“ Vain of his looks he can hardly have been, but interested in them, fond of watching and studying them, as a strong and self-conscious personality is fond of watching and studying whatever belongs to itself, this he certainly was; and the vainest of beautiful women never spent so much of her time before the mirror. What is more, Rembrandt in his youth and early manhood was almost as fond as a woman of ornaments and costume; and he has painted and etched himself once and again in armor, in rich furs and outlandish hats and feathers, in all sorts of strange and rich caparisons. ”

“ This, in truth, is the great difference between Rembrandt and other followers of the dark manner — that his transitions are never crude or abrupt, and his darkness is never opaque or dull. In the midst of gloom, he never lets the light perish, but is as careful of its remotest glimmer as of its central coruscation. He breaks his shadow with light and his light with shadow with an infinity of counterchange and gradation. ”

“ Certain, nevertheless, it is that northern art had always suffered in some shape or another from an inveterate inability to realize any high conception of human breeding or beauty. Flemish painting under the Gothic and religious rule, from the Van Eycks to Memling, had in part made up for this shortcoming by the expression of strength with devotion in men, and of mildness with devotion in women, by an unexampled force and splendor in the color and finish of costumes, jewellery, armor, and by a landscape primitive indeed, but of much loveliness both in sentiment and detail. ”

“ It is in the temper of this latter class of his observations that Rembrandt is altogether singular. He has not the least shrinking from what is most abject, most repulsive even, in either the physical or moral world; but amid the repulsiveness, the abjectness, he discerns and puts on record, not only whatever is picturesque, whatever speaks to and entertains the eye, but above all, and like no one else, whatever is poignantly human, whatever speaks to and lays hold upon the heart. ”

“ We shall the better understand his future career if at this point we allow ourselves to anticipate still further, and try to realize for good and all what those gifts and instincts were. In what manner, then, was Rembrandt destined to assert himself as a man of unequal but searching and profound experiment among men of even, contented, but unexciting achievement — as an artist accustomed impetuously to feel and imagine among artists only accustomed placidly to see and paint — in a word, as a poet among men of prose? ”

“ The lustrous objects of the scene, surrendering their individual tints, appear not, indeed, as colorless, but, as gleaming in some nameless hue made up of all the other hues in the picture so blended and broken up in light as to be indistinguishable. See, for instance, the pearls and jewels, the armlets and necklaces, the feathers and gauze scarf of Saskia, in the same striking and highly-wrought portrait at Cassel which we have already mentioned. And as it is with colors at the upper end of the scale of light, so it is at the lower. ”

“ By so doing they not only secured to themselves a success which in its own homely and unimaginative way was immediate and complete; they threw a whole world open to the experiments of the modern spirit. They were not, the majority of them, men of a stamp themselves to solve what is, we can now see, the great problem of modern art — the problem how to combine the new spirit of freedom and naturalism with the old spirit of intensity and ardor, the old power in appealing to the emotions. But one man among them, at least, of such a stamp there was, and that man was Rembrandt. ”

“ Even in his best days with Saskia, the semblances which he has left us of himself vary between the aspect of masquerading picturesqueness, as in instances too numerous to record, and the aspect of somewhat plebeian jollity, as in the well-known drinking picture at Dresden. The only portrait in which he presents himself as really and simply a gentleman, is that admirable one in the National Gallery of the year 1640, painted with a fusion and softness almost like those of Correggio, as well as with an inner glow and force of flesh-color that are all his own. ”

“ So that in this inanimate world, the world of light and shade, he found the most complete and most expressive drama for the painter, all contrasts, all conflicts, all that is most mortally dismal in the light, all that is most fugitive and melancholy in uncertain shadow, all that is most violent and irresistible in the irruption of the day. ”

“ Rembrandt is to many minds the most interesting of modern painters. We say of modern painters, because his work, with that of his fellow-countrymen in the same age, reflects for the first time in the history of art a state of mind which is essentially akin to our own. It was the destiny of the Dutch people to open the modern era of history by victoriously asserting and illustrating the principle of human freedom at once in the spheres of government and society, of thought and of art. ”

“ Thick, light hair disposed to straggle and curl, a thin moustache brushed sideways according to the fashion of the time, a scanty beard, generally shaved excepting a tuft beneath the lower lip, a massive, roughly modelled head, the determined mouth by no means finely cut, the nose thick at the end and somewhat pinched at the bridge, the powerful brow concentrated in level wrinkles above searching, somewhat narrow eyes — such were the features of which Rembrandt has left us versions in every manner of workmanship and every key of expression. ”

“ But as a rule we are chiefly struck, in the works of this group, by what is forced in their chiaroscuro, by what is cold and strained in their action, by what is vulgar in their types and fantastic in their costumes. The truth is, that the achievement of Rembrandt must rather be regarded as a great experiment than as a great example. From him, we accept what he chooses to give; but we cannot accept from others, or for good, painting in which daylight is sacrificed to chiaroscuro, and beauty to character and pathos. ”

“ It was a still better day when the painters of the liberated Dutch provinces, in the manner we have seen, gave up those sanctities and mythologies altogether. Commonness and prose, where they are vices in the blood, are best not paraded in the attempt to perform achievements to which commonness and prose are fatal. The Dutchmen showed knowledge of themselves, as well as of the new conditions under which they lived, when at the close of the sixteenth century they spontaneously forswore high art, and took with one consent to painting pictures of daily life and nature. ”

“ The only answer is that the elements with which painting must work, the appearances which it must in some mode or another represent and combine, in order to give us the most intense pleasure we are capable of receiving from it, are, and must surely forever be, those of bodily symmetry, distinction, grace, of facial sweetness, expressiveness, power, with beauty of costume and environment, and poetry of skies and landscape. All these elements we are accustomed to find the work of the Italian schools, even when it was least mature, exhibiting or striving to exhibit. ”

“ In the art of etching, perfected as he knew the means of perfecting it, Rembrandt found the only mode of linear expression which could have been made suitable to his special genius. The chastened, the severe, the firmly and deliberately ploughed line of the burin, in what is called line engraving, is really suited only to the expression of a chastened and severe conception of physical form. It is a mode of work best corresponding to those instincts in art which find in purity of form, and determinateness with suavity of linear contour, the most interesting of natural facts. ”

“ Rembrandt's most ambitious portrait group, the "Sortie of the Company of Banning Kock," is so forced out of all regular relation to nature, its obscurity is so freakishly illuminated in the figures of a buff lieutenant, and a phantom child all gleaming blue and gold, that whole generations of men have asked themselves in vain what season of the day or night it represents. ”

“ Their landscape is perfectly harmonious and justly felt within its special range of light and color; but that range is narrow, and the Dutch landscape painters as a rule avoid such occasions of splendor, poetry, and deeper imaginative suggestion as even the quiet scenery of their country might have afforded. A man like Everdingen, indeed, imported into Dutch art some sense of the poetry of mountain and forest gloom, and Everdingen found in Jakob Ruysdael a follower of greater power, originality, and penetration than himself. ”

“ It is precisely to these changes, absorptions, degradations, that the local tints of painters not belonging to the color group do tend. Such changes are conspicuous in the work of Rembrandt. As light and dark are what he cares for more than anything else, so his extremes of light and dark devour his local colors, absorbing them and destroying their identity. In a scale of light short of full illumination, Rembrandt will produce effects of color as rich, as jewelled, as constant to their own nature, as those of Tintoret himself ”

“ Lastly, an etching of Lievens represents again a kindred conception of the scene, only that here the Saviour faces us on a kind of terrace, beneath which, in front, lies the open tomb; and, emerging from the tomb, we see nothing but the hands of Lazarus flung up like those of a drowning man. We have tried, but quite in vain, to satisfy ourselves of the exact relations and derivations of these kindred embodiments of a single subject. And relations of similar intricacy occur repeatedly among the works of Rembrandt and his followers in his early days. ”

“ And yet his system of light and shade is too strange, and his version of human existence too devoid of beauty, for us to regard him as having solved any of the problems of modern art for good. One possible solution, indeed, he has offered, and such is the force of genius that in his own works we find ourselves not only impressed but satisfied with it. But in the work of others whom he immediately inspired we find the same solution deeply unsatisfying. Several of the painters of Rembrandt's pleiad may approach him, as portrait painters, in force and glow ”

“ No man is always at his best, and we must remember that Rembrandt, a man of experiment all his life, was still at his most experimental age. If we see engravings bearing his signature, in one or another of its customary forms, which closely approach, now the manner of Bol, now that of Lievens, now even that of the objectionable Van Vliet (so far as these fluctuating talents can be said to have definite manners of their own) , we need not necessarily infer that they are in each case the actual work of the satellite and not of the master. ”

“ Of the new generation of Dutch painters, one division go out, among timbered lanes or windy dunes, or by sunlit water-meadows or frozen meres, to study and report the effects and qualities of their native scenery and native atmosphere. Another division interest themselves most, not in the landscape itself, but in the pastoral life which peoples it: their choice is to study and exhibit the groups of cattle, the sheep and shepherds, the peasants at rest or labor. ”

“ But to imitate, to take example, to allow foreign influences to modify his own instincts and predilections, was the last thing of which this uncompromising spirit was capable. No man was more apt than Rembrandt to take pleasure in works of art of all kinds, or made, as we shall see in the sequel, greater sacrifices in order to surround himself with them. But to collect and appreciate is one thing, to be influenced is another. ”

“ If we say that Rembrandt enshrouds in gloom all those parts of his picture which in nature would be seen in shadow varying from half-shadow downwards, because he wants the whole available scale between pictorial light and pictorial dark to express the full range of transition, and full subtlety of relation, among those things which in nature would be seen in light varying from half-light upwards, we define a part of Rembrandt's practice in the matter, but only a part. ”

“ A few hasty sweeps of a brush loaded with bistre upon the paper, a few significant scramblings of the needle upon the copper, perpetuate, with an astonishing insight and precision, the speaking movement, the pathetic glance,, the quivering lip of supplication, the outstretched hand of importunity, the tottering step of palsied age, the snarling mask of plebeian spite, the swollen features of unloveliness in woe, the huddling gestures and pitiful kindnesses of those who would comfort one another amid rags and darkness. ”

“ In the former class, with a very few exceptions, Rembrandt is content to record his impressions of the level and uneventful scenery near his adopted city; expressing, with a perfect precision and subtlety, a justice and distinction of touch which are exclusively his own, the shadowy softness of a foreground copse, the trending sinuosity of a sunken lane, the gabled picturesqueness of farm buildings beside a sea wall, the perspective of level fields or gentle undulations diversified with a cottage here, a windmill there ”

“ Among painters and critics of painting, the apostles of what is called realism, who aver that it is no part of art's business to represent things as the least better than they are, have proclaimed Rembrandt their founder and patron. ”

“ Haden, it seems, has yet to learn that time is never so much wasted as in advancing confident opinions on any subject whatever upon insufficient grounds. It is perfectly true that among the members of the pleiad who worked in Rembrandt's manner and under his influence were some, like Ferdinand Bol, of refined and serious talent, and others like Van Vliet, whose work is seldom anything but the coarsest parody of their master's. ”

“ But there is a set-off against the merit of that great and spontaneous achievement by virtue of which the Dutch painters of this age take their place as leaders and pioneers of modern art. Leaving Rembrandt, who is at once a typical master and a great exception in the school, for the moment out of sight, and taking the rest of the school as a whole, its weak point is this, that it fails to afford to contemplation delight of the same degree as is afforded by the works of the older and traditional schools. ”