Mortimer Menpes

“ It is generally acknowledged that the greatest masters of painting that the world has known are Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt, and to each of the triumvirate we apply the word genius. Among the many definitions of that abused word is one which states that genius consists not in seeing more than other people, but in seeing differently. We acknowledge genius in a painter when, over and above masterly technical power, he presents to us a view of life or of nature which we may never have seen, but which we are convinced is the vision of deeper eyes than our own, and is true. ”

“ Titian accepts the literary motive, and the artist in him straight forgets it. We walk from The Entombment to the little chamber where Rembrandt's Christ at Emmaus hangs, and the heart of Rembrandt is beating there. To Titian the glory of the world, to Rembrandt all that man has felt and suffered, parting and sorrow, and the awakening of joy. We do not compare the one painter with the other; we say: "This is Titian, that is Rembrandt; each gives us his emotion." ”

“ Not only did M. Michel visit and revisit all the galleries where Rembrandt's pictures are displayed in Russia, France, England, Sweden, Denmark, and North Germany, but he lived for several years with Rembrandt, surrounded by reproductions of his pictures, drawings, and etchings, and by documents bearing on their history, his mind all the while intently fixed on the facts of Rembrandt's life and the achievements of his genius. Gradually the procession of dates and facts took on a new significance; the heterogeneous threads of information wove themselves into the fabric of a life. ”

“ Petersburg.
It was the last of half a hundred portraits of himself, painted and etched without vanity; painted because a man's self is such an accommodating model, always ready and willing; painted because Rembrandt loved to experiment with himself before a mirror, [41] grimacing, angry, stern, "as an officer," "with a casque," "with a gorget," or, as we see him in the National Gallery, on one wall with the bloom of youth and health upon his face, on the other, dulled, stained, and marked by the finger of time. This we can say: that he was always true to himself. ”

“ Personality may be expressed by a Rembrandt, abundantly. It may also be expressed by a Velasquez, negatively.
We must be vigilant, in judging a painter, to distinguish between his own personality and the personality of those who interpret him to us. The more we give of ourselves to a painter or an author, the greater is the return of his appeal and interest. Cleave the wood of your brain and you find him brimming with communications, raise the stone of your imagination and he is revealed. ”

“ Imagination, which confuses the judgment of so many, aided him, for his imagination was not nourished by vanity, or the desire to produce an effect, but flowed from the greatness of his brooding heart. He stood alone during his life, an absorbed man, uninfluenced by any school; he stands alone to-day. ”

“ Rembrandt was always inspired when he painted his own family. There is a quality about his portraits of father, mother, Saskia, Titus, and Hendrickje, yes! and of himself, that speaks to us as if we were intimates. It is a personal appeal. We find it in every presentment that Rembrandt gives us of another figure which constantly inspired his brush—the figure of Christ. In The Woman taken in Adultery, it is His figure that is articulate: it is the figure of Christ in the Emmaus picture that amazes: it is the figure of Christ that haunts us in a dozen of the etchings. ”

“ Velasquez made two journeys into Italy; he knew what men had accomplished in painting, and if he was not largely influenced by Titian and Tintoretto, their work showed him what man had done, what man could do, and indicated to him his own dormant powers.
Rembrandt was sufficient unto himself. There [48] are moods when one is sure that he stands at the head of the painting hierarchy. In spite of his greatness, we feel that he is very near to our comprehension. What a picture of the old painter towards the end of his life that saying of Baldinucci presents. ”

“ A great painter writes us a letter, tells us of the things he has seen or heard or felt, gives us news of the world wherein he lives. He expresses his personality to us, and personality in art is a thing [43] incalculable. Corot's Arcadia landscape delights us because it is the distilled essence of the vision, heart, and character of the personality called Corot. ”

“ It was not easy for our enthusiast to explain to the ladies of the Dorcas meeting that the dissection of a body was a suitable subject for the brush of a painter. The Dutchmen of Rembrandt's day were not so squeamish as we have become since. They had a passion for the literal painting of literal things, and this picture was destined not for a Tate Gallery, but for the wall of an operating theatre. Dr. Tulp desired a picture of himself performing an operation, and Rembrandt gave it to him, painted in a way that pleased his contemporaries, and that has astonished the world ever since. ”

“ Beneath that grey and solemn boulder that Time and man accepted as a freehold tenant of the world, that our citizen had seen and passed a hundred times, a population of experts were working, their deeds unseen by the wayfarer. Now what is the meaning of this little story? How did the discovery of that horde of capable experts strike the imagination of our golfer? The boulder was Rembrandt. ”

“ They are distorted, disfigured, almost unrecognisable. But the free spirit is still unbroken. The eyes that meet ours are still keen and piercing; they have even the old twinkle of good-humoured irony, and the toothless mouth relaxes in frank laughter. ”

“ All this and much more he would have had to unlearn, discovering in the end the simple truth that Rembrandt lived for his art; that he loved and was kind to his wife and to the servant girl who, when Saskia died, filled her place; that he was neither saint nor sinner; that he was extravagant because beautiful things cost money; that being an artist he did not manage his affairs with the wisdom of a man of the world ”

“ Foolish indeed it seems in the face of these two pictures, and a thousand others, to say that art should be this or that,—that a picture should or should not have a literary or a philosophical motive. ”

“ To a child, the portrait of a painter by himself has a human interest apart altogether from its claim to be a work of art. Rembrandt's portrait of himself at the National Gallery, painted when he was thirty-two, is not one of his remarkable achievements. ”

“ For the first time these masterpieces, with all the rich, deep colouring, can be in the possession of every one—in the possession of the connoisseur, who knows and loves the originals but can scarcely ever see them, and in that of the novice, who hardly knows the emotions familiar to those who have made a study of the great masters, but is desirous of learning. ”

“ M. Michel is the recoverer-in-chief of all that truly happened during the sixty-three years that Rembrandt passed upon this earth.
Every dead painter, poet, or writer of genius, has had his Recoverer. ”

“ To-day not a turn or a twist of his life, not a facet of his temperament, not an individual of his family, friends, or acquaintances, not the slightest scrap of paper bearing the mark of his hand, but has been peered into, scrutinised, tracked to its source, and written about voluminously. ”

“ He also displayed photographs of the remarkable series in the Hermitage Gallery at St. Petersburg: The Descent from the Cross, with the brilliant light focussed on the body and winding sheet, and fading away into the darkness of the background; that radiant portrait of Saskia painted just before her marriage to Rembrandt, known as Flora with a Flower-trimmed Crook, standing at the opening of a grotto, with a wreath of flowers upon her head, and the light falling upon her face and gay attire ”

“ After many years of careful thought and consideration as to the best, or the only possible, manner of giving to those who love the master a work which should really be a genuine reproduction of his pictures, I have adapted and developed the modern process of colour printing, so as to bring it into sympathy with the subject. ”

“ Suppose this citizen, having one day a loose half-hour of time to fill in the neighbourhood of South Kensington, remembers the articles he has skimmed in the papers about the Constantine Ionides bequest: suppose he strolls into the Museum and asks his way of a patient policeman to the Ionides collection. Suppose he stands before the revolving frame of Rembrandt etchings, idly pushing from right to left the varied creations of the master, would he be charmed? would his imagination be stirred? ”

“ Glorious or inglorious, the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he could see—by rushlight...."
Had Ruskin, one wonders, ever seen The Syndics at Amsterdam, or the Portrait of his Mother, and the Singing Boy at Vienna, or The Old Woman at St. Petersburg, or the Christ at Emmaus at the Louvre, or any of the etchings? ”

“ Reverence for the students of art, for the specialists, for the scientific historians, was born within him as he pursued his studies in Rembrandt lore. Also he was conscious of sorrow, anger, and pride: sorrow for the artist of genius who goes down to his grave neglected, unwept, unhonoured, and unsung: anger at the stupidity and blindness of his contemporaries: pride at the unselfish industry and ceaseless activity of the men who, born years after, raise the master to his throne.
A RABBI SEATED, A STICK IN HIS HANDS AND A HIGH FEATHER IN HIS CAP ”

“ People make the long journey to St. Petersburg for the sake of the 35 pictures by Rembrandt that the Hermitage contains. He is hailed to-day as the greatest etcher the world has ever known, and there are some who place him at the head of that noble triumvirate who stand on the summit of the painters' Parnassus, Velasquez, Titian, and Rembrandt. ”

“ CHAPTER III THE APPEAL OF THE ETCHINGS
The citizen and golfer, whose commerce with Rembrandt was narrated in the first chapter, approached the master through the writings of his Recoverers, certain art historians and scholars, who frequent libraries, search archives, and peruse documents; men to whom a picture is a scientific document rather than an emotional or intellectual experience. He was well content to end his commerce with Rembrandt there. ”

“ At this point of his discourse he began to feel more confidence, and he proceeded to focus his remarks upon four periods in Rembrandt's life—epochs that lend themselves to separate treatment, each epoch marked by the production of a masterpiece, and one remarkable portrait that has a particular and pathetic interest. Those four pictures are The Anatomy Lesson, painted in 1632, when he was twenty-six; the Sortie of a Company of Amsterdam Musketeers, known as The Night Watch, painted in 1642, when he was thirty-six; The Syndics of the Cloth Hall, painted in 1662, when he was fifty-six ”

“ Petersburg, to devise a means by which facsimile reproductions in colour of Rembrandt's pictures could be set before the public. The black and white reproductions and the photographs I put on one side at once, because of the impossibility of suggesting colour thereby.
Rembrandt has been reproduced in photograph [vi] and photogravure, and by every mechanical process imaginable, but all such reproductions are not only disappointing, but wrong. The light and shade have never been given their true value, and as for colour, it has scarcely been attempted. ”

“ Mr. Berenson has written an exhaustive and learned work on Lorenzo Lotto, analysing his pictures year by year, and exhuming the various painters who influenced Lotto at the different periods of his life. Mr. Berenson's book extends to nearly three hundred pages. The influences of the painting fraternity upon Rembrandt would not provide material for the first paragraph of the first page of such a book.
His fame is assured. He is one of the great triumvirate. "He was greater, perhaps," says Mr. Clausen, "than any other painter in human feeling and sympathy, in dramatic sense and invention ”

“ Abraham's Sacrifice, Christ at Emmaus, and The Prodigal Son are four shillings each."
The enthusiast could not conceal his astonishment. "I thought Rembrandt's etchings cost hundreds of pounds," he said.
"They do, but these are merely reproductions. Only a millionaire could hope to possess a complete collection of first states. These are the reproductions that were issued with M. Blanc's catalogue. He made them from the best proofs in his own collections, and from the public museums. You should compare them with the originals. The difference will astonish you. ”