_Rembrandt_ (Dutch: 1606-1669).
Rembrandt Harmensz--called also Van Rhyn, "of the Rhine," from
having been born on the banks of that river--has a place apart
by himself in the history of painting. He is the greatest
genius of the Dutch School, and one of the six supreme masters
of the world. He is also one of the most distinctive and
individual of them all. In what, let us ask, do the genius and
the individuality of Rembrandt consist? In the first place, his
mastery of the resources of painting, within the sphere and
for the ideals he chose for himself, is surpassed by no other
artist. "It will be remembered," said Millais, "that Rembrandt
in his first period was very careful and minute in detail,
and there is evidence of stippling in his flesh-painting;
but when he grew older, and in the fulness of his power, all
appearance of such manipulation and minuteness vanished in the
breadth and facility of his brush, though the advantage of
his early manner remained. The latter manner is, of course,
much the finer and really the more finished of the two.[76] I
have closely examined his pictures at the National Gallery,
and have actually _seen_, beneath that grand veil of breadth,
the early work that his art conceals from untrained eyes--the
whole science of painting. And herein lies his superiority
to Velazquez, who, with all his mighty power and magnificent
execution, never rose to the perfection which, above all with
painters, consists in _ars celare artem_" (_Magazine of Art_,
1888, p. 291). "Rembrandt," says Sir Frederic Burton, "would
have been unparalleled had he treated nothing but frivolous
subjects"; but, in the second place, "the artist was a poet
and a seer." He was a seer in his penetration into the mind of
man; a poet in his perception of a special kind of beauty. His
portraits have "an inward life that belongs to no others in a
like degree." It is as a painter of character that he shows
himself supreme, bringing out the personality of his sitters
in their gestures and attitudes, and in the peculiarity of
bearing and expression stamped upon them by temperament and
habits. From his dramatic action and mastery of expression,
Rembrandt has been called "the Shakespeare of Holland." In his
religious subjects, the originality of his mind and power of
his imagination are also conspicuous. "He gives," says Ruskin,
"pathetic or powerful fancies, founded on real Scripture
reading, and on his interest in the picturesque character of
the Jew." In all subjects alike, "he moves us by his profound
sympathy with his kind, by his tragic power, by his deep
pathos, by his humour, which is thoroughly human and seldom
cynical." What he held up to nature--and herein is Rembrandt's
individuality most marked--was the dark mirror. "He was," says
Leighton, "the supreme painter who revealed to the world the
poetry of twilight and all the magic mystery of gloom." "He was
in the mystery," says Burton, "that underlies the surface of
things." "He accosts with his dark lantern," says Fromentin,
"the world of the marvellous, of conscience, and the ideal; he
has no master in the art of painting, because he has no equal
in the power of showing the invisible." "It was his function,"
says another critic, "to introduce mystery as an element of
effect in the imitative arts." "As by a stroke of enchantment
Rembrandt brought down a cloud over the face of nature, and
beneath it, half-revealed, half-hidden, her shapes met the
eye in aspects full of new suggestion."[77] In the technical
method by which Rembrandt worked out his ideal he is the great
master of the school of chiaroscuro--of those, that is, who
strive at representing not so much the colours of objects,
as the contrasts of light and shade upon them. "If it were
possible for art to give all the truths of nature it ought to
do it. But this is not possible. Choice must always be made
of some facts which _can_ be represented from among others
which must be passed by in silence, or even, in some respects,
misrepresented.... Rembrandt always chooses to represent the
exact force with which the light on the most illumined part
of an object is opposed to its obscurer portions. In order
to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth, he
sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of his picture;
and the expression of every character of objects which
depends on tenderness of shape or tint. But he obtains his
single truth, and what picturesque and forcible expression is
dependent upon it, with magnificent skill and subtlety."[78]
Rembrandt "sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of
his picture." This is inevitable. For both the light and the
darkness of nature are inimitable by art. "The whole question,
therefore, is simply whether you will be false at one end of
the scale or at the other--that is, whether you will lose
yourself in light or in darkness.... What Veronese does is
to make his colours true to nature as far as he can. What
Rembrandt does is to make his contrasts true, never minding
his colours--with the result that in most cases not one colour
is absolutely true."[79] An exception, however, must be made.
For he often "chose subjects in which the real colours were
very nearly imitable,--as single heads with dark backgrounds,
in which nature's highest light was little above his own." He
was particularly fond also of dark scenes lighted only by some
small spot of light; as, for instance, in this picture and in
No. 47.
The technical skill and sense of power which distinguish
Rembrandt's work are reflected in his life--a life of hard
labour, sinking towards its close into deep gloom, and a life
at all times of a certain aloofness and of restricted vision.
He was born at Leyden, being the fifth child of a miller, and
from a very early age set himself to etch and sketch the common
things about the mill. "His father's mill was, doubtless,
Rembrandt's school; the strong and solitary light, with its
impenetrable obscurity around, the characteristic feature of
many of Rembrandt's best works, is just such an effect as would
be produced by the one ray admitted into the lofty chamber of a
mill from the small window, its ventilator" (Wornum). He never
went to Italy or cultivated the grand style. He studied the
life and manner of his own time and people. His models were
not conspicuous for elegance; beauty of form was not within
the compass of his art. He was indefatigable in making studies
both of himself and of his mother. Among the things he studied
were, it must be admitted, the lowest functions of humanity and
often obscenities of a rollicking kind; coarseness of manner
and conversation was common at that time. Rembrandt studied for
a short period under a well-known painter, Pieter Lastman, at
Amsterdam, where he had for a fellow-pupil a fellow-townsman,
Jan Lievens (see 1095), but returned to Leyden in 1624,
determined "to study and practise in his own fashion." He soon
acquired a considerable reputation; a Dutch poet, in a book
published in 1630, refers to him as an instance of precocity,
and in disproof of the doctrine of heredity. Rembrandt,
"beardless, yet already famous," was the son of a miller, "made
of other flour than his father's." As most of his sitters lived
in Amsterdam, then a great centre of wealth and learning,
Rembrandt moved to that city in 1631. The famous "Anatomy
Lesson," now in the Museum at the Hague, was produced in the
following year. "He lived very simply," we are told, "and when
at work contented himself with a herring or a piece of cheese
and bread; his only extravagance was a passion for collecting."
In 1634 he married Saskia Uilenburg, a lady of a good Frisian
family, and possessed of some fortune. Her features may be
recognised in a large number of the painter's pictures; in none
more attractively rendered than in the famous picture of the
Dresden Gallery, in which she is sitting on her husband's knee.
During this period of Rembrandt's life all went well with him.
Commissions poured in; his studio was crowded with scholars,
and his etchings spread his fame far beyond his native land.
He lived for his art and his home, mixing little in society.
"When I want to give my wits a rest," he said, "I do not look
for honour, but for liberty." "When he was painting," said
one of his biographers, "he would not have given audience
to the greatest monarch on earth, but would have compelled
even such an one to wait or to come again when he was more at
leisure." He never travelled, even in Holland, and he dwelt
apart. He had few books, but his taste in art was catholic.
To his passion for collecting we have already referred. His
house, which still stands in the Breedstraat, was a museum of
curiosities, containing costly materials, stuffed animals,
richly ornamented weapons, casts, engravings, and pictures
(including works by Palma Vecchio and Giorgione). The pearls,
precious stones, rich necklaces, clasps and bracelets of every
kind that Saskia wears in her portraits were not gems of the
painter's imagination, but actual objects from the jewel-cases
which he filled for his wife. "When Rembrandt was present
at a sale," says Baldinucci, "it was his habit, especially
when pictures drawn by great masters were put up, to make an
enormous advance on the first bid, which generally silenced all
competition. To those who expressed their surprise at such a
proceeding, he replied that by this means he hoped to raise the
status of his profession." This lordly buying was the undoing
of Rembrandt's worldly fortunes. In 1642 Saskia died, and his
financial embarrassments, which had already begun, went from
worse to worse. In 1656 he was declared bankrupt; his house and
collections were sold, and at the age of fifty-one he found
himself homeless and penniless. He was stripped, we read, even
of his household linen, though of this, to be sure, he seems to
have had but a meagre store. In his life, as in his art, there
were heavy shadows; but the light shines out in his undaunted
perseverance. He had lived for some years with his servant,
Hendrickje Stoffels, an uneducated peasant, who served him as a
model, and whose homely features appear in many of the pictures
of his middle period (_see e.g._ No. 54). In 1654 Rembrandt had
been summoned before the elders of the Church on account of the
irregularity of their relationship. But Hendrickje was a good
mother to Rembrandt's legitimate children as well as to her
own, and in 1660 she and the painter's son, Titus, entered into
partnership as art dealers, and supported Rembrandt by the sale
of his etchings. His vogue as a painter had by this time been
eclipsed by the popularity of painters of less sombre genius.
Fallen from his rich estate and frowned upon by the Church, the
master found himself in the last period of his life deserted
and unhonoured. Yet to this period belong many of his noblest
works. "He had never cared," says M. Michel, "for the suffrages
of the crowd. He set his face more steadily than ever towards
the goal he had marked out for himself. Within the walls of
his makeshift studios, seeking solace in work and meditation,
he lived for his art more absolutely than before; and some
of his creations of this period have a poetry and a depth
of expression such as he had never hitherto achieved." But
fresh sorrows descended upon the master as the end drew near.
Hendrickje died about 1664, and this blow was followed in 1668
by the death of Titus. Crushed in spirit and broken by poverty,
the old painter did not long survive his son. He died in
1669--unknown, unrecorded, and dishonoured. Gerard de Lairesse,
then at the height of his reputation, said of him only that he
was a master "who merely achieved an effect of rottenness,"
and was "capable of nothing but vulgar and prosaic subjects."
Now, two centuries and a quarter after his death, Rembrandt's
fame stands higher than even in the heyday of his success. His
work as a painter is represented in the National Gallery by
several masterpieces. Of his drawings and etchings the British
Museum possesses a splendid collection; an exhibition of these
(illustrated by an admirable Catalogue) was arranged in 1899.
A _tour de force_ in the artist's speciality of contrasts of light and
shade. Notice how a succession of these contrasts gradually renders the
subject intelligible. "The eye falls at once upon the woman, who is
dressed in white, passes then to the figure of Christ, which next to
her is the most strongly lighted--and so on to Peter, to the Pharisees,
to the soldiers, till at length it perceives in the mysterious gloom of
the Temple the High Altar, with the worshippers on the steps" (Waagen:
_Treasures of Art in Great Britain_, i. 353). "Beyond the ordinary
claims of art, this picture commands our attention from the grand
conception of the painter, who here, as in other pictures and etchings,
has invested Christ with a majestic dignity which recalls Leonardo and
no other" (J. F. White).
This picture, which was painted in 1644 for Jan Six, the well-known
patron of Rembrandt, passed eventually into the possession of Mr.
Angerstein. The poet Wordsworth, describing a visit he paid to the
Angerstein collection, wrote to Sir George Beaumont in 1808: "Coleridge
and I availed ourselves of your letters to Lawrence, and saw Mr.
Angerstein's pictures. The day was very unfavourable, not a gleam
of sun, and the clouds were quite in disgrace. The great picture of
Michael Angelo and Sebastian (No. 1) pleased me more than ever. The new
Rembrandt has, I think, much, very much, in it to admire, but still
more to _wonder at_ rather than admire. I have seen many pictures of
Rembrandt which I should prefer to it. The light in the _depth_ of the
temple is far the finest part of it: indeed, it is the only part of
the picture which gives me very _high_ pleasure; but that does highly
please me" (_Memorials of Coleorton_, ii. 49).