CHAPTER XI.
Amsterdam's Pictures Dutch art in the palmy days--The Renaissance--A miracle--What Holland did for painting--The "Night Watch"-- Rembrandt's isolation--Captain Franz Banning Cocq--Elizabeth Bas--The Staalmeesters--If one might choose one picture--Vermeer of Delft again--Whistler--"Paternal Advice"-- Terburg--The romantic Frenchmen again--The Dutch painter's ideal--The two Maris--Old Dutch rooms--The Six Collection--"Six's Bridge" and the wager--The Fodor Museum.
The superlative excellence of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century has never been explained, and probably never will be.

The ordinary story is that on settling down to a period of independence and comparative peace and prosperity after the cessation of the Spanish war, the Dutch people called for good art, and good art came.

But that is too simple.

That a poet, a statesman or a novelist should be produced in response to a national desire is not inconceivable; for poets, statesmen and novelists find their material in the air, as we say, in the ideas of the moment.

They are for the most part products of their time.