The Netherlands: A Study of Some Aspects of Art, Costume and Social Life

In this book Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell, looking at the Netherlands through his own eyes rather than through those of his many predecessors, has produced a pic­ture of the country which may appear un­orthodox only because of its unfamiliarity. In his belief Holland, as a country, is as individual as Russia or as Spain, and there is a great deal more to be seen and enjoyed in it than the picture galleries, windmills, canals, flower markets and bare empty churches which seem to have impressed previous writers. It has been Mr. Sitwell's endeavour to get out of the museums and into the open-air-out of the museums and, likewise, away from the great cities (although not without having entered some of the old and forgotten patrician houses of The Hague and Amsterdam).

In this way the author has discovered a new and beautiful Holland in which the architecture of the eighteenth century, the strange villages and costumes of Friesland, or the art of a Daniel Marot and a Cornelis Troost are taken as truly representative of this at once phlegmatic and poetical people and the man-made wonders of their largely artificial country. The result is a book both to awaken curiosity and, so far as a book may do so, to satisfy it-more especially as the very numerous photographs go side by side with the text and illustrate it at almost every point. If the traditionally pic­turesque and quaint appear as seldom among these illustrations as they do in the text the intelligent reader is presented all the more with a picture of a country whose proximity and unfamiliarity will form added inducements to a visit.