Rembrandt's principle was to extract from things one element among the
rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the
seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to
analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even
more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects.
One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their
"envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise
than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate them; but then,
if he ignored grace and beauty, purity of line and the delicacy of the
skin, he expressed the nude body by suggestions of suppleness,
roundness, elasticity, with a love of material substance, a sense of the
live being, which enchant the practical painter. He resolved everything
into its component parts, colour as well as light, so that, by
eliminating the complicated and condensing the scattered elements from a
given scene, he succeeded in drawing without outline, in painting a
portrait almost without strokes that show, in colouring without colour,
in concentrating the light of the solar system into a sunbeam. It would
be impossible in a plastic art to carry the curiosity for the essential
to an intenser pitch. For physical beauty he substitutes expression of
character; for the imitation of things, their almost complete
transformation; for studious scrutiny, the speculation of the
psychologist; for precise observation, whether trained or natural, the
visions of a seer and apparitions of such vividness that he himself is
deceived by them. By virtue of this faculty of second sight, of
intuitions like those of a somnambulist, he sees farther into the
supernatural world than any one else whatever. The life that he
perceives in dream has a certain accent of the other world, which makes
real life seem pale and almost cold. Look at his "Portrait of a Woman in
the Louvre," two paces from "Titian's Mistress." Compare the two women,
study closely the two pictures, and you will understand the difference
between the two brains. Rembrandt's ideal, sought as in a dream with
closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosphorescence
that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and
uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear
before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the
vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to
preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet
achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial painting, real
beyond any other master's work, and able to hold its own with a Rubens,
a Titian, a Veronese, a Giorgione, a Van Dyck--this is Rembrandt's aim.
Has he succeeded? The testimony of the world answers for him.
_Fromentin._