Boulder Place Directory 11

The real inaugurators of Dutch portraiture were Mierevelt, Hals, Ravesteyn, and De Keyser. Mierevelt (1567-1641) was one of the earliest, a prolific painter, fond of the aristocratic sitter, and indulging in a great deal of elegance in his accessories of dress and the like. He had a slight, smooth brush, much detail, and a profusion of color. Quite the reverse of him was Franz Hals (1584?-1666), one of the most remarkable painters of portraits with which history acquaints us. In giving the sense of life and personal physical presence, he was unexcelled by any one. What he saw he could portray with the most telling reality. In drawing and modelling he was usually good; in coloring he was excellent, though in his late work sombre; in brush-handling he was one of the great masters. Strong, virile, yet easy and facile, he seemed to produce without effort. His brush was very broad in its sweep, very sure, very true. Occasionally in his late painting facility ran to the ineffectual, but usually he was certainty itself. His best work was in portraiture, and the most important of this is to be seen at Haarlem, where he died after a rather careless life. As a painter, pure and simple, he is almost to be ranked beside Velasquez; as a poet, a thinker, a man of lofty imagination, his work gives us little enlightenment except in so far as it shows a fine feeling for masses of color and problems of light. Though excellent portrait-painters, Ravesteyn (1572?-1657) and De Keyser (1596?-1679) do not provoke enthusiasm. They were quiet, conservative, dignified, painting civic guards and societies with a knowing brush and lively color, giving the truth of physiognomy, but not with that verve of the artist so conspicuous in Hals, nor with that unity of the group so essential in the making of a picture.

Many of the smaller species of fishes, upon leaving these winter resorts, ascend small, clear brooks in large numbers for the purpose of depositing their eggs; as, when hatched in such a place, the young will be comparatively free from the attacks of the larger carnivorous forms. Among the lowest vertebrate often found in numbers in early spring in these meadow rills and brooks is the lamprey, _Ammocoetes branchialis_ (L.), or "lamper eel," as it is sometimes called. It has a slender eel-like body, of a uniform leaden or blackish color, and with seven purse-shaped gill openings on each side. The mouth is fitted for sucking rather than biting, and with it they attach themselves to the bodies of fishes and feed on their flesh, which they scrape off with their rasp-like teeth. Later in the season they disappear from these smaller streams, probably returning in midsummer to deeper water. Thoreau, who studied their habits closely, says of them: "They are rarely seen on their way down stream, and it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature to the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare's description of the sea floor."

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