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$Title{Rembrandt
Chapter IX}
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$Log{See The Painter In Old Age*0008701.scf
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Title:       Rembrandt
Author:      Sharp, Elizabeth A.

Chapter IX

Chapter IX - Summary

     Neglect and misrepresentation - Solitary genius - His mental ancestry -
Before his time, he outstripped the comprehension of his contemporaries -
Authentic records - Huijgens' autobiography - Sandrart's opinion - Rembrandt's
self-portraits are his autobiography - Not embittered by life - The typical
Hollander - His character and mental equipment - Uncompromising as a painter -
Technical perfection - Chiaroscurist - Colourist - Etcher - Appreciation by
John La Farge - Rembrandt the supreme painter of woman and of old age - The
master painter.

     More than a century elapsed after the death of Rembrandt before posterity
awoke to the fact that his genius, both as etcher and as painter, was a potent
factor in the development of northern art, and that it would be well to rescue
his memory from the many legends and hearsay tales that had gathered round his
name, misrepresented his personality, and abused his character.  Recent
critics and historians have with patience and care succeeded in freeing the
memory of this great man from the tarnishing effects of ignorance and neglect,
in presenting a juster estimate of him, based on a reasonable and sympathetic
study of trustworthy records of his environment, work, and influence.  For, in
order to apprehend his greatness it is necessary to study the man who
patiently worked out his ideal through shortcoming and failure, through high
success and potent achievement, to study the conditions and environment of
which he was the outcome.  We have to realise his rare creative imagination,
controlled by innate more than by extraneous forces, that so wrought upon him
that he became an active power in the development of art in Europe, an
influence upon modern painting and etching that is greater to-day than it was
in his own century.

[See The Painter In Old Age: He became an active power in the development of
art in Europe.]

     Regarded from one aspect of his genius Rembrandt, in common with all
great creators, stands strangely solitary; he appears to us without a father,
or kith, or son.  He is Rembrandt simply.  Nevertheless Rembrandt, as with
Shakespeare, is not a brilliant accident, but a logical development.  If
Holland speaks its highest through his genius, his was no solitary utterance.
He had his Marlowe in Frans Hals, his predecessors in Lastman, Elsheimer,
Honthorst, Ravesteijn, van Goyen; his sources in every well of genius,
Venetian, Florentine, Milanese, Spanish, Flemish; his remoter spiritual
ancestry in Lucas van Leyden, Jan Gossaert, the van Eycks, Albrecht Durer. The
sword of Spain shaped him as well as the Dutch Republic; in his veins ran the
blood of the ancient indomitable Hollanders, who had wrenched their country
from the ocean, had conquered the hostility of nature and of foreign invaders,
and had shaken off the tyrannous fetters of Latins and Spaniards. He descended
from that noble congregation of nobles and peasants who had gained
independence of rule and of religious thought after a protracted, bitter
struggle.  Out of this resolute and noble ancestry came Rembrandt, most
typical and most independent, who in himself sums up the potent
characteristics of his race.  So typical was he that he outstripped the
understanding and sympathy of his contemporaries, yet strong enough to be a
universal and supreme genius, one of the great sowers of the world, whose
harvests are reaped by a later generation.  As a painter he lived before his
time; popularity was his for a season, during the period when he was in line
with his contemporaries, before he had developed the idiosyncrasies of his
unique individuality.  He tasted popularity and success, and knew their worth;
he put worldly ambition into the balance with his ambitions as an artist, and
found it wanting.  When the supreme trial of his spirit came; when, like Job,
he suffered the loss of wife, children, home, and worldly possessions; when
his allegiance to his ideal was put to a final test, he was not found wanting.
He testified to his belief in it until his last breath, for in his spiritual
need lay his greatest strength.

     The authentic records of his life are few.  Recent researches in the
Archives of Holland have produced a small amount of documentary facts relating
chiefly to his relationship with an old servant, and to various transactions
connected with his bankruptcy.  The inventory of the sale by auction gives a
glimpse into his home and his interests.  The first written references to
Rembrandt are in the autobiography of Constantine Huijgens, written about
1630, which contains a reference to the master's Leyden period. Certain of his
pupils and friends also wrote about him: Hoogstraten, Sandrart, and
Baldinucci, at dates varying from ten to twenty years after his death,
collections of fact liberally interspersed with hearsay fables.  The following
extract from Sandrart - whose acquaintance with Rembrandt ceased in 1640, when
this German painter left Amsterdam - gives an idea of the way the great
Dutchman was regarded by his contemporaries at the moment of his greatest
popularity, just prior to "The March Out": "It is astonishing that the eminent
Rembrandt, though born in the country, the son of a miller, was nevertheless
raised by Nature to such an excellence in art that by zealous assiduity and
innate inclination he reached so great a height . . . he had no scruples in
combating our rules of art, such as the anatomy, the proportions of human
members, perspective and utility of antique statues, the design of Raphael and
his ingenious works, and also of the Academies so necessary to our profession.
He never feared to oppose himself to these, pretending that one should submit
to nature only and to no other rules; and thus, according to the exigence of a
work, he approved the light or the shadow of the contour of things, even if
that were in contradiction with the horizon, as soon as his idea was satisfied
thereby and it was favourable to his subject.  Thus, as precise contours
should be found correctly in their places, in order to avoid this difficulty
he filled them with black shadows and contented himself only with the general
accord and harmony, in which he excelled.  He knew not only how to render in a
marvellous manner the simplicity of nature, but also to ornament it with
natural effects, by colouration and vigorous relief. . . .  Let it be said in
his praise that he knew how to break colours in a very ingenious and artistic
manner, to repaint his panel with these colours, represent the true and living
simplicity of nature, all the harmony of life, opening thus the eyes of those
who are more users of colour than painters, in that they place one colour
beside another, crudely in a glaring manner, so that they have no likeness to
nature, but resemble patches of colours in a shop drawer.  In his works our
painter showed little light, except in the principal selected place, where he
ingeniously focussed the light and the shadows with care as to the
reflections, so that the shadow was penetrated by the light with great
judgment; his colouration was truly glowing, and in everything he showed fine
spirit."

     The most valuable index to a right understanding of Rembrandt the man and
Rembrandt the painter is a careful study of his work, and in particular of his
long series of remarkable portraits of himself beginning about his
twenty-third year and ending shortly before his death, and by a supplementary
study of the portraits of his mother, of Saskia, Hendrickje, and Titus.  In
these, and in the varying points of view and moods from which he painted and
etched his numerous biblical pictures and drawings, may be traced his
development in his life, in his art, in his home, in his methods of approach
to and handling of his subjects, and his ever-deepening penetration into the
psychology of human nature.  Life was his absorbing study, and light, as the
symbol of life.  His approach to life was twofold.  Primarily as the workman,
skilled and untiring - as were all the painters of Holland - he studied life
from the point of view of his profession, as a scientific craftsman, absorbed
in the problem how best to produce what his brain impelled.  Preoccupied with
chiaroscuro, he studied his characteristic medium of individual expression
till he reached a degree of perfection and variety in technique, unapproached
by his contemporaries and beyond their comprehension.  Primarily as the
workman; but behind the craft and dexterity of the painter, impelling and
inspiring him, was the vision of the seer, whose keen intuition was closely
attuned to the hidden mysteries of the human heart, and penetrated the veils
of flesh to the spirit within.  His curious mind watched the complex weaving
of the web of human emotions; his sympathies were responsive to the suffering
and sorrows of men and women.  Rembrandt's soul was big and elemental, in
intimate touch with nature, with all that was sincere and real in life, with
the potent inner forces that underlie the outward appearances of things.

     In his ceaseless quest to know the mysteries of life, to find therefor
the most forcible methods of expression, one special study was of preminent
value - the study of himself.  "Know thyself" was his guiding rule of life,
though not in the analytic method of self-introspection.  His was a sane
though complex nature.  Rembrandt the seer, thinker, philosopher, watched with
curious interest the growth, the actions, and experiences of Rembrandt the
worker.  He was not embittered by his harassing after-life; suffering and
hardship deepened and broadened his sympathies so that he, more than any
artist, interpreted and gave vibrant expression to the deep pathos of the life
of Christ, and the all-embracing pitying love of the Saviour.  This
interpretation from within of external life was at once his strength and his
limitation.  What was foreign to his nature remained closed to him - for
instance, certain phases of life, social and courtly, were unattractive and
unexpressed by him.  The habits, tastes, and associations of his youth swayed
him throughout life.  Born of upright, hard-working, self-respecting parents,
he always preferred the companionship of workers to that of men of leisure.
His early reputation, his marriage with Saskia, the influences at his command
would have opened the doors of society to him had he craved it; and while,
owing to lack of culture and general knowledge, he could not have commanded
such preferments as those held by Rubens or Velasquez, he could have had at
will the post of chief court painter to the Duchy of Holland, and with it
commensurate wealth and prosperity.  The necessary qualification of submission
to imposed conditions and conventional taste was impossible to him.  A typical
Hollander, his independence of mind, of outlook, of technique, his sturdy,
uncompromising personality, made the ways and atmosphere of court and high
society impossible to him; the very qualities that made him the culmination of
Dutch art and a great pioneer of modern art tended to bring about his material
downfall.

     As a man he was warm-hearted, generous to a fault, careless in
expenditure, lavish on anything connected with his work, simple in tastes and
habits of life, affectionate and home loving.  Educated as an ordinary
burgher, he was no scholar.  He studied life at first hand; the only books he
is known to have studied were the Bible, Josephus, and Albrecht Durer's book
on Proportions.  In 1656 he possessed eight other books of subjects unknown.
His friends were drawn from among professional men, doctors, and theologians
of different sects and religions.  Among painters, portrait-painters and
landscapists attracted him most; he does not seem personally to have known the
court painters Rubens or Van Dyck.  Neither was he attracted by the salons of
the foremost men of letters; either of the great poet Vondel, who equally
ignored the painter, or of Hooft or van Baerl.  Academic subtleties and
artificial conventions were foreign to his direct ingenious nature.  In his
old age a few friends remained to him, but he died in neglect and extreme
poverty.

     As a painter he was no less uncompromising.  When a youth, in Leyden, he
worked with eager assiduity, and soon outstripped his masters.  At the age of
twenty-six he was the equal of men of longer repute, such as Ravesteijn and
Thomas de Keyser.  Keenly observant, he noted all he saw - movement,
expression, grouping, and above all, the play of light and shade in that
northern land where days of sunshine and great clarity alternate with days of
mist, lowering rain-clouds, and grey obscurity.  Equally did he love the long
low lines of land and water beneath that great curving expanse of sky: and the
most personal appeal was the sudden burst of sunshine through a shroud of
clouds; the shaft of piercing light that scattered the flying shadows revealed
with vivid emphasis objects focussed by the light, and intensified the
concealing obscurity.  He was the great poet-painter of light and its
attendant shadows; through these he ever sought to catch Nature's momentary
revelations, whether in landscape or in human beings, and thereby to penetrate
to the haunting environing mysteries of which throughout life all men are more
or less conscious.

     In matters of technique he learnt all that the strong Dutch school had to
teach.  He painted in the "brown" manner of his master Lastman; he studied the
"night effects" of Honthorst, he tested the approved methods of the
"Italianisers," and for a time used conventionally composed landscapes,
architecture, and drapery.  Through engravings, paintings, and drawings he
acquainted himself with the methods of the old masters, particularly of
Mantegna, Michelangelo, and the great Venetians; he copied oriental
miniatures, and figures by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci.  From each and all
he took what most he needed to build up his powerful idiosyncratic style.
Before all things he was the painter; he trained himself to a free, full use
of brush and pigment, and revelled in their handling.  And in proportion as he
gained in mastery, and his hand became subservient to his brain, he was
ceaselessly preoccupied in forcing his materials adequately to express the
grandeur of his ideas, the penetrating quality of his perceptions, so that he
ceased to express himself in one style only, but elaborated, or generalised,
as his subject demanded.  Nevertheless, in the logical growth of his genius,
in the deepening and enriching of his nature, he realised more and more the
great power gained by the application of the law of sacrifice to his art.  In
proportion as his style broadened, and became freer, and simpler in
composition, the more did he eliminate detail, and concentrate his emphasis on
a few striking points.  In portraiture he emphasised the salient
characteristics of his sitter, and presented the character as he, the
psychologist, conceived it.  He worked by contours, not by line; he bathed his
figures in a soft penumbra of light that merged into luminous shadow and deep
obscurity in which all petty detail was lost.

     Second only to his marvellous use of chiaroscuro ranks his power as
colourist.  At first his handling of colour was clear and limpid, then richer,
more bizarre and capricious, yet always dominated by certain carefully chosen
hues; he finally adopted a deep rich harmony of browns, soft reds, and cool
neutral greys that play in a marvellous unity through light and shadow, in
pure colour, in broken tones, used broadly, or in jewel-like juxtaposition, in
a manner akin to later modern methods.

     By common consent, Rembrandt, a superb master in the art of painting, is
supreme as a painter-etcher.  It is in his etchings, therefore, that we must
seek the ultimate proof; in that marvellous series of plates in the shorthand,
trenchant notes of this remarkable genius, Hamerton rightly says, "he owed
success to no peculiarity of method, but to a surpassing excellence of skill."
He enriched and enlarged the possibilities of the needle, refound and
perfected the use of dry-point, and such has been his influence that he is
virtually the founder of the present vigorous English School of
Painter-Etching.

     Mr. John La Farge, the well-known American painter, has admirably
summarised the master's power: "Rembrandt had little of what is called
exquisite taste, nor did he differ in that from those around him.  What is bad
taste in him belongs to others.  He seems to have admired it in men of the
past, but to have had a perfect wisdom which prevented his gathering what he
could not fully use, which he could not test by the life of every day. What is
distinct and beautiful is apparently his alone.  For the building of the great
structure of painting, of the planes and direction of planes, the intersection
of lines, what is called the interior structure, his abundant etchings and
drawings must have made him master.  Even in the paintings, occasionally in
the obscurity of corners, he resorts to those abbreviations which his etchings
and drawings show, a manner of starting only a few points which the mind fills
in.

     "Perhaps, after all, the etchings and drawings tell us more about
himself, about his completeness of study, his intensity of perception, and the
extraordinary feeling and sympathy which separates him from all other artists.
There he could - for he was Rembrandt - throw away the greater part of his
armour of art.  Perhaps in the drawings in which he worked entirely for
himself, we see still more intimately the mind of the master.  But they are so
subtle, they appeal to such a perception of nature, such a sympathy with the
expression of the soul, that they require in the mind that looks at them a
sympathy that all cannot give.  At my age and after long experience I can say
so.  As a younger man I only guessed it."

     Neither is everyone competent to understand fully all his superb
portraits; for they can be appreciated only in accordance with the acuteness
of our own perceptions.  The most modern quality in his portraiture is the
beauty and reverential tenderness with which he paints old age; and his
understanding of and sympathy with woman.  For, woman in herself, the distinct
personality, considered neither as a type, a symbol, nor in relationship to
man or child; woman, whose inner life is a distinct growth with its own
experiences - in short, woman as an independent factor in life - had not been
painted till Rembrandt held the brush.  Rarely, in the present day even, has
she been painted with equal comprehension and sympathy. Girlhood attracted him
in his later life for its vigour of young life.  Early womanhood is typified
in his many portraits of Saskia.  The final revelation lies in his portrayal
of mature and aged women, touched and marked by the tragedy or pathos of life:
quiet faces, lined and wrinkled by Time's fingermarks, with sorrow and
suffering on brow and eyes revealing strength and weakness of character -
though weakness of character had no appeal for this Titan - wise eyes and
thoughtful brows of those who had suffered in silence when their men folk were
active in warfare; active brains of women who had handled the reins of a wise
domestic authority and guided the lives under their roof to active, important
issues.

     Rembrandt, in his handling of old age, is as truly the spiritual ancestor
of his compatriot Josef Israels, the modern artist, who of all living painters
has conveyed the deepest vibration of the pathos of old age, as with his
biblical compositions he is of Von Uhde, the modern artist, who of all others
has the most simply and naturally interpreted anew, as a peasant interpreting
his own folk, scriptural events, and biblical allegories.

     From the first Rembrandt was a profound student of humanity, and in
whatever he did he was quick to see and express what of spiritual suggestion
obtained in the subject.  Throughout his life his most frequent study was
himself; of his rugged face, with its massive contours, its dauntless
expression, and keenly observant dark eyes.  With brush and needle he has kept
a record of himself from his early portrait at the Hague, through triumphant
manhood, through years of harassed trouble, to his sorrowful, lonely old age,
portrayed probably because of a natural and passionate curiosity that was more
of an impersonal than a personal kind.  This marvellous series of portraits -
to be found scattered through all the important European galleries and in
several private collections - is of the utmost importance, for not only do
they demonstrate the growth and development of the artist as observer,
craftsman, colourist - in a word, of the master painter - but they are
convincing life-chapters which contemporary and later records can serve only
to illustrate.

     The man and his work and his genius are closely wrought.  In Rembrandt
there was till the day of his death an eager, dauntless, and insatiable spirit
of life.  In the last painting that left his easel there is the power and
promise of assured and inexhaustible mastery.  And to-day, to this hour, his
influence is that of the only "younger generation" which long prevails - the
eternal "younger generation," the enduring youth of genius.