clouds. In all his works, whether in water or oil colour, and in his etchings,
the subject is always subordinate to the effect. His art is suggestive rather
than decorative, and his force does not seem to depend on any preconceived
method, such as a synthetical treatment of form or gradations of tone. And
yet, though his means appear so simple, the artist’s mind seems to
communicate with the spectator’s by directness of pictorial instinct, and we
have only to observe the admirable balance of composition and truthful
perspective to understand the sure knowledge of his business that underlies
such purely impressionist handling. Maris has shown all that is gravest or
brightest in the landscape of Holland, all that is heaviest or clearest in its
atmosphere—for instance, in the “Grey Tower, Old Amsterdam,” in the
“Landscape near Dordrecht,” in the “Sea-weed Carts, Scheveningen,” in “A
Village Scene,” and in the numerous other pictures which have been exhibited
in the Royal Academy, London, in Edinburgh (1885), Paris, Brussels and
Holland, and in various private collections. “No painter,” says M. Philippe
Zilcken, “has so well expressed the ethereal effects, bathed in air and light
through floating silvery mist, in which painters delight, and the characteristic
remote horizons blurred by haze; or again, the grey yet luminous weather of
Holland, unlike the dead grey rain of England or the heavy sky of Paris.”
See Max Rooses, Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century (London,
1899); R. A. M. Stevenson, “Jacob Maris,” Magazine of Art (1900); Ph.
Zilcken, Peintres Hollandais modernes (Amsterdam, 1893); Jan Veth,
“Een Studie over Jacob Maris,” Onze Kunst (Antwerp, 1902).
MARITIME PROVINCE (Russ., Primorskaya Oblast), a province of
Russia, in East Siberia. It consists of a strip of territory along the coast of the
Pacific from Korea to the Arctic Ocean, including also the peninsula of