Netherlandish art has long enjoyed a huge popularity, even with a public that does not otherwise take more than a casual interest in the works of the Old Masters. Whereas the heroic art of Michelangelo can be daunting and the complexities of da Vinci’s oeuvre somewhat difficult for the untutored eye to discern, the art of the Dutch and Flemish masters offers no comparable obstacles. In one degree or another, their art is as accessible to the novice as to the connoisseur. We feel an instant kinship with its distinguishing features.

There have been many attempts to account for the special appeal of this art; my own favorite is an observation made by the English critic Roger Fry in his masterly study of Flemish Art (1927), and it is an observation that applies equally well to the Dutch masters.

Fry was especially concerned with identifying the spiritual differences that separated Flemish art from what he described as “the other great school of European painting, the Italian,” which he clearly regarded as more spiritual in character. Fry wrote: “What characterizes the Flemish school throughout its whole course is rather its extreme earthliness. Both its qualities and defects arise from the fact that these people found themselves very much at home on the surface of our planet. They were entirely satisfied with the profitable industry of their cozy, familiar townships and with the rude plenty of their well-kept farms. They enjoyed the things of this life with so wholesome, so uncritical an appetite that they loved to see in their pictures vivid reminiscences of what was so familiar and so dear to them. Even their religion became molded to this habitual bent of their character. It adapted itself to that and inspired a simple, unquestioning and uncritical pietism which allowed even their conceptions of transcendent realities to keep a homely quality and a childlike literalness. Even when the Renaissance came to shake to its foundations the medieval system, religion adapted itself to these fundamental needs, and we find Rubens able to conciliate a frankly pagan sensualism with an unquestioning and whole-hearted orthodoxy, whilst his contemporary Jordaens could leave out all suggestions of spirituality and revel unashamedly in the world of sense.”

In the exhibition “Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada,” which closed last month at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, an “extreme earthliness” is certainly a dominant interest regardless of whether the subjects are secular or religious. What could be more down-to-earth than, say, Andries Both’s drawing of “Two Peasants Playing the Violin and Singing in a Tavern,” circa 1630, or Jacques de Gheyn’s drawing of a “Boy Seated on the Ground, Scratching His Knee,” circa 1598? Even the treatment of a religious subject like the “Holy Family in an Interior,” circa 1603, attributed to the Circle of Hendrick Goltzius, is set in a peasant’s dismal kitchen, while another religious subject—“The Prodigal Son among the Swine,” circa 1650– 62, doesn’t stint in depicting a scene of squalor. Then, too, there is Cornelis Dusart’s “Peasant Seated on a Barrell,” circa 1685–96, in which the peasant’s right hand is seen blithely clutching his groin.