He is as
sane, as unsentimental, as truthful and unpretending as the most literal
and unimaginative Dutchman of his time or before it; but he has also
that feeling for style, and that instinct for avoiding the common and
unclean which always seem to prevent French painters from "sinking with
their subject," as Dutch painters have been said to do. He seems never
to let himself go either in the direction of Greuze's literary and
sentimental manipulation of his homely material, or in the direction of
supine satisfaction with this material, unrelieved and unelevated by an
individual point of view, illustrated by the Brauers and Steens and
Ostades. One perceives that what he cared for was really art itself, for
the aesthetic aspect and significance of the life he painted.
Affectionate as his interest in it evidently was, he as evidently
thought of its artistic potentialities, its capability of being treated
with refinement and delicacy, and of being made to serve the ends of
beauty equally well with the conventionally beautiful material of his
fan-painting contemporaries.
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