REMBRANDT

It is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true one,--and the

saying is welcome to surprise the academic and conventional--that if

the painted work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his drawings

were unknown, the three hundred etchings that he wrought during some

forty years of labour would assert for him, amongst all capable judges,

a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now admitted to occupy.

It is not that in saying this I would underrate for a moment the skill

of the pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who plays with

subtle hue, the master of the material which is applied to prepared

canvas; but that if one asks oneself, ‘What are the qualities, really,

which in any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it his

particular and permanent station?’ one finds shortly that one’s answer

has to be the following, or something like it: ‘The qualities are an

alert freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an individual vision

of the world, and the knowledge how best to wield the instrument by

which that vision is expressed.’

In the case of a writer, language is the instrument, and Sterne’s or

Molière’s perception and sensitiveness are made evident in words.

In the case of a pictorial artist, paint may be the instrument, or

water-colour, or the humble but expressive pencil--or the instrument

may be that which was Rembrandt’s more than any other’s: it may be the

needle of the etcher.

I hope that, in my enumeration of the qualities of intellect and

craftsmanship that make for excellence in creative Literature and in

pictorial Design, I have cut the ground from under the feet of those

who advocate the work of craftsmen merely--those who consider that in

_technique_ lies the end as well as the beginning of success. Even to

the most casual of the students of the Arts--to the most superficial

observer of the means whereby the several performers may produce

their effects, in story, drawing, print--it can scarcely be necessary

to say that a command of _technique_ must be demanded by the severe

and accurate judge. But the genius of a man of the first order--a

Goethe, Coleridge, Balzac, Rembrandt, Turner--is, as it seems to me,

misunderstood altogether, if the flexibility and freshness of spirit

and the originality of vision are not remembered and praised when we

praise too the excellent command of technical means. 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; an artist who, with masculine

perception of the import of material things, was alive, constantly and

keenly, also to the concerns of the spirit; a judge of character, who

understood and who dissected all that he portrayed; a man of feeling,

who rendered to the full the pathos of age, of suffering, and of

Death--who somehow rendered also, as in the wistful portrait of the

Prince of Orange, the incommunicable pathos of Youth.

Over all Rembrandt’s work, from the beginning to the end of it, as much

on canvas as in drawing, as much in drawing as in etching, there reigns

an absolute sincerity. It was himself that he expressed. Warped by

no prejudice, modified by no fashion, his art, during the generation

and a half in which he did his joyful labour--in the midst of personal

triumph, in the midst, too, of personal disaster--recorded his own

unaffected perception of the outward world and his own profound vision

of the souls and the experiences of men. To study his work, therefore,

is, if we have the wit, to have the opportunity to glean from it that

which it is open to us to glean always from the greatest Classics--the

richer harvest of a familiarity not alone with technical achievement,

but with the great, deep way of apprehending Life and the world.

From youth to age, with art delightful and supreme, Rembrandt expressed

himself in Etching. One of his first prints--the subject known to

many by Wilson’s title of it, ‘Head of a Woman lightly etched’--is

the earliest of his known portraits of his mother; and that shows

already mastery of character and mastery of line, as the lady, with the

pardonable vanity of the handsome, the pardonable self-appreciation

of one who was scarcely less a woman of the world because she was

_bourgeoise_ by station, smiles her sagacious, kindly, genial smile,

and lives with Whistler’s ‘Portrait of his Mother,’ with Holbein’s

‘Erasmus,’ with Latour’s pastels that glow sober yet vivid on the

walls of the Museum of Saint-Quentin. It is a sketch, and consummate.

His very last print--so it is generally accepted--is that ‘Woman

with the Arrow’ which, unless the place be given to the print often

called ‘_Négresse couchée_,’ is the most tolerable of his nudities.

It is not faultless in draughtsmanship; or, if it is faultless in

draughtsmanship, then how deficient was the model in perfection of

form! But, in a fine impression--and in Etching, if the impression

be not fine, the work does not exist--how alive is the figure! The

flesh, how supple! The pose--the grace of the faulty. The light, how

glowing, and the shade, how velvety! You forgive--it may be rather

that you scarcely notice--the inexplicable mixture of realism with

the classic. The side of a bed, the young thing sitting on it: Degas

might have conceived the figure thus. But it is not pure realism, for

she holds an arrow--suggests some light allegory, as much, save for

her imperfections, as some nudity of Titian’s or Tintoret’s--just that

touch of the Classic, that one remove from the actual, Rembrandt’s

tribute to an art inspired by higher thought, by fancy more elegant,

than any that it was the privilege, generally, of the art of Amsterdam

to show.

Between that early etching, the first of his mother’s portraits,

and this final one, his last record of the body, to which he has

imparted a slimmer charm than the charm that belonged unquestionably

to Hendrickje Stoffels, the young and sympathetic companion of his

later years--recorded, opulent and somewhat sensuous, in the great

Edinburgh picture,--the range of Rembrandt, in about three hundred

prints, is almost inconceivably great. Several of his plates, and these

not really the least attractive, are, like the rare sheet of studies,

with the portrait of Rembrandt himself (No. 82 in the catalogue of Mr.

Middleton-Wake), so to put it, thumb-nail sketches as he passed upon

his way and was struck and interested by this or that countenance, this

or that gesture. Many deal with Sacred Subjects, and invariably with

a directness, a homeliness, one might say almost, that is his alone.

It would have been impossible so to have conceived the incidents of

Bible Story if Rembrandt had not so profoundly believed in them. The

conventional and perfunctory are altogether banished. And though, for

reasons that the present place would not perhaps be quite the fittest

for dwelling on, the Sacred Subjects of this great Dutch master do

not attract or charm as the portraits and the landscapes do, there is

yet in them a world of material for serious study: in them invention

and imagination enrich a treatment fortified already by closeness of

observation. His mind is stored; his spirit is devout. In the ‘Death

of the Virgin’ he takes advantage of tradition--gives us therefore

not only St. Joseph moved at his loss, St. Luke with hand on wrist as

feeling the pulse of the dying, but (as Mr. Middleton-Wake reminds us)

a company of Apostles, brought miraculously, legend says, from distant

missions; and, above, are angels and cherubim. A religious composition

better known to the public, is the ‘Christ healing the Sick,’ or, as

it is called often, ‘The Hundred-Guilder Print.’ It got that latter

name because, during that portion of his life in which Rembrandt was

popular, the then substantial sum of a hundred guilders was wont to

be obtained for it, when, out of Rembrandt’s studio, an impression of

it was sold. Its intense reality and homely pathos--the qualities in

it which have influenced, so greatly, later and now living etchers,

like Legros and William Strang--gave it immediate value. And since

those days a fine impression has always had its price, though it

should be said here that the difference in money value, established

more particularly in our own generation, between a fine impression

of the most rare ‘First State’ of this plate and the less rare but

often as desirable ‘Second,’ is a fantastic difference, dependent

only upon relative difficulty of acquisition. Thank goodness, even

now a twenty-pound note will buy sometimes a most desirable Rembrandt

etching. A couple of hundred guineas is required to buy a fine

impression of the Second State of the ‘Hundred Guilder’; and of a First

State, could it come into the market, there is every reason for knowing

that two thousand pounds would be about the ransom.

In various branches of his practice, Rembrandt’s fame is about equally

dependent on picture, drawing, and original print; but I take leave

to ask the reader to impress upon his mind that in one branch, the

branch of Landscape, that is not so at all. Lord Lansdowne’s ‘Mill,’

a famous landscape at Cassel, and a few other landscapes scattered

about collections private and public, could not, however undeniable

their art and however complete their charm, secure for Rembrandt that

exalted place amongst the makers of Landscape which the drawings give,

and which is given yet more by the etchings. It may be asked, naturally

enough, ‘Why were Rembrandt’s painted landscapes so few--his mastery

being so great?’ The answer is, that like our own Gainsborough’s, a

century later, they were painted, most of them, for his own personal

delight. The painted landscape of Rembrandt could not have been

warmly appreciated by a generation that made difficult the life of

Hobbema, and that extended welcome less to Wynants and De Koninck than

to the Dutchmen who had become Italianised in theme and treatment.

How, then, about the drawings and the etchings? Well, the truth is,

with these it mattered little. The drawings were generally masterly

brief studies. In the case of the etchings even, hours, not weeks,

for the most part--a day and not a month--had been bestowed on the

performance. For Rembrandt, with at least some other sources of income,

it was enough to have had the delight of execution; and then, here

and there a friend--the Burgomaster Six perhaps, or Uytenbogaert, the

Receiver-General to the States of Holland--would want an impression

or so. There was the little sketch ‘Six’s Bridge’--a decisive,

plain-sailing, by no means particularly picturesque record of the

wooden way whose name is associated with Rembrandt’s lifelong friend.

There is the ‘Goldweigher’s Field’--his estate, rather: the estate

of Uytenbogaert, lying a few miles from Amsterdam; its pavilion and

ornamental water, the surrounding lands, the modest, heathy uplands,

the trees and towers, a bird’s-eye view, a very panorama of slightly

undulating plain that stretches to the Zuyder Zee. Of Rembrandt’s

etched landscapes--which are rare generally--this is one of the rarer,

one of the more important. Art like that does not captivate at just the

first glance at it; but, with knowledge, comes a deep appreciation of

the vision and the chronicle.

Two other landscapes I should wish to name as at least the equals

of this one, and both of them, it may be, are easier to receive,

easier for the little-trained eye to enjoy promptly. One is the

‘Large Landscape with a Cottage and Dutch Hay-barn’; the other is the

‘Landscape with a Ruined Tower.’ The first is a record of sunshine;

the second, of the more dramatic weather that threatens storm. The

first is the more intricate. Little in keeping with the fashions of our

moment, in the art of landscape, is it to present within the limits of

a single composition a view so varied and so elaborately wrought. But

Rembrandt, even more than Turner, could achieve without any loss of

unity of impression the presentation or suggestion of every fact of the

scene; and the piece remains ‘modern,’ though a Classic. The ‘Landscape

with a Ruined Tower’--broad, decisive, concentrated--is, in a sense, an

anticipation of the method of Constable: the interest lying less in

formal elegance of line or placid light than in the strong realisation

of the forces of Nature--a vivid broad illumination and an ominous

shadow, and the expression of these exalting somehow the features of

an everyday land, as emotion transfigures a face. The ‘tower,’ the

close observer may inform me--thinking of the title--is not ‘ruined’;

for here is its domed roof. Yes, but the domed roof is in the First

State only, and that is so rare that it is doubtful if it had ever been

examined by the cataloguer who bestowed upon the etching the name by

which it is still known.

Although the etched Landscape of Rembrandt, in its singular union of

simplicity and learning, in the close, uncustomary alliance of Style

with personal impression, stands well-nigh alone, and suffices as the

basis of a reputation as great as Titian’s, Claude’s, or Poussin’s--and

one which now, with only slight and temporary declension, has endured

for two hundred years--we have yet to give consideration to his triumph

in that branch of Art with which, in the mind of the average educated

person, he is more generally identified--I mean Portraiture: which

means to some the taking of superficial likeness, and to some the

revelation of character.

For this reason and that, every industrious and thoughtful, as well as

every careless, student of pictorial Art, has his own favourites in

Portraiture: there is our pride in Reynolds, our joy in Gainsborough,

our wonder at the magic of Velasquez, our steady confidence in truth

when Holbein is the draughtsman, our grave and brooding satisfaction

over the august portraiture of the Venetians. But Rembrandt unites

men’s suffrages--carries with him even those who admire most warmly

this painter’s unswerving veracity and that one’s fluent grace. And as

one thinks what was the human material which furnished elements for

the creations of Rembrandt--the old men and the women and the youths

of Amsterdam--one thinks all the more, how exalted was the vision,

and yet how firmly with his feet on earth stood the man to whom it

was vouchsafed! Over and over again, the needle, as the brush, of

Rembrandt, has been occupied with a face which had no beauty--at all

events no formal beauty--that we should desire him. He has given it

interest and dignity--dignity without a touch of the artificial or

pretentious; the dignity of the individual soul in its best hours.

He did this more or less at all times, but he did it more markedly

in his later time than in his earlier; for, wonderful as was the

completeness of Rembrandt’s art within its self-set limits in even his

earliest time, he had, in common with most of the greatest of creative

and critical intellects, that gift of long development, of steady

progression. Rembrandt was no juvenile prodigy. As time passed, as

experience gathered, as misfortunes saddened--at all events in certain

lonely hours--the spirit of a man of whom upon the whole indeed it may

be said, he

‘rose distinct

Above slave-sorrows, to his chariot linked,’

Rembrandt’s command of the instruments of his employment became only

more complete, if also his method was more summary. More and more

sonorous were the notes he uttered, and the _vox humana_ stop, which is

absent in colder craftsmen, sounded with increased frequency and more

assured appeal.

Of course in Portraiture, though he succeeds always, he succeeds

best when his themes are the best. With the exception of ‘Clément de

Jonghe,’ with the exception of ‘Lutma,’ with the exception perhaps of

‘Jan Six’--etched by him many years before he wrought the noble painted

portrait which is owned still by a descendant of its sitter (Mr. Six

van Hillegom of Amsterdam)--Rembrandt is most profoundly interesting,

most penetrating, most sympathetic, when it is this or that member

of his own family who serves as his model. Once or twice at least he

portrayed the features of his son; several times those of his mother,

whom in the ‘Mère de Rembrandt au voile noir’ he records in an hour

of austere and guarded meditation, as in the ‘Head of a Woman lightly

etched’ he records her in the relaxation of social ease. Many times, in

drawing, print, and picture, he portrayed his wife, Saskia--in moods

that seemed to vary with his own: now perched upon his knee, in the

Dresden canvas of almost aggressive buoyancy and self-satisfaction; now

demure and pretty, in a Berlin drawing; now radiant and almost stately

in the ‘Great Jewish Bride,’ so it is said--though I find least witness

of her here--now the healthy, blameless animal of Mrs. Joseph’s golden

canvas; now the sick, worn woman, with vitality gone, eye dimmed, life

surely ebbing, of the lovely and pathetic little etching which Sir

Seymour Haden was, I think, the first to christen ‘The Dying Saskia.’

But oftener than he depicted any member of his family--and oftener much

than he thought fit to give expression to the cordial youthful face and

ample contours of Hendrickje Stoffels, the agreeable consolation of

his age--he had recourse to his own countenance. In the great series

of what the Germans call ‘self-portraits’ we may trace the changes in

his air from spirited youth to burdened years. To-day he is comely,

clean, and fit. To-morrow, after a night of revelry, it may be--for

from few human experiences did Rembrandt, any more than Goethe, stand

aside--he is haggard and ‘to pieces.’ Then he is proud in cap and

feather; he buckles on his sword. Or, aged a little, he paints himself

in loose gown, palette in hand, it may be, and mahl-stick at his side.

Then, heavy and stooping, baggy below the eyes, with mouth tender yet

saddened, trouble has come upon him from all the ends of the earth.

He totters, scarcely yet irresolute, but weighed down certainly by

years and sorrows; his wife long gone; his fame obscured; his means

narrow; and, save for the sustaining power of his art, and one hopes,

at least, for the consolation of one deep affection, anxiety in all his

hours. We will not leave him like this--though like this we find him

in Lord Iveagh’s immortal picture, and in one or two representations

of kindred character in Vienna and at St. Petersburg. We will leave

him happy in his drawing. It is an etching of scarcely surpassable

interest, existing in many ‘States’--a print to be avoided in the

later, which are flat and expressionless; to be cherished in all the

earlier, of which the first is rarest and most vigorous. See its

slashing directness. With blow to left and blow to right, so to say it,

on the copper, he hacks his way triumphantly and speedily to his goal.

He is the master of all methods. Here, as in so much besides, he has

been broad and rapid. In the ‘Burgomaster Six’--which has something of

the quality of a mezzotint--how tender and how slow! In the ‘Clément de

Jonghe’--the printseller of Amsterdam--how large yet subtle! He is the

master of many an instrument. We can apply to him the phrase, and the

implied eulogy, of Robert Browning--he ‘blows through brass,’ but he

can ‘breathe through silver.’

(_Pall Mall Magazine_, December 1898.)