The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in the land of Reineke Fuchs.  Carriere says about these masters of genre painting[9]:  ’Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so producing works of art of a kind unknown to antiquity.  That divine element, which the Greek saw in the human form, the Germanic race divined in all the visible forms of Nature, and so felt at one with them and able to reveal itself through them.

’Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual object of the picture.  Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element.  The greatest Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life.  But these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave charm to the most trifling—­it was the life of the universe divined in its minutiae.  In its treatment of landscape their genre painting displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into being.’[10]

The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting too.  No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams, woods, meadows, and dales.

But it was in devotional pictures that the Netherlanders first tried their wings; landscape and scenes from human life did not free themselves permanently from religion and take independent place for more than a century later.  The fourteenth-century miniatures shew the first signs of the northern feeling for Nature in illustrations of the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts.  Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck, which was finished in 1432.  It shews the most accurate observation:  all the plants, grasses, flowers, rose bushes, vines, and palms, are correctly drawn; and the luxuriant valley in which the Christian soldiers and the knights are riding, with its rocky walls covered by undergrowth jutting stiffly forward, is very like the valley of the Maas.

One sees that the charm of landscape has dawned upon the painters.