us, he is the master, supreme alike in genius and accomplishment.
Because, as time went on, he broke completely from tradition and in
his work gave full play to his originality, his pictures were looked
at askance; because he chose to live his own life, indifferent to
accepted conventions, he himself was misunderstood. It was his cruel
fate to enjoy prosperity and popularity in his earlier years, only to
meet with neglect in his old age. But this he felt probably less than
other men; he was not a courtier, with Velasquez, nor vowed to
worldly success, with Rubens. His pleasure and his reward, he found
in his work. So long as easel and canvas, brushes and paints were left
to him, he demanded no greater happiness.
[Illustration: Marie De Medici at the House of Rubens.]
In Leyden, a town already made famous by another master, Lucas van
Leyden, Rembrandt was born in 1606; though this date has been
disputed, some authorities suggesting 1607, others, 1608. His family
were respectable, if not distinguished, burghers, his father, Harmen
Gerritszoon, being a miller by trade, his mother, Neeltjen Willems of
Zuitbroeck, the daughter of a baker. Not until early in the
seventeenth century did permanent surnames become common among
Dutchmen; hitherto children had been given their father's, in addition
to their own Christian name; Rembrandt for many years was known as
Rembrandt Harmenzoon, or the son of Harmen. But the miller, to be in
the growing fashion, had called himself Van Ryn--of the Rhine--and
thus, later on, Rembrandt also signed himself. Harmen was well-to-do;
he owned houses in Leyden, and beyond the walls, gardens, and fields,
and the mill where Rembrandt, because he once drew a mill, was
supposed to have been born. But there was no reason for Neeltjen to
move from a comfortable house in town into such rustic quarters, and
it is more likely that Rembrandt's birthplace was the house pointed
out in the Nordeinde Street. A commercial career had been chosen for
his four older brothers. But Harmen, his means allowing the luxury,
decided to make of his fifth son a man of letters and learning, and
Rembrandt was sent to the University of Leyden. That letters, however,
had small charm for him, was clear from the first. Better than his
books he loved the engravings of Swanenburch, better still, the
pictures of Lucas van Leyden, which he could look at to his heart's
content on gala days, when the Town Hall, where they hung, was thrown
open to the public. His hours of study were less profitable than his
hours of recreation when he rambled in the country, through his
father's estate, and, sometimes as far as the sea, a sketch-book, the
chances are, for sole companion. Certainly, by the time he was
fifteen, so strong were the proofs of his indifference to the classics
and his love for art, that his father, sacrificing his own ambitions,
allowed Rembrandt to leave the university for the studio of Van
Swanenburch. From this day forth, his life's history is told in the
single word--work; his indeed was the genius of industry.
Van Swanenburch had studied in Italy; but his own painting, to judge
by the few examples still in existence, was entirely commonplace.
Three years were more than enough to be passed under his tuition. At
the end of the third, Rembrandt went to Amsterdam, and there entered
the studio of Lastman. His second master also had studied in Italy,
and also was a painter of mediocre talent, popular in his own
times--the Apelles of the day, he was called--but remembered now
chiefly because of his relations to his pupil. From the first,
Rembrandt, even if obliged to paint the stock subjects of the day, was
determined to treat them in his own way, and not to follow set forms
that happened to be adopted in the schools. He used real men and women
for models, and painted them as he saw them, not as he was bidden to
look at them through his teacher's spectacles. In six months he had
learned at least one thing, that Lastman had nothing more to teach
him. The man of genius must ever be his own master, though he remain
the hard-working student all his days. Back to Leyden and to his
father's house, Rembrandt had not returned to lead a life of idleness.
He worked tremendously in these early years. Even needed models he
found in the members of his family; he has made the face of his mother
as familiar as that of a friend; his own, with the heavy features, the
thick, bushy hair, the small intelligent eyes, between them the
vertical line, fast deepening on the fine forehead, he drew and etched
and painted, again and again. More elaborate compositions he also
undertook. As in his maturity, it was to the Bible he turned for
suggestions: Saint Paul in prison, Samson and Delilah, the
Presentation in the Temple--these were the themes then in vogue which
he preferred, rendering them with the realism which distinguished his
later, more famous Samsons and Abrahams and Christs, making them the
motive for a fine arrangement of color, for a striking study of light
and shadow. A pleasant picture one can fancy of his life at this
period; he was with his own people, for whom his love was tender; busy
with brush, pencil, and etching-needle; he was strengthening his
powers of observation, developing and perfecting his style,
occasionally producing work that won for him renown in Leyden; and,
gradually, he gathered round him a small group of earnest
fellow-workers, chief among them Lievens, Gerard Dou, and Van Vliet,
the last two, though but slightly his juniors, looking up to him as
master. These were the years of his true apprenticeship.
Leyden, however, was not the best place for a young painter who had
his fortunes to make. It was essentially a university town; interest
was concentrated upon letters; art was but of secondary consideration.
It was different in Amsterdam, the great commercial centre of Holland.
There, all was life and activity and progress; there, was money to be
spent, and the liberal patron willing to lavish it upon the artist.
Holland just then was in the first flush of prosperity and patriotism,
following upon her virtual independence from Spain. Not a citizen but
glowed with self-respect at the thought of the victory he had, in one
way or another, helped to win; the state, as represented by the good
burghers, was supreme in every man's mind. It was natural that
individuals and corporations alike should seek to immortalize their
greatness by means of the painter's art, which, in Holland, had long
since ceased to be a monopoly of the church. Hence the age became
essentially one of portrait-painting. Many were the painters whose
portraits had already achieved distinction. De Keyser was busy in
Amsterdam; a far greater genius, Franz Hals, but fifteen years
Rembrandt's senior, was creating his masterpieces in The Hague and
Harlem. It was as inevitable that Rembrandt should turn to
portraiture, as that he should find commissions less numerous in
Leyden than in Amsterdam. Often in the latter town his services were
required; so often, indeed, that at last, about 1631, when he was just
twenty-five, he settled there permanently and set up a studio of his
own.
Success was his from the start. Sitter after sitter sought him out in
his house on the Bloemgracht; the most distinguished men in the town
hastened to patronize him. His work was liked by the burghers whom he
painted, its strength was felt by artists, whose canvases soon showed
its influence. Admirers crowded to his studio. He had not been in
Amsterdam a twelvemonth when, before he was yet twenty-six, he was
entrusted with an order of more than usual importance. This was the
portrait of Dr. Tulp and his class of surgeons: the famous "Lesson in
Anatomy" now in the Gallery at The Hague. The subject at the time was
very popular. Many artists, De Keyser among others, had already, in
painting prominent surgeons, placed them around the subject they were
dissecting; indeed, this was the arrangement insisted upon by the
surgeons themselves, and, as there seems to have been no limit to
their vanity, "Lessons in Anatomy" were almost as plentiful in Holland
as "Madonnas" in Umbria. Rembrandt in his composition was simply
adhering to accepted tradition. It is true that he instilled life into
a group hitherto, on other painters' canvases, stiff and perfunctory;
but, though the picture was a wonderful production for a man of his
years, it is not to be ranked with his greatest work.
Commissions now poured in still faster. It was at this time he painted
several of his best known portraits: the "Master Shipbuilder and his
Wife," at present in Buckingham Palace; that simply marvellous old
woman at the National Gallery in London, made familiar to everyone by
countless photographs and other reproductions; the man in ruff and
woman in coif at the Brunswick Museum; and a score of others scarce
less important. With increasing popularity, he was able to command his
own prices, so that only a part of his time was it necessary for him
to devote to the portraits which were his chief source of income.
During the leisure he reserved, he painted biblical subjects, ever his
delight, and made etchings and drawings, today the most prized
treasures in the world's great galleries. As in Leyden, he drew about
him students; a few, notably Ferdinand Bol and Christophe Paudiss,
destined, in their turn, to gain name and fame. Indifferent to social
claims and honors--an indifference the burghers, his patrons, found it
hard to forgive, his one amusement was in collecting pictures and
engravings, old stuffs and jewels, and every kind of _bric-a-brac_,
until his house in Amsterdam was a veritable museum. This amusement
later was to cost him dear.
Four years after the "Lesson in Anatomy" was painted, when he was at
the height of prosperity, in 1634, he married Saskia van Uylenborch,
the Saskia of so many an etching and picture. She was of a good
Frisian family, and brought with her a dowry of no mean proportions.
Rembrandt's marriage made small changes in his way of living. Into the
society, so ready to receive him, he never went, not even now that he
had a wife to introduce. It bored him, and he was no toady to waste
his time fawning upon possible patrons. "When I desire to rest my
spirit, I do not seek honors, but liberty," was his explanation. The
companionship of artists he always welcomed; sometimes he visited the
humbler burghers, whose ways were as simple as his own; sometimes he
sought the humblest classes of all, because of their picturesqueness,
and his contemporaries took him to task for his perverted taste for
low company. The truth is that always he devoted himself solely and
wholly to his art; the only difference, once he was married, was that,
when he sat at his easel all day or over his copperplate, and
sketchbook all evening, Saskia was with him. She shared all his
interests, all his ambitions; she had no will but his. During his
working hours, she was his model, obedient to his call. She never
tired of posing for him, nor he of painting her now simply as Saskia,
now as Delilah feasting with Samson, as Susanna surprised by the
Elders, as the Jewish Betrothed at her toilet. Sometimes he
represented her alone, sometimes with himself at her side; once, in
the famous Dresden portrait, on his knee, as if to proclaim the love
they bore for one another. And he, who could render faithfully the
ways of the beggar, the austere black of the burgher, for himself and
Saskia found no masquerading too gay or extravagant. In inventing
costumes for their own portraits, he gave his exuberant fancy free
play: in gorgeous embroidered robes, waving plumes, and priceless gems
they arrayed themselves, until even the resources of his collection
were exhausted: the same rich mantle, the same jewels appear, and
reappear in picture after picture.
Rembrandt's short married years were happy, though not without their
sorrows. Of Saskia's five children, four died in infancy; the fifth,
Titus, was not a year old when, in 1642, the end came for Saskia, and
Rembrandt, who had just reached his thirty-seventh year, was left in
his great house alone with an infant son and his pupils. Her
confidence in him is shown by her will, in which the inheritance of
Titus is left in the father's charge, though already Rembrandt's
affairs must have given signs of coming complications.
[Illustration: Connoisseurs at Rembrandt's Studio.]
Much of his best work remained to be done, but after Saskia's death
his worldly fortunes and his popularity never again touched such
high-water mark. The reason for this is not far to seek. During all
these years, Rembrandt's powers had matured, his methods broadened,
and his individuality strengthened. With each new canvas, his
originality became more conspicuous. It was not only that the world of
nature, and not imagination, supplied his models. Many of the Dutch
painters now were no less realists than he. It was not only that he
solved certain problems of _chiaro oscuro_, there were men, like
Lievens, who were as eager as he in the study of light and shadow. But
Rembrandt brought to his every experiment an independence that
startled the average man. He painted well because he saw well. If no
one else saw things as he did, the loss was theirs. But he paid for
his keener vision; because he did not paint like other artists, his
methods were mistrusted. To be misunderstood is the penalty of genius.
The picture which, of all his work, is now the most famous, marks the
turn in the tide of his affairs. Shortly before Saskia's death, he had
been commissioned to paint a portrait group of Banning Cock and the
military company which he commanded. These portrait groups of the
military corporations rivalled in popularity the "Lessons in Anatomy."
Each member, or officer, paid to be included in the composition, and,
as a rule, a stiff, formal picture, with each individual posed as for
a photograph, was the result. Rembrandt, apparently, was in nowise
restricted when he undertook the work for Banning Cock, and so,
instead of the stupid, hackneyed arrangement, he made of the portrait
of the company a picture of armed men marching forth to beating of
drums and waving of banners, "The Night Watch," as it must ever be
known--more accurately, "The Sortie of the Company of Banning
Cock"--now in the Ryks Museum of Amsterdam. With the men for whom it
was painted, it proved a failure. The grouping, the arrangement
displeased them. Many of the company were left in deep shadow, which
was not the privilege for which they had agreed to pay good money.
Rembrandt was not the man to compromise. After this many burghers, who
cared much for themselves and their own faces, and not in the least
for art, were afraid to entrust their portraits to him lest their
importance might be sacrificed to the painter's effects. Certain it is
that six years later, in 1648, when the independence of Holland was
formally recognized at the Congress of Westphalia, though Terburg and
Van der Heist celebrated the event on canvas, Rembrandt's services
were not secured. Good friends were left to him--men of intelligence
who appreciated his strong individuality and the great originality of
his work. Banning Cock himself was not among the discontented. A few
leading citizens, like Dr. Tulp and the Burgomeister Six, were ever
his devoted patrons. Artists still gathered about him; pupils still
crowded to his studio; Nicolas Maes, De Gelder, Kneller among them.
Many of his finest portraits--those of Hendrickje Stoffels, of his
son, of himself in his old age, of the Burgomeister Six, above all,
his masterpiece, "The Syndics of the Guild of Clothmakers," now in
Amsterdam; many of his finest etchings, the little landscapes, the
famous "Hundred Guilder Print," "Christ Healing the Sick," belong to
this later period. There was no falling off, but rather an increase,
in his powers, despite the clouds that darkened his years of middle
age.
Of these clouds, the darkest was due to his financial troubles.
Rembrandt had made large sums of money; Saskia's dowry had been by no
means small. But he also spent lavishly. He had absolutely no business
capacity. Once he was accused of miserliness; that he would at times
lunch on dry bread and a herring served as reproach against him; there
was a story current that his pupils would drop bits of paper painted
to look like money in order to see him stoop to pick them up. Both
charges are too foolish to answer seriously. When he was at work, it
mattered little to him what he ate, so that he was not disturbed; who
would not stoop to pick up coins apparently scattered on the floor?
The money he devoted to his collection is sufficient to show how small
a fancy he had for hoarding; upon it a princely fortune had been
squandered. To his own people in Leyden, when times were hard, he had
not been slow to hold out a generous hand. It was because he was not
enough of a miser, because he gave too little heed to business
matters, that difficulties at length overwhelmed him. It is too sad a
story to tell in detail. Perhaps the beginning was when he bought a
house for which he had not the ready money to pay, and borrowed a
large sum for the purpose. More and more involved became his affairs.
In time his creditors grew clamorous, and at length the blow fell
when, in 1657, he was declared bankrupt. The collection of years, the
embroidered mantles and draperies, the jewels with which Saskia had
been so gayly decked, the plumes and furs and gorgeous robes in which
he himself had masqueraded, the armor and plate, the engravings and
pictures which had filled his house--all were sold. He, the master,
had, at the age of fifty-one, to begin life anew as if he were still
but the apprentice.
In the midst of his troubles and losses, Hendrickje Stoffels, whose
portrait hangs in the Louvre, was the friend who cheered and comforted
him. She had been his servant; afterward she lived with him as his
wife, though legally they were not married. To Titus, as to her own
children, she was ever a tender mother, and Titus, in return, seems to
have loved her no less well. In the end, they together took
Rembrandt's business interests into their own hands, the son,
probably, using his inheritance in the enterprise. Renting a house in
their own name, they became his print and picture dealers.
But as time went on, Rembrandt's work brought lower and lower prices,
and he, himself, the last two years of his life, was almost forgotten.
Though he still lived in Amsterdam, the town from which he had so
seldom journeyed, and then never far, he had fallen into such
obscurity, that report now established him in Stockholm as painter to
the King of Sweden, now in Hull, or Yarmouth. In his own family
nothing but sorrow was in store for him. Hendrickje died, probably
about 1664, and he was once more alone; and next he lost Titus, who
then had been married but a few short months.
Fortunately for Rembrandt, he did not long survive them. In 1669, at
the age of sixty-two, his release came. He was buried in the West
Church, quietly and simply. Thirteen florins his funeral cost, and
even this small expense had to be met by his daughter-in-law. When an
inventory of his possessions was taken, these were found to consist of
nothing but his own wardrobe and his painter's tools.
But better than a mere fortune, his work he left as an heirloom for
all time; his drawings, not the least among them without the stamp of
his genius; his prints, still unsurpassed, though it was he who first
developed the possibilities of etching; his pictures, "painted with
light," as Fromentin has said. His subjects he may have borrowed from
the fashions and traditions of the time; certain mannerisms of
technique and arrangement his pupils may have copied. But for all
that, his work belongs to no special school or group; like all the
world's great masterpieces, whether produced in Spain by a Velasquez,
in Venice by a Titian, in England by a Whistler, it stands alone and
supreme.
[Signature of the author.]
WILLIAM HOGARTH
(1697-1764)
[Illustration: William Hogarth.]
"I was born," says Hogarth, in his Memoirs of himself, "in the city of
London, November 10, 1697. My father's pen, like that of many authors,
did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for
myself. As I had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing,
shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and
mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access
to a neighboring painter drew my attention from play, and I was, at
every possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up
an acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learned to draw the
alphabet with great correctness. My exercises when at school were more
remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise
itself. In the former I soon found that blockheads with better
memories could much surpass me, but for the latter I was particularly
distinguished."
To this account of Hogarth's childhood we have only to add that his
father, an enthusiastic and laborious scholar, who, like many of his
craft, owed little to the favor of fortune, consulted these
indications of talent as well as his means would allow, and bound his
son apprentice to a silver-plate engraver. But Hogarth aspired after
something higher than drawing ciphers and coats-of-arms; and before
the expiration of his indentures he had made himself a good
draughtsman, and obtained considerable knowledge of coloring. It was
his ambition to become distinguished as an artist; and not content
with being the mere copier of other men's productions, he sought to
combine the functions of the painter with those of the engraver, and
to gain the power of delineating his own ideas and the fruits of his
acute observation. He has himself explained the nature of his views in
a passage which is worth attention:
"Many reasons led me to wish that I could find the shorter path--fix
forms and characters in my mind--and instead of copying the lines, try
to read the language, and, if possible, find the grammar of the art by
bringing into one focus the various observations I have made, and then
trying by my power on the canvas how far my plan enabled me to combine
and apply them to practice. For this purpose I considered what
various ways, and to what different purposes, the memory might be
applied, and fell upon one most suitable to my situation and idle
disposition; laying it down first as an axiom, that he who could by
any means acquire and retain in his memory perfect ideas of the
subjects he meant to draw, would have as clear a knowledge of the
figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-five letters
of the alphabet and their infinite combinations." Acting on these
principles, he improved, by constant exercise, his natural powers of
observation and recollection. We find him roaming through the country,
now at Yarmouth and again at Queenborough, sketching everywhere. In
his rambles among the motley scenes of London he was ever on the watch
for striking features or incidents; and not trusting entirely to
memory, he was accustomed, when any face struck him as being
peculiarly grotesque or expressive, to sketch it on his thumb-nail, to
be treasured up on paper at his return home.