Peter Van, was a pupil of the eminent Dutch painter, Gerard Douw, and was born at Leyden, in 1640. He is distinguished above nearly every artist of his time for the elaborate minuteness with which he goes into every detail and circumstance of the interiors which he has undertaken to paint. For example, his most celebrated picture, which contains the portraits of the Meerman family, and consists only of some 20 inches by 16, had no less than three years devoted to its execution. The beauty of the colouring, and the delicacy with which every detail is filled in, doubtless enchants the eye of the observer; but one is apt to reflect whether it would not be possible for an artist of genius to produce a much better picture in a much shorter time. It betrays a slavish adherence to matter of fact, to spend a month on a lady's ruff, or to copy, with the most abject care, every hair of a dog's, or of a cat's, back. Slingelandt's pictures are certainly gems, and none but the opulent can buy them. In the collections of the Earl of Ellesmere and of Sir Robert Peel, at the galleries of the Louvre, of Amsterdam, and of Dresden, the curious may compare the pictures of Douw and Slingelandt, when they will have an opportunity of judging how far a touch of genius can glorify a picture, and of what an infinity of touches are required by an artist of mere talent to give his painting the veriest semblance of an approximation to the production which he has set himself to emulate. Slingelandt executed some seventy pictures in all, generally of the interiors of houses, and pencilled with an accuracy that would delight the heart of a Pre-Raphaelite. He died in 1691, in his fifty-first year.