From the standpoint we have taken up, interested
in the fate of genre-picture, we have been looking
all the time at the Netherlands; and, where the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries are concerned, few of
the salient features can have escaped us. In the eighteenth
century, France holds the field and in France the Court.
To begin with, painting portrayed concentrated monar-
chical power, then followed a sumptuous and galant
period inclining to erotic frivolity. More and more the
lady, whether mistress or queen, sets the taste. The Court
and the classes which copy Court style move ceremonially.
Convention, social discipline stiffens the deportment,
makes the gestures stilted. Along with the Court the
Academy ruled art, like as not guiding it away from the
Court on occasion. But both ruling powers were unani-
mous in their rejection of everything natural as unseemly.
The villainous and famished mob at the lower end of the
social scale was not permitted to dim the glitter of the
pictorial stage. The further the century advanced, the
more an intimation of danger looming ahead may have
induced the idle rich and the privileged consciously to
shut their eyes to misery and indigence.

In the Netherlands, so far as the genre-picture informs us,
people ate, drank, smoked, danced, made music,
brawled, sometimes even worked, with a spot of hearty
love-making thrown in. But in the French epoch the only
one of the mainsprings of human action that appears to
have functioned is love. Dancing, playing and music
were all subservient to l'amour. This indicates certain

-207-