable genre pieces—conversation, music, play—were in truth," says Mr. Pater, "the equivalent of novel-reading for that day; its own actual life, in its own proper circumstances, reflected in various degrees of idealisation, with no diminution of the sense of reality (that is to say), but with more and more purged and perfected delightfulness of interest. 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,[33] 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 Italian art might well feel that the Italianisers, like Berghem, Bol, and Jan Weenix, went so far afield in vain" (Imaginary Portraits, p. 99).

The same awakening of a national taste made itself felt in the native school of Dutch landscape—a landscape excellent in many ways, but cabin'd, cribbed, and confined, like their own dykes. "Of deities or virtues, angels, principalities, or powers, in the name of our ditches, no more. Let us have cattle, and market vegetables" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vi. § 11). But the Dutch School of landscape had the qualities of its defects. "The Dutch began to see what a picture their country was—its canals, and boompjis, and endless broadly-lighted meadows, and thousands of miles of quaint water-side; and their painters were the first true masters of landscape for its own sake" (Pater, ib. p. 98).