Rembrandt

“ Nothing need be said in justification of a comprehensive book upon the life and work of Rembrandt. A classic among classics, he is also a modern of moderns. His works are to-day more sought after and better paid for than ever before; he is now at the zenith of a fame which can hardly decline.
The author of this work is perhaps, of all living authorities on Rembrandt, the one who has had the largest experience, the best opportunity of knowing all that can be known of the master. ”

“ Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.
It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One man sees everything in the forcible light and shade of Rembrandt: a few heroes stand out conspicuously in a focus of brilliancy from a background of imperfectly defined shadows, clustering round the centre in strange but picturesque confusion. To another, every figure is full of interest, with singular contrasts and sharply-defined features; the whole effect is somewhat spoilt by the want of perspective and the perpetual sparkle and glitter; yet14 when we fix our attention upon any special part, it attracts us by its undeniable vivacity and vitality. ”

“ Beautiful his work is not, but it invariably arrests and haunts. There is about it at once a simplicity and a strangeness, an air of reality and a mystery, a combination of the poignantly human with the unaccountably fantastic, a force, a penetration, a personality and intensity, which together appeal to the beholder with a power comparable in degree, if not in kind, to the power of the appeal made by any of the greatest masters of other schools. Every one is struck by Rembrandt. Every one feels that he is a poet and a magician, and a poet and a magician of a new kind. ”

“ The secret of Rembrandt lies here exposed, if we can only read him aright. It is not the mass of shadow and isolated light which stamp the power and individuality of the man. These are only his tricks of trade, repeated when he saw how well they took with the public. It is the vigour and command of this master which strike us as we probe the breadth and extreme simplicity of his accessories. He is content with a bunch of carrots when they serve his purpose. ”

“ The flesh tints in the face, whether catching the full light, or partly veiled by shadows, display an endless variety of shades, and the neutral greens and reds, greys and yellows, are put against each other in such a wonderful manner that an effect has been attained which strikes us dumb with admiration. The way in which he is made to stand out from the background is in itself marvellous, but just look at the man! how full of life and understanding is the look in those eyes. It is something quite unique, something Rembrandt himself has never surpassed. ”

“ Rembrandt, on the other hand, so absorbed in his own contemplation as to be an enigma to the man who runs and reads, is yet so passionately human that the place he by degrees makes for himself in the imagination and the heart of those who learn to know him expands and deepens. The difference between them is epitomized in their respective kinds of technique. While Rembrandt is a constructor, Hals is a “follower of surfaces.” ”

“ Rembrandt returns to the simplest gamut of colour, but shows his skill in the use of it, leaving on the spectator an impression of absolute enjoyment of the result, unconscious of the means. The plain burghers dealing with the simple concerns of their gild arrest our attention as if they were the makers of history. The live for ever; and we close our eyes to the strange perspective of the table. ”

“ In Rembrandt's picture we see the dainty face, round and fresh as a flower, with the nose slightly tip-tilted, the short upper lip and full, curved mouth; we also see the eyes, large and blue, beneath the straight brow—eyes which had nothing of the usually vapid expression of those that are blue—eyes which, even in the picture, seem to dance with merriment and with joy, and to which the tiny brown mole, artfully placed by nature upon the left cheek-bone, lent an additional air of roguishness and of youth. ”

“ The waves that emanate from the canvas suffuse your senses but do not soothe or satisfy. The modern nervous intensity, missing absolutely in Hals and his substantial humans, is present in Rembrandt. We say "modern" as a sop to our vanity, but we are the "ancients," and there is no mode of thought, no mood that has not been experienced and expressed by our ancestors. Rembrandt is unlike any other Dutch painter—Hals, Vermeer, Teniers, Van der Heist—what have these in common with the miller's son? ”

“ Weary of the familiar commonplaces of daily life, the popular imagination looks to art for happier scenes and fairer forms. This taste, so completely gratified by Raphael, is at first strangely disappointed by Rembrandt. While Raphael peoples his canvases with beautiful creatures of another realm, Rembrandt draws his material from the common world about us. In place of the fair women and charming children with whom Raphael delights us, he chooses his models from wrinkled old men and beggars. Rembrandt is nevertheless a poet and a visionary in his own way. ”

“ Rembrandt's method is, so to speak, supersensuous. At times he lightly touches his plate, and at times he attacks as at a venture; at others he skims the surface and caresses it with an exquisite refinement, a magical dexterity. In his lights he breaks the line of the contour, but only to resume and boldly accentuate it in his shadows ”

“ In this last, a touching truthfulness and depth of feeling, with every other grand quality peculiar to Rembrandt, are seen in their highest perfection. Of hardly less excellence, also, is our Descent from the Cross.
Endowed with so many admirable qualities, it follows that Rembrandt was a portrait painter of the highest order, while his peculiar style of lighting, his colouring and treatment, distinguish his portraits from those by all other masters. Even the works of his most successful pupils, who followed his style in this respect, are far behind him in energy of conception and execution. ”

“ We look again, and we see behind the commonplace exterior the poetry of the inner life. A vision of the ideal hovers just beyond the real. Thus we gain refreshment, not by being lifted out of the world, but by a revelation of the beauty which is in the world. Rembrandt becomes to us henceforth an interpreter of the secrets of humanity. As Raphael has been surnamed "the divine," for the godlike beauty of his creations, so Rembrandt is "the human," for his sympathetic insight into the lives of his fellow men. ”

“ He stands alone, not only among his countrymen, a gigantic workman among the minute laborers of cabbages, butchers' shops, and green-grocers' stalls, but he is a solitary master in the schools of Europe. The style of Rembrandt it is easy to distinguish, but difficult to characterise. ”

“ To feel Rembrandt truly, it is not enough to be an artist or an amateur picture-fancier—one should be something of a poet too.
There are nineteen of his pictures here; of these "Jesus teaching the doctors in the temple," though a small picture, impressed me with awe,—the portraits of the painter Flinck and his wife, with wonder. All are ill-hung, with their backs against the light—for them the worst possible situation. ”

“ Rembrandt is the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache.... ”

“ And even a poor man may have a few good Rembrandts, though only quite a rich man can have them in great numbers and of the rarest. Rembrandt is a superb tonic for people who have courted too much the infection of a weakly and a morbid art. Not occupied indeed in his representations of humanity with visions of formal beauty, his variety is unsurpassed, his vigour unequalled; he has the great traditions of Style, yet is as modern and as unconventional as Mr Whistler. ”

“ And in the case of Rembrandt, the character and charm of whose three hundred etchings are the theme of my discourse, the first thing to take account of is that we have to deal not only with a conjurer of the brush and a magician of the needle, but with a deep soul. An âme d’élite—that is the true phrase for it: a being not above human faults, but above average human excellence; a reveller in pageantry, who yet had a tender eye for the large lines of simple landscape ”

“ But while the former and so many of his contemporaries were content with their own facility and the convention they had reached, Rembrandt never remitted the ardour of the great quest which was the very blood of his life. Constantly breaking new paths, and losing at each new turn his earlier patrons, who failed to follow the progress of his genius, he died in comparative neglect, only to be rediscovered by the moderns as one who still belongs to the most living style of art. ”

“ There was reverence and quick admiration in every feature as he bowed and exclaimed with a long sigh:
“Rembrandt! Rembrandt! God!––to paint like that!”
The emotions of this remarkable young man came and went with the quickness of his eye.
While still in the act of outpouring his admiration he whipped from the tail of his dress coat a flat fold of a dozen or more sheets of wrapping paper, shook them out and laid them on the lid of the chest. ”

“ There is a type in the child, the same as we observe in the Joseph, a type indeed which follows us everywhere and under every form, except in that of the consecrated Christ. This type we should, were we dilating simply on Rembrandt's art, have abundant opportunity to show is no other than Rembrandt himself, — new proof that his designs were evolved from his own inner consciousness, from that storehouse of images gathered up in his brain, the treasures of generations, and of his own immense genius and observation. ”

“ There is only one high light, falling on the lower part of the face. Inspiration has tightened the sensitive mouth; the questing [65] eyes peer out from the shadow of the soft cap. She broke off from her vision to realize with a start that when she touched the trigger she would be stepping back through the centuries and killing her dream of the original of Rembrandt's picture. A foolish fancy, truly, but in the dark a dream may be as true, as vivid as reality. ”

“ After long study one comes to believe, not only that Rembrandt treated form differently from other artists, which no one, I suppose, denies; but also that no other artist has ever treated it with such a mingling of power and subtlety, with so fine and sure a reliance upon its physical qualities, and yet with so marvelous a capacity to interpret its spiritual significance. ”

“ It is in scenes by fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness of sunshine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Rembrandt had no need to seek new ground to escape from a formal rendering of well-known themes. Like most masters of supreme genius, his originality consisted in the realisation of his own deepest and most personal emotion in his treatment of the old stories. They appealed to him as the vehicle of the noblest thoughts of man in relation to himself and God, and he was practically the first artist who dared approach the Scriptures in the spirit of reality that implied a living faith rather than an official creed. ”

“ We have now arrived at the year 1640, the threshold of his second manner, which extended to 1654, the middle age of Rembrandt. During the latter part of the previous decade we find the shadows more transparent and the blending of light and shade more perfect. There is a growing power in every part of his art. ”