Malcolm Bell

“ The course of true love in this case ran smoothly enough; the young people soon came to an understanding; no difficulties were raised by Sylvius, who acted as Saskia's guardian; and the marriage was only deferred till Saskia came of age. The union, indeed, from a worldly point of view, was unexceptionable. Saskia, it is true, was of a good family, while Rembrandt sprang from the lower middle class, but he had already carved out for himself a rank above all pedigrees. Saskia was twenty, and he, with all his fame, was only twenty-six. ”

“ There was, on the other hand, but a single objection to the scheme—the parting with his mother; and to such an affectionate and home-loving nature as Rembrandt's the difficulty can have been no small one. Still, a man has to do a man's work in this life. Adriaen, his brother, and Lysbeth, his sister, were there to minister to her comfort, while Amsterdam was no great distance away; and though, doubtless, it was not altogether without tears that the widowed Neeltje consented to the departure of her youngest son, the decision was taken, and the consent yielded at last. ”

“ In the first the kindly old lady, whoever she may be, wears a large white hood shading her forehead. The right side of her face, with the exception of the prominence of the cheekbone, is in shadow, and the strong light falling on the left side of the head brings into relief the wrinkles by the nose and at the corner of the mouth, and the soft fleshy forms of the cheek and jaw. ”

“ In such a plate as the "Blind Tobit" (B. 42) there is not a detail of the technique which other men could not have done as well; but for such another presentment of the hurried, helpless groping for the door by a blind, weak old man not yet inured to the perpetual darkness that has fallen on him, we must wait for a second Rembrandt—and the wait is likely to be long. ”

“ Among all the portraits of Rembrandt, real or supposed, there is none which makes one feel so strongly that here, indeed, one is face to face with him, as he saw himself when he sat drawing from the mirror in front of him. ”

“ Beginning with the early etchings of himself or the members of his family, often mere drawings on copper, with little or no appeal to the variety of line and tone obtainable in etching, he may follow the artist's sure and rapid development, until he finds him master of every method the art permits. He may trace the progress of his work, from a first sketch of an idea, dashed off on the copper in one sitting, to the high perfection of such an elaborate portrait as that of "Burgomaster Six." ”

“ The merit of the work is no less dubious ground for judgment; for while producing, over and over again, masterpieces of the art that have never been equalled, [Pg 92] he at other times, through carelessness, indifference, or perhaps ill-health, turned out and left for future ages stuff which most far inferior men would have obliterated there and then. We can only decide each for ourselves that such or such a plate is in no way worthy of Rembrandt, but, unless we have the courage of M. Legros, we cannot go on to assert definitely that therefore it is not his. ”

“ A far more satisfactory production, indeed the best of the year, is "The Descent from the Cross by Torchlight" (B. 83) , with its bold drawing and coarse yet effective handling, but, like all the work of 1654, it has serious and obvious defects; while the last to be noted, "The Game of Golf" or Kolf (B. 125) , is yet another instance of Rembrandt's contentedly signing a work which would disgrace a man without a tithe of his genius, and is one of those plates which, if it be authentic—and no one else that I know of disputes it—renders any test of genuineness by workmanship impossible. ”

“ One would have supposed that such devoted art-patrons as the Dutch people of that time, would have hailed with delight the creation of such a masterpiece by one of themselves, and would have showered praises and commissions upon its creator. The very contrary seems to have been the fact; nor is the reason far to seek.
Holland at that time abounded in Guilds and Companies, civil and military, Boards of Management of this or that Hospital or charitable Institution, and a perfect craze for being painted in groups animated one and all. ”

“ He has grown stout, his throat hangs in puffy folds below his chin, his nose has coarsened, and he bears his two-and-forty years but badly; but if his face has aged, it has also strengthened, he has learned as well as suffered, and, if there is no longer in his eyes the look of undoubting self-approval, there is still the same keen, penetrating gaze of observation, and a wiser self-confidence born of trials and labours past and overcome. ”

“ Leyden, again, was a University town, where religion and philosophy were more thought of and more sought after than such a trifle as art, as indeed is still the case in some University towns that could be mentioned; while Amsterdam was a city of prosperous traders making more money than they knew how to spend or employ, and ready enough to devote some of their superfluity to portraits of themselves and wives, or pictures of incidents and places, and it was clearly desirable that one able and willing to satisfy their wishes in this respect should be upon the spot. ”

“ Impossible to drive, yet easy enough to lead, a giant in his studio, a child in his business relations with the world outside its doors, he should have found some steady practical head to regulate his household affairs and introduce some order and economy into his haphazard ways. Such, unfortunately for him in the end, Saskia was not. ”

“ Michel gives a list of nearly nine hundred, which does not pretend to be a full one. The British Museum alone contains ninety authentic drawings and a considerable number of more or less doubtful ones. In the second place, their qualities are such as to appeal almost exclusively to the artist. Rembrandt's impetuous energy did not lend itself to the production of the minute and elegant drawings characteristic of so many Italian masters. He made the drawing for the sake of what it had to tell him, not for the purpose of creating a thing beautiful in itself. ”

“ In that case half of the joint estate at the time of her death was to be put in trust for the child or children, though Rembrandt was still to enjoy the interest for life. It was obvious that the making at once of an inventory of all the property in his possession was the only right course to pursue, in order that the share which might eventually revert to Titus should be accurately known, for Rembrandt was but six-and-thirty, and his re-marriage by no means impossible. ”

“ Of the next two years we know nothing, except that we learn from a portrait of Jeremias de Decker, a poet who wrote eulogistic verses on the painter, that neither the man [Pg 46] nor the artist was entirely neglected. The first sounds that come again to us out of the darkness are those of wedding bells on the occasion of the marriage of Titus with his cousin Magdalena, the daughter of Cornelia van Uylenborch and of Albert van Loo, whose quarrel with Rembrandt years before had clearly been forgotten. ”

“ While Gerard de Lairesse in his Groote Schilderboek, published in 1714, was condescendingly assuring a listening public that Rembrandt's paintings were not "absolutely bad," Houbraken was recording the struggles of collectors to get possession of his etchings, and their consequent increase in price—struggles and increasings, which have gone on augmenting without intermission to the present day, until even a small representative collection of them is a luxury for the very rich alone, an absolutely perfect one of all the differing states unobtainable by a many times millionaire. ”

“ One by one the cobwebs of myth with which, partly through malice, partly through ignorance, the master's image had been overwhelmed have been torn away, and we begin at last to see him as he really was, not impeccable, but intensely human, a kindly, patient, laborious, much-tried soul—one whom fortune, not altogether without his own provoking be it frankly owned, sorely buffeted, but one who, though well-nigh crushed, was never subdued ”

“ He will, in especial, discover, if he compares Rembrandt's etched work with that of other masters, and without doing so he can never rightly understand it, that it is not in technique, masterly as that often is, so much as in expressiveness that his pre-eminence lies. It is in the mental qualities more than in the manual, that he so incomparably excels. ”

“ Two of the dated portraits are of himself; one with the full date is in the Louvre [No. 2555] , and one with a doubtful date belongs to Sir A. D. Neeld. Both are of extreme interest in their bearing on the personal history of Rembrandt. The portrait of the year before, belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch, shows us a man bearing some traces indeed of a struggle with adversity, but of a not altogether unsuccessful one. The character has been developed rather than shaken in the strife; the man is still strong in body, firm in mind ”

“ CHAPTER IX THE AUTHENTIC ETCHINGS
In the entire absence of any evidence to the contrary, we are reasonably safe in concluding that the two etchings dated 1628 were, if not actually the first, among the very first he ever did; and, regarded in this light, they are truly astonishing. Both are called Rembrandt's mother, though the one in full face (B. 352) seems to represent a woman in a much humbler station of life than the stately old lady in the other (B. 354) , while both, furthermore, seem to portray a woman much more advanced in years than his mother was at that time. ”

“ At what time in 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam we have no means of judging, nor can we say with any certainty which pictures of that year were painted before, which after, his change of residence. A "Bust of his Father," signed R.H.L. 1631, the property of Mr Fleischmann, was probably among the former. The "Young Man with the Turban," at Windsor, must also, presumably, have been painted before his removal, if M. Michel is justified in his belief that it is a portrait of Gerard Dou. Of the others we know nothing that points either way. ”

“ REMBRANDT THE PAINTER CHAPTER V EARLY YEARS (1627-1633)
Of the blank spaces in the record of Rembrandt's career, none is so long or so inexplicable as that which begins with his return from Amsterdam to Leyden in 1624. Here the track breaks off abruptly, and we can be sure of nothing until we come to the first known pictures signed by him, and dated 1627.
We will take first the picture discovered by Sir J. C. Robinson about twenty years ago, and presented by him to the Berlin Gallery. It represents a wrinkled old man, seated at a table. ”

“ Most attractive, perhaps, to the amateur, are the numberless little sketches of landscapes, just the simple everyday scenes that caught his eye during his daily walks, jotted down on the spot, briefly, but with extraordinary truth and vivacity, and always with a sense of balance and proportion, and an intuition of the salient points, transmuted by his own genius into gems of reticent perfection. ”

“ By that time Rembrandt's utter [Pg 39] incapacity for business was probably recognised even by himself, and all that Titus possessed was left to Hendrickje and her daughter Cornelia in trust for him. Nevertheless, as if to smooth over the slur upon his father's improvidence, he provided that Rembrandt might draw a certain share, on condition that he did not employ it to pay his debts, a most unlikely use, it is to be feared, for him to put it to, except, like Falstaff, "upon compulsion." The remainder was to go to Cornelia on her marriage or coming of age. ”

“ In the two pictures now under consideration we find a change truly startling. The hair is thin and white, the face is wrinkled, the eyes weary. But it is in the character conveyed that the chief transformation is perceived; he has sunk suddenly into old age and weakness, the strength, the resolution of the man have gone out of him—he seems, stout as he was, to have broken at last. ”

“ The answer is simple, if unsatisfactory: there is not, there never has been, there never can be. There is no style to judge by; for Rembrandt had half-a-dozen styles at least, and employed them all together or separately as he listed. The signature is no guide, for many beautiful works of his have none, and many that are not his bear forged ones. ”

“ Still fewer etchings were produced in 1652, and one of the two, the larger "Christ disputing with the Doctors" (B. 65) , is only a sketch—in places, indeed, it degenerates to a mere scrawl—displaying, for Rembrandt, an unwonted amount of indifferent and inexpressive drawing; but the other, a landscape, generally known in England as the "Vista" (B. 222) , with the two large trees on the left and the dense wood in the centre, is, perhaps, the finest specimen of work in pure dry-point ever produced. ”

“ In the debatable land between the late forties and the early fifties there are two magnificent works, one, oddly included in the usual classifications among the portraits, "Dr Faustus" (B. 270) , the other the famous Hundred Guilder print, "Jesus Christ healing the Sick" (B. 74) . There are, all told, twenty-eight etchings dating between 1640 and 1650.
Only eighteen of uncertain date are placed between 1650 and the end of Rembrandt's career as an etcher in 1661, but they are nearly all worthy of more space than can be devoted to them. ”

“ The reson of this store of pictures and their cheapness proceedes from their want of land to employ their stock, so that it is an ordinary thing to find a common Farmer lay out two or three thousand pounds in this comodity. Their houses are full of them, and they vend them at their faires to very great gaines." So, for a time, the Dutch painters drove a thriving trade; and as Amsterdam was by far the richest city, to Amsterdam the successful painter must needs repair. ”

“ One of the two subject-pictures, in the Six collection, Amsterdam, is a sketch, broadly but expressively handled, of "Joseph interpreting his Dreams," signed with the full name Rembrandt, 1630. The other, signed R.H.L. 1630, in the collection of Count Stroganoff, is of doubtful import. It represents an old man seated in a cave, resting his head upon his right hand, while his left rests on a large book. Beside him lie a cloth embroidered with gold, various gold vessels, and other objects of value. In the distance is seen a town in flames, from which the inhabitants are hurriedly escaping. ”

“ It was, perhaps, as judicious an arrangement as could be made for Rembrandt's sake, but it is not wonderful that the creditors, who saw all chances of their getting anything further vanishing into thin air, should have been fierce in their protests. How far the association prospered we do not know. Probably not too well, for Dr Bredius has gathered together a mass of evidence to show that a large proportion of the art-dealers in Amsterdam at that period came to disastrous financial ends. ”

“ Drawing often carelessly, blind or indifferent to superficial beauties, he, nevertheless, gets straight to the heart of the matter, grasps the essentials, and feels clearly and records frankly and simply all that speaks to the fundamental humanity in himself, and must therefore strike an answering chord in the breasts of his fellow-men. ”