Madonna in Contemplation

Carlo Dolci (dōl'-chē), 1616–1686

JOINED with his keen sense of the beauty in the human form, undistorted by violent attitudes or foreshortenings, Carlo Dolci's skill in design, careful modeling and sound color give to his better pictures an attractiveness which his severest critics cannot deny. If he is sometimes strained and affected in trying to depict emotions of a painful nature, when his task is to show figures under the influence of more gentle and placid feelings, he is natural and truthful.

In his madonnas, while he has, perhaps, never reached the sublime and subtle beauty and meaning, which some of the greatest masters expressed, he has known how to infuse into lovely representations of the always gracious theme of a mother with her nursling, something of the divine, keeping yet close to the humanity which all may understand.

Mary, the Virgin Mother, into whose innocent life all those marvels came, which the evangelist Luke relates, "kept all these things," he says; "and pondered them in her heart." As each young mother looks down on her sleeping baby, beautiful and wonderful in its weakness, something of the same sense of mystery, of the same mingled feelings of hope and fear, at the thought of what the future must bring, all its possibilities of good or adverse fate, comes ever into her heart.

With wonder at the treasure so strangely placed in her keeping, and striving in humility to grasp the infinite meaning of the marvel, in adoration. the Mother beholds her Child.

James McDougall Hart, 1828-1901

COTLAND was the birthplace of the two American landscape and cattle painters, William and J. M. Hart. They were brought in early childhood to this country by their parents, who settled in Albany, N. Y. Both learned how to handle a brush as boys in coach-painting, but the talent they showed directed them to higher walks of art and both developed into pleasing and sincere painters of landscape and cattle.

The older William has perhaps a firmer touch and a somewhat richer color. J. M. Hart went in 1851 to Düsseldorf, which in those days was the correct place for American students to go, and spent a year there under Schirmer, a leading landscape painter, so that Hart's style is a combination of the Hudson River and Düsseldorf schools. As he went on painting, his landscapes assumed less and less importance, and he is more a cattle painter.

His landscape backgrounds are rendered in quiet browns and greens without great force. In his better pieces Hart showed himself often of considerable power as a painter of cattle in calm and quiet fields or by still brooks, but a sameness of subject and treatment was too often suffered to lapse into a weak conventionality.

Mr. Hart, whose studio was for most of his life in New York, was a member of the National Academy, and exhibited this picture there in 1880. It was shown for years in the Metropolitan Museum, loaned by Cornelius Vanderbilt. It is one of the best of the painter's works, of good color, attractive through its fine arching trees and pleasing vista. Hart's pictures are in many of the museums of the country.

The Avenue, Middelharnis, Holland Meindert Hobbema (min-dert hob'be-mä), 1638-1709

JOBBEMA, born probably in Amsterdam, and apparently pupil of Jacob Ruysdael, died certainly in Amsterdam and with his wife was buried there in "the class of the poor"; such is all that history has to tell us of a great landscape painter of the best age of Dutch art. One luminous fact more, though, we do have. When he married in 1668, by the aid of a friend of his wife, the maid-servant of the burgomaster, and on agreement to pay her yearly 200 florins from his fees, he was made a city gauger and he gauged and paid and painted until he was ready for his pauper grave.

In London, in 1900, his "Watermill" was sold for $31,000; in 1901, "A Woody Landscape," for $49,350, and in 1902 his "Peasant Shaking Hands" for $48,300.

The appreciation of Hobbema's beautiful art, as reflected in these prices, is of rather recent date, and his great merits were earlier felt in England, where are many of the hundred or so pictures which stand under his name. He has not the vigor and fire of Ruysdael, as he chose rather quiet, peaceful, and cultivated spots, a field in tillage, an old mill, a cottage by the wayside, or a country road with trees.

His tones are silvery grays or subdued golden browns, solidly put on, sunny and smiling, with no great variety of subject or treatment.

The Middelharnis Avenue, in the National Gallery in London, is thought by many his best work, and the silver-toned skies and the sense of free space which the unsightly trees only strengthen, make it a general favorite.