motive be as impersonal as Hals’s. The latter’s point of view was objective, intent on seeing and rendering the facts of things as they confronted him; but, unlike many objective painters whose technique presents merely a correct and efficient record, because their own mind is little more than a mirror, reflecting mechanically what is in front of it, Hals’s mind was an active vitalizer of the impressions that it received. The distinction corresponds pretty completely to the difference which may exist between two lecturers. One will give a careful presentation of his subject which we listen to with interest, and, if we have confidence in his ability, with a willingness to accept his conclusions; but another will do more. Because of the gusto with which he attacks his subject, the genial, expansive outlook with which he views it, the broadly human spirit in which he treats it, even because of the tone of voice and gesture of body with which he lends color and warmth to his remarks, he will so stimulate his audience that they cease to be mere listeners. Their own brains are at work; they become active participators in the train of thought. It is in this kind of way that Hals’s technique affects one. It is the product of so ample and genial an outlook, so teems with gusto, and manifests itself with such an assurance of conviction and so vigorously facile a style, that it stimulates the imagination. In the presence of his portraits one is no passive spectator, but aroused to an activity of appreciation.

I have spoken of imagination; and I mean to imply a twofold exercise thereof: that Hals himself exhibited imagination and kindles it also in the spectator. To some people it may seem to be an abuse of the word to speak of imagination, in the case of an artist so content to be occupied with the objective traits of his subject as Hals was. But they overlook the fact that, while an artist may exercise no imagination in the choice of a subject, he may display a great deal in the rendering of it. He may not give reins to his imagination as Rembrandt did, peering below the surface of things, exploring the hidden recesses of the human soul; he may, on the contrary, be satisfied to be an able craftsman, handling the material presented to him, intent only on giving to it form and character; yet, even so, he will exhibit what one may call a technical imagination. And it is precisely this which characterizes the technique of Hals. It appears in the arrangement of his compositions, especially in the group-portraits, where it takes the form of a superior kind of inventiveness, which is but a phase of imagination. This gift abounds in the corporation pictures at Haarlem. The problem of disposing so many figures in such a way that each shall have its due share of individual emphasis, and yet that the whole group may have, on the one hand, a naturalness and spontaneity of suggestion, and, on the other, a reasonable amount of artistic unity, was one to try to its utmost capacity an artist’s inventiveness. Hals was the first to solve it; and, while other artists profited by his example, none could attain to the completeness of his success. You may be thinking of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Cloth Guild; but the latter’s composition contains only six figures, whereas in Hals’s masterpiece, The Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew, there are fourteen. For a just comparison you should rather choose Van der Helst’s great composition in the Rijks Museum, The Banquet of the Civic Guard, an amazing example of inventiveness, but lacking in the suppleness, spontaneity, and gusto that Hals exhibits.

But the latter’s imagination is not alone displayed in the management of intricate compositions. It is displayed also in the treatment of each figure and in his pictures of single individuals; manifesting itself in two ways, both in the way he has seen his subject and in the way he has rendered it. And first for the imaginative quality of his vision. It is concerned with externals, or at least with traits of character that lie close to the surface; but with what an alertness it has observed the idiosyncrasy of each person, and how completely it has comprehended it! This is more than objective clear-sightedness; it implies a capacity to reconstruct the retinal impression, and to clothe it with actual living consciousness, that involves a marked exercise of the creative faculty of imagination. If you still doubt it, again compare Hals with Van der Helst, next to himself the most accomplished of the painters of corporation pictures, and the verdict concerning the latter’s work will surely be that by comparison it is prosy. At least that is the word that seems to me to express the difference, and it conveys the suggestion that the work is merely objective, unvitalized by the imaginative faculty.

Further, observe how Hals treats the costumes and the accompaniments of still-life in his pictures. He has not merely seen them; he has felt them, realized in his imagination their distinctive character and their relation to the whole impression. For those were brave days in Holland, succeeding the expiration of the truce; an underlying bravery of spirit and an external bravery of demeanor and manners characterized the life of the burghers. It was not for nothing that their trade had absorbed the finest weavers and artificers in the world; they decked themselves and their families in the costliest fabrics of their looms and loaded their tables with objects of fine plate. These things were more to them than vanities; they were the expression of the proud preëminence they had won. Now it is the spirit and the meaning of all this that Hals was so skilful in rendering. Van der Helst’s displays of costume rather suggest that “fine feathers make fine birds,” while the suggestion of Hals is of fine fellows appropriately bedecked with finery. His imagination, in fact, had caught the enthusiasm of the time and discovered its interpretation. And, further still, apart from the relation which this beauty of display bore to the temper of the times, it needs imagination in an artist to interpret the beauty of a fabric or an object of still-life. Mere imitation of its appearance is not sufficient. Such merely represents the appearance; it does not interpret it. The distinction will be clear to any one who is a student of photography and has seen the still-life studies of flowers and fruit and glassware by Baron A. de Meyer. In them the crude notion of merely representing appearances has been superseded by the desire to make the picture express the enthusiasm which their beauty has inspired. The result is an interpretation of the sentiment of beauty. Such, too, is Hals’s rendering of the silks and velvets and lawn ruffs, the dishes and

goblets, the fruit and wine, banners and weapons. He has not only seen these things, he has felt their beauty; discovered, in fact, by an act of imagination, the sentiment of beauty they involve.

And here I may add, in the way of anticipation, that, if a person is dull to the sentiment of beauty that things inanimate may suggest, he is not going to proceed very far toward an appreciation of the art of Holland in the seventeenth century, for it was largely concerned with the beauty that is inherent in material things. If he is conscious of nothing more in the rendering of costumes and accessories with which these pictures abound than the cleverness of material representation, he will soon tire of the study, for the skilfulness is so frequently repeated, and its very repetition will fatigue. He may begin by exclaiming: “How wonderfully that sash, this velvet gown, or what not is painted!” but, unless he can go on and share the enthusiasm for beauty that inspired and assured the artist’s skill; if, in a word, his own imagination cannot conspire with the imagination of the artist, he will very shortly be an exceedingly tired student of Holland art.

So far we have discussed the imagination with which Hals observed his subjects; it remains to note how imagination was involved in the rendering of them. Really the two processes, the mental and the manual, are inextricably united, for it was the way he felt his subject that determined the impression he received of it, and the impression itself that suggested the mode of rendering it. Yes, he was an Impressionist. The term, as we know, is modern, dating from about 1871, but the idea involved in it has been derived from the example of Frans Hals and of his great contemporary Velasquez, with whom, however, so far as is known, he had no possible chance of conferring. These two original minds, separated by distance and the difference of race and by the barrier of hostilities that precluded any acquaintance with each other or each other’s work, were nevertheless kindred geniuses who simultaneously discovered a new way of seeing and rendering their subject. It did not survive their generation, for the artists of the next century turned again to Italy, and Hals and Velasquez were practically forgotten, until in the early sixties of the nineteenth century Edouard Manet rediscovered Velasquez, and the study of him led to the recognition of Hals, so that both became an example and inspiration to modern art. It produced, in fact, a revolution in the artist’s point of view and method of painting, and the principle involved was dubbed Impressionism.

Some confusion still exists as to what is implied by this term. Many, for example, having heard that Claude Monet is an Impressionist and observing that he covers his pictures with little dabs of paint, suppose that in this consists Impressionism. Others of wider observation, having found themselves puzzled and even outraged by the vagaries in paint that are committed under cover of Impressionism, have concluded that Impressionism is something which, in the words of the late Lord Dundreary, “No fellah can understand”; no layman, at least; and, according to their temperament, they either foam at the mouth with disgust of Impressionism or regard it as a comparatively harmless form of lunacy. In either case they miss the fact that Impressionism has become a vital principle of modern thought, expressing itself not only in the arts: in painting, sculpture, literature, play-writing, acting, music, and dancing, but also in modern methods of education, and, by a natural extension of the idea involved, even in the modern attitude toward matters of criminology and sanitation. These, however, are modern evolutions from the single, simple principle involved in the Impressionism of Hals and Velasquez. Before discussing this, let us note what is surely interesting and extremely suggestive, namely, that both the rudimentary principle, as it appears in Hals, and the efflorescence to which it attained in the nineteenth century were contemporary with a signal advance in the growth of the scientific spirit. It is, in fact, of the latter that Impressionism is a phase.

With Hals, as with modern Impressionists, it represents a more natural way of seeing. When the eye is directed toward an object, it sees the latter as a whole; it perceives some details and fails to perceive others; it automatically selects and eliminates. There is another way of seeing, as when the object is kept for a long time under observation, and the eye travels over it at leisure and exhaustively examines every part. Of a picture that records the results of this way of seeing, we exclaim, “How realistic!” And so in a sense it is; but, on the other hand, we know that it does not really represent the way in which we see things in every-day life. What our eye usually records is not an inventory of details, but a summarized impression of a personality; and the more vivid the impression, the less likely is it to be distracted by a number of details. We are impressed by the general significance of the personality, and note only those details that most contribute to it; the details that are themselves most significant and characteristic. Such was Hals’s way of seeing his subject; and, if it resulted in a very vivid impression in the case of an individual portrait, how much more when it embraced the complicated impression of a group! The latter, as a matter of fact, does include more than any eye could possibly embrace in a single act of vision; but this was a necessary concession to the difficulties of the problem, which was to effect a compromise between the conflicting claims, on the one hand, of the group as a whole, and, on the other, of each of the individual units composing it. Admitting the need of this reconciliation of opposites, we can scarcely hesitate to acknowledge the vividness of the total impression and the no less vivid impression of each one of its component units.

When we analyze the principle of this method of seeing, it is found to be that of relativity. In selecting this or rejecting that the artist has been guided by its more or less of value in relation to the whole. The composition, in fact, is an adjusted balance of varieties of values; an interlocked scheme of mutual relations; shrewdly calculated to assert the significance of the whole without undue impairment of the varying character of the parts. And this principle, thus applied to the whole composition, operates also in the treatment of every part. Whether it be the folds of a sash, the modeling of an arm in a sleeve, the substance and set of a ruff, or the construction of a face, each is attained by observing the relation of the values. In this case, however, one uses values, not to measure the amount of relative importance that they play in the general scheme, but in the technical sense of the amount and quality of light reflected from the several facets of the surface. Hals chose to view his subject in a diffused light that permitted practically no shadows, but reduced the whole to a tissue of more light and less light, of higher and lower values. While this sounds like the method of the modern plein-air painters, which has been evolved from the example of Hals and Velasquez, it is not quite the same; for Hals does not represent the light as being independent of the figures and enveloping them, but still adheres to the old convention of making the figure itself a center of light, as, for instance, a lamp is. Thus in one of his groups, where a window appears at the back, the light beyond it is of lower value than that which illumines the figures; and, in another case, a landscape presents a darker background. But, having adopted this convention, he adheres to the logic of it, and, like the modern painter who has followed his example, but with the difference that he tries to represent the effect of plein-air, models his forms in colored light by the juxtaposition of the various values.

And it is characteristic of Hals that in doing this he overlooks minute distinctions of value, seizing only the most salient ones and laying them on the canvas with a broad brush and a remarkable decision. Thus his technique presents a bold and vigorous generalization of the values; often conspicuous for what it omits, as when he indicates the back of a hat or a ruff by a flat tone that is almost uninterrupted by contrasting tones. It is a technique, in fact, that relies very largely on suggestion; hence its stimulating character, for one’s own imagination is invited to assist in the illusion.

Nor does this suggestive generalization involve the slovenliness or crudeness of brushwork that often disfigures the modern impressionistic picture. While a canvas by Hals should be viewed from some distance off, it does not offend at close range. On the contrary, one can enjoy the orderliness and finesse, the result of fluency and assurance, that the brushwork reveals, the ensemble having that quality of perfected craftsmanship which characterizes the whole Holland School. And, though Hals is scarcely to be classed as a colorist, the compositions being decked with color rather than interwoven of color, yet his color has a distinctly positive charm. For he takes so frank a delight in local colors, whether gravely or gaily sumptuous, preserves their purity of hue and invests them with luminousness. His color-schemes, too, have this distinction, that, for all their bravery of show, they are never commonplace and seldom without a clear suggestion of virility.

A unique opportunity of tracing the development of his style is presented by the series of corporation pictures at Haarlem. I will not attempt a detailed description of each, but rather recall the impressions that were jotted down in the presence of them. The earliest, then, is The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, dated 1616, when Hals was thirty-two. How magnificent the display of still-life, the table-cloth, fruit, dishes, and goblets painted with such skill and evident delight; what a vigorous enthusiasm is manifested in the treatment of the uniforms, mostly black, and the scarfs of white and crimson silk! Each head is strongly characterized, and so are the hands. The heads are so disposed that they form a band across the picture, below which another band contains the more sprinkled arrangement of the hands. Two of the latter, close together near the center of the table, form the nucleus from which the lines of the composition radiate. The composition, in fact, is quite formal, and the heads, one notices, are lighted from the side and constructed of shadow as well as light; meanwhile no light comes in from the window at the back, through which appears a landscape, less vividly lighted than the scene indoors. Indeed, the whole arrangement is still influenced by the arbitrary devices of the studio; nor does one fail to note that the space occupied by the heads is flattened almost into one plane, as a modern photographic group is apt to be.

These points are emphasized by a comparison with Nos. 117 and 118, painted eleven years later. The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, this time, is presented in an interior without a window visible. The whole apartment seems to be filled with lighted air; the heads are no longer so obviously arranged to secure a contrast of dark against light and light against dark; they are evenly illuminated, and take their places justly in their several planes. For the planes here extend farther back, and the composition is more varied, with less suggestion of studied artfulness. Moreover, the treatment of the costumes has become finer, the blacks especially yielding a variety of delightful grays that give increased sparkle and animation to the color-scheme. The flesh parts also are more luminous, and reveal a greater fluency of brushwork, as if the artist had “got there” with more ease and rapidity. The effect of all this is very arresting and satisfying until one examines The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew.

The latter belongs to the same year, 1627; but the artist has surpassed himself. Here the faces literally scintillate with animation of color. Those of the other picture are discovered by comparison to be less illuminated; after all, they have been modeled to some extent with shadow, and the flesh in parts is inclined to be greenish gray or drab. The hands also in the latter picture have more expression and a more individual characterization, while the gestures are more natural and spontaneous. The composition, too, is at once more varied and more coördinated. Again, as in both the previous pictures, the nucleus of it is a hand; in this case the center of two diagonal axes. But, while the design is geometrical, the naturalness of the grouping is quite extraordinary in its mingling of ease and propriety. Further, the color masses are more inventively arranged; their spotting is more effectively distributed, and the gaiety of the color is prolonged into the lower part of the composition. This picture commemorates the banquet given by the corps on the eve of its departure to the siege of Hasselt and Mons. Six years later Hals painted a Reunion of the same corps, though only one member appears in both scenes. It is Captain Johan Schatter, who in the earlier picture is seated in front of the table, facing left. He occupies the same position in the later group,

but is now standing and looking over his shoulder toward the spectator. He has exchanged his costume of black and golden brown, with its scarf of rose and white, for a snuff-colored jerkin, pearl-gray under-coat, and a sky-blue sash and feather; and the difference is reflected in the superior delicacy of color that distinguishes the later picture.

In this Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew the corporation pictures reach their highest water-mark. The background, however, of brownish-olive foliage, showing through an opening some red roofs against the sky, is dry in color and lacking in luminosity. The heads, in consequence, do not present the same suggestion of being enveloped in light as those in the previous picture. In what, then, does the superiority of this acknowledged masterpiece consist? Comparing it with the earlier examples, we discover that its color-scheme of blue and amber, while less resplendent, is more choice, delicate, and subtle, and that the loveliness of color has been made contributory to the characterization of the figures. This is scarcely to be appreciated from the photographic reproduction, but in presence of the original one has a lively sense of it. There is no suggestion of the display of color having been considered by itself or as itself an end; the tonal harmony so accords with the harmony of expression that characterizes the separate individualities of the group that tone and expression are in complete unity. Again, as a result or, more probably, a cause of this harmony of expression, there is a complete simplicity of attitude and gesture. “What shall I do with my hands?” Any one who has stage-managed amateur theatricals knows how frequently this question is asked by the performers. In nine cases out of ten the best advice, though the hardest to follow, is to do nothing. It is just the fact that the members of this group are so admirably doing nothing which gives at once such a naturalness and so high a distinction to this picture.

Here, in fact, we touch perhaps the clue to the whole superiority of this canvas. In one word, it is control; that almost unconscious self-control on the artist’s part which results from his consciousness of assured capacity. He has won beyond the point of experiment, beyond the later temptation to indulge in display of knowledge and skill; he has so absolutely acquired both and attuned the one to the other, that the tricks and devices of his craft no longer sway his imagination; he shows, in fact, his mastery not so much by what he does as by what he withholds; he has reached in this great work a plane of extraordinary artistic conscientiousness. The picture, in fact, has that appearance of inevitableness, that suggestion of having grown rather than of having been made, which is the highest expression of genius. It represents Hals at his zenith. The date is 1633 and the artist’s age forty-nine.

The next picture, Officers of the Archers of St. George, is dated 1639, six years later. It is conspicuously inferior not only to the masterpiece (that were excusable), but to all the preceding works. It represents a falling off not so much in actual craftsmanship as in artistic morality. The artist appears to have been satisfied to do less well than he could; to do, in fact, as little as he might. He has saved himself expenditure of invention in the composition by stringing the figures out in a line across the front, and raising another line of figures behind them; this having been the niggard, unimaginative arrangement of the older corporation pictures, from which his other work had presented so happy a departure. Correspondingly the heads, while forcible in characterization, are lacking in luminosity, and the fabrics are without vivacity. The general effect is stockish; the breath of life and of art, as Hals could suggest both, is absent.

Nor in the next picture, dated two years later, the Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth, do we detect the true Frans Hals. The faces are trickily modeled, brilliant high lights being contrasted with heavy greenish-drab shadows; and the figures are lumpish, except the second from the right, which alone reveals sympathy and enthusiasm.

Of the last two groups nothing need be said but that they are the work of a veteran of eighty years, whose hand has lost its cunning, while his brain, no longer active, retains only some wavering recollections of its original activity.

The important point to be suggested in conclusion is that Hals’s best period included the years from 1625 to 1635; that after the latter period this enthusiasm waned, and his work became too often perfunctory. In such cases the flesh parts exhibit an uninspired use of green lower tones that have a tendency to become drab; features are often crudely emphasized by a stroke or dab of exaggerated value, and luminosity has faded into a dull, sometimes lumpish inertness. Even so, however, compared with the work of other Hollanders, apart from Rembrandt, it still had a quality and a character that render it distinguished; but much of this distinction disappears when you compare him with himself, the later with the earlier Hals. Many of his portraits suggest the perfunctoriness of a man who has got his method down pat, and tediously repeats it. In a word, his technique was so personal and so dependent upon the mood of the moment that it needed the stimulus of enthusiasm, and when this was absent, the vitality of the technique became impaired.

CHAPTER V

REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN

IT is surely no accident that the name of Rembrandt is familiar to thousands who know little or nothing of his art. It has, in fact, become so embedded in the mental consciousness of modern times, that, even as it must have been a household word in his own day, so almost it has grown to be in ours. And for this there seem to be two reasons. In the very use of the word “household” there is a hint of one: the homely, in the sense of plain and simple, and very heartfelt appeal that his conception of the subject-matter generally makes to the imagination. But there is another reason and a greater. It is the magnitude of his personality as an artist. This was but dimly recognized in his own day, in the succeeding century forgotten, and is only beginning to be fully understood in our own times. The influence with which he fertilized art was to prove so great, that it needed a long period of gestation before it came to birth, and a correspondingly long period of development before it reached maturity. Now it has grown to be recognized and felt, until, like all the great contributions to human ideas, it is, so to say, in the air. Unwittingly as well as by conviction the world is conscious of it. Briefly, the nature of the influence is that it has revolutionized our attitude toward beauty. It has not eliminated the old idea of beauty, but supplemented it with a newer one, no less potent and far more adapted to our modern needs. The absolutism of the classic ideal has been overthrown by it. Art, that once was solely aristocratic, has been expanded to include the democratic ideal. It was therefore necessary for the world to have mastered the latter, as a principle of life and conduct, before it could be capable of appreciating Rembrandt to the full.

For Rembrandt’s art is the antithesis of Greek art. The Greek is founded upon a hypothesis, upon the assumption of a possible perfection; Rembrandt’s upon an acceptance of imperfection, upon the facts of life in relation to things as they exist. The one is based upon an artificially constructed absolutism, and is technically expressed through form—form, absolute and supreme. The other, in its recognition of the relativity of everything in life, is based upon tone, as affected by its environment of light. The difference is fundamental both in its technical and psychological aspect.

As long as society was conditioned by the aristocratic theory, Greek art, and the Renaissance interpretation of its principles, sufficed; but, with the growth and spread of the democratic, a new principle became necessary. Rembrandt conceived it, and our own age is learning to apply it. Our appreciation of the character of beauty has become enlarged by a realization of the beauty of character. The latter may be associated with beauty of form and features, though in real life it is more often not; yet, even when it is, we have discovered that the beauty of character is due, not to the form itself, but to the expression inherent in the form, and that character, as revealed by expression, is discernible also in things homely, even in the ugly. Art, in fact, has extended its province until it more nearly corresponds with the universal scheme of earthly conditions, wherein the good is mingled with the bad, and the sun shines alike on the just and the unjust. Meanwhile, even as humanity gropes toward some divine reconciliation of the coexistence of evil with good, so art must find some means of spiritualizing the facts of life and of idealizing the homely and ugly. This preëminently was Rembrandt’s gift.

The few known facts of Rembrandt’s life are clearly associated with his art. Born on the 15th of July, 1606, in Leyden, he was the son of Harmen of the Rhine, a miller in comfortable circumstances. He was sent to a Latin school as a preparation for entrance into the University of Leyden, that “when he became of age he might serve the city and the republic with his knowledge.” But he was destined to serve them in another way. Since he showed no taste for Latin and a single desire to be an artist, he was removed from school and placed with the local painter, Jacob van Swanenburch. He was then about twelve years old, and after spending three years with this teacher had made such progress that the father decided to send him to Amsterdam to study under Pieter Lastman, whose pictures of religious subjects had made him the most popular painter of that day.

With this master Rembrandt remained only six months. Lastman’s influence, however, had been considerable, though scarcely in a direct way. In fact, what he did for Rembrandt was to pass on to the latter the influence which he himself had derived from Elsheimer during a two years’ stay in Rome. For this German painter had made a great reputation by treating Biblical subjects in the natural or anti-classic manner. The scene was suggested by the Italian landscape, and the personages were real men and women, clothed in ordinary costume of the period. It is this translation of the Bible story into the vernacular of the day, corresponding as it did to the motive of Lucas van Leyden in his picture at Leyden of The Last Judgment, which must have been familiar to Rembrandt, that affected the latter’s imagination.

He returned to Leyden and for seven years in his father’s house continued a course of self-study. It was based on direct study from life, his models being himself and his relations, and included (where again one may trace the influence of Lucas van Leyden) the practice of etching. The earliest date recorded of any of these products of his needle is 1628, which appears on An Old Woman’s Head, Full Face, seen only to the Chin, and Bust of an Old Woman.[B] In 1624 appeared another dated etching, Rembrandt, a Bust, and the following year a series of small plates for which he himself was the model: Rembrandt with an Open Mouth; with an Air of Grimace; with Haggard Eyes, and Laughing.

These prints give a remarkable clue to a phase of Rembrandt’s personality that has not been sufficiently emphasized. They show that it included the instinct and faculty of an actor; the consciousness that in his body he possessed a muscular instrument capable of expressing the emotions of the mind; and, moreover, the capacity to play upon it. This throws a new light upon the habit, exhibited at intervals throughout his life, of making portraits of himself and frequently in costume. The latter particular is apt to be dismissed as a harmless pleasantry, whereas it should rather be considered extraordinarily suggestive. For he was not merely “dressing up,” but enacting a part in his own person; actually realizing in his body the idea that possessed his mind. That he could do this and needed to do it for the satisfaction of his own mental and physical impulses, helps to explain his extraordinary facility and power as a draftsman. For the virtue of great drawing consists in its quality of expression, in its ability to infuse feeling into a gesture or movement and so correlate the latter to the mood of mind, presumed to be dominating the subject. This virtue cannot be gained at second hand from a model; it must be inherent in the artist himself, and will be efficient according to the degree in which the artist can feel the emotion in himself and is capable of physically expressing it; in a word, to the degree in which he possesses the instinct of an actor. Viewed in this light Rembrandt’s habit of grimacing before a mirror, dressing up and posturing, gives a most illuminating clue to the source of his amazing versatility and capacity of expression as a draftsman.

In the same year, 1630, which produced the small prints, appeared also two “serious” etchings of himself; also two Biblical subjects, Jesus Disputing with the Doctors and The Presentation with the Angel; and, further, several fine portrait studies. In this year he moved to Amsterdam.

He was twenty-four years old, and, as far as etching is concerned, “was already in the peculiar situation,” I quote from Hamerton, “of an artist who has left himself no room for improvement except in attempting art of another kind, and in overcoming new, though possibly not greater, difficulties.” Among the oil-paintings that he had already executed are St. Paul (Stuttgart); St. Jerome in a Cave (Berlin); two portraits of old men (Cassel); and one of a young man, resembling himself, at The Hague. It was the fame of his portraits that, according to Orlers, brought invitations from Amsterdam to settle there; and during the first years of his sojourn over a shop on the Bloemgracht he executed six that are still in existence. But the most remarkable picture of this year is the St. Simeon in the Temple, now in the Gallery of The Hague. Here we detect for the first time the power and strangeness of Rembrandt’s imagination, displayed in the mysteriously lighted expanse of mammoth architecture and in lustrous fabrics, and, more essentially, the foretaste of his lifelong effort to construct a composition out of colored light.[C] It is the first revelation of his peculiarly individual self.

Meanwhile he had been attending the anatomy classes of the famous Dr. Tulp, and the following year, 1632, produced the Hague picture, The Lesson in Anatomy, as remarkable for clearly defined characterization as the St. Simeon had been for its imaginative treatment of light. Both have elements of indecision, for the artist was only twenty-six, but in them the qualities of Rembrandt’s personality are already established.

The Lesson brought him fame. Pupils flocked to his studio, clients sought his pictures, and the ten years that followed teemed with productivity and fortune. They cover his life with Saskia van Uylenborch, whom he married in 1634 and lost by death in 1642. She appears in frequent portraits and inspired many of his pictures. He occupied houses successively on the Nieuwe Doelstraat, Binnen-Amstel, and the Jodenbreedstraat, living simply, but indulging profusely in the collection of works of art. This heyday of prosperity in the companionship of Saskia is commemorated in the superb portrait of his wife sitting upon his knee, in the Dresden Gallery.

In 1642 his fortunes received a double blow. Saskia died, and his corporation picture, The Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company, popularly but erroneously called “The Night Watch,” was received with disfavor. It proved to be a turning-point in his career. Public recognition began to wane, and financial embarrassments to increase; yet his artistic fecundity continued, marked by more frequent examples of landscape. Toward the end of the forties he enjoyed the sympathetic support of the burgomaster, Jan Six, an enthusiastic lover of books and collector of works of art, whose friendship lasted till his death in 1658. Meanwhile, about 1653, Rembrandt seems to have married the woman who had devoted herself to his care, Hendrickje Stoffels. She died in 1656 and money troubles crowded upon him. He was declared a bankrupt; his household goods were seized by his creditors and later sold at an appalling sacrifice; the house in the Jodenbreedstraat also passed under the hammer, and Rembrandt retired to a house on the Rosengracht. This was in 1658. The house, which still exists, was a comfortable one; and it seems probable that the eleven years during which Rembrandt lived in it, until his death in 1669, were a time of tranquillity, as they certainly were of continued artistic activity. This period, indeed, produced The Six Syndics of the Cloth Hall (Amsterdam), a masterpiece of assured self-possession and complete achievement. It also was marked with many portraits of himself, no less than four having been painted in the last year of his life. One of them shows him blear eyed, with red and bulbous face, but laughing, and holding his maulstick like a scepter.[D]

Eugène Fromentin, skilled alike as a man of letters and a painter, analyzes in his “Maîtres d’Autrefois” the art of Rembrandt. The argument has been so generally accepted, that it must be described here. It may be compressed as follows: Fromentin discovers contradictions in the art of Rembrandt. It is at one time so realistic, and at another so visionary. He explains this apparent contradiction by the theory that Rembrandt’s was a dual nature. On the one side he shared with his fellow-artists their practicalness, direct seeing, and love of clear and definite expression; while on the other he was a solitary dreamer, a visionary, to whom the mystery of things made

chief appeal. Thus, by turns he was realist and idealist; occasionally, as in The Sortie, his pictures seem to have been the battle-ground of his two irreconcilable natures.

Fromentin calls the realist in Rembrandt the “exterior man” as contrasted with the “interior man,” revealed in his examples of idealism. The former he characterizes as an accomplished technician, with certainty of hand and a keenly logical mind. “His aim is to be comprehensible and veracious; he emulates the true colors of the daylight; draws with a fidelity and thoroughness that, while it makes you forget that it is drawing, itself forgets nothing. It is excellently physiognomical. It expresses and characterizes, in their individuality, traits, glances, attitudes, and gestures, that is to say, normal habits of behavior and the furtive accidents of life. His execution has the propriety, the ampleness, the high bearing, the firm tissue, the force and conciseness that belong to passed masters in the art of fine idiomatic expression.” The original of this last phrase is l’art des beaux langues; and we may note, in passing, its significance in connection with the context. Indeed, the whole paragraph might as accurately characterize some fine literary production, such as would satisfy the high standard of the French Academy. It is based upon the clear comprehension and logic of form.

On the contrary, when Rembrandt is in the mood of idealism, Fromentin no longer discovers in him the consummate technician. He sacrifices form to chiaroscuro. And what of his use of chiaroscuro, so peculiar to himself that it has come to be called by his name? Fromentin, in a beautiful passage, first suggests the general value of chiaroscuro. Ordinarily used, it is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible and of painting an object enveloped in air. “But it is more than any other medium the form of intimate sensations or ideas. It is light, vaporous, veiled, discreet; it lends its charm to things which are concealed, invites curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to the speculation of conscience. In fine, it is concerned with sentiment, emotion, the uncertain, the undefined and infinite; with dreams and the ideal. And that is why it is appropriately the poetic and natural atmosphere, which the genius of Rembrandt did not cease to inhabit.”

It was natural, therefore, that Rembrandt should bring to perfection this method of chiaroscuro, which Fromentin describes as the art of “enveloping everything, of immersing everything, in a bath of shadow, of plunging into it even the light itself, in order to draw out the light therefrom so that it shall appear more distant, more radiant; to cause waves of shadow to revolve round lighted centers; and to modulate these shadows, to hollow them, make them dense and yet render the obscurity transparent, and the less obscure parts easy to penetrate; in a word, to give to the strongest colors a kind of permeability which stops them from being black.”

But it is Rembrandt’s peculiar characteristic that he carried the method of chiaroscuro much further. Fromentin thus sums the matter up: He calls him a luminarist, apologizing for the word, which, when he wrote in 1876, was still a “barbarous” one. And a luminarist he defines to be one who conceives of light as outside of

fixed laws, attaches to it an extraordinary meaning, and makes great sacrifices for it. And, he adds, “if such is the meaning of this newly coined word, Rembrandt is at once defined and judged, for the word expresses an idea difficult to render, but a true idea, a rare eulogy and a criticism.”

Briefly, then, Fromentin’s argument is this: Rembrandt in his ideal moods essayed to use light as the actual material out of which to construct form; he composed in light. The result was admirable, when the character of the subject justified such treatment; but open to serious criticism when it did not. The famous instance of the latter, in Fromentin’s judgment, is The Sortie or “Night Watch.”

“Rembrandt had to represent a company of men-at-arms. It would have been easy enough to tell us what they were going to do; but he has told us so negligently, that people are still unable to comprehend it, even in Amsterdam. He had to paint some likenesses, they are doubtful; some characteristic costumes, they are for the most part apocryphal; a picturesque effect, and this effect is such that the picture becomes undecipherable. The subject, the personages and details have disappeared in the shadowy phantasmagoria of the palette. Ordinarily Rembrandt excels in rendering light, he is marvelous in the art of painting an imaginary subject (fiction); his habit is to think, his master faculty is the expression of light. But here imagination is out of place, life is wanting, and the thought atones for nothing. As for the light, it is unnatural, unquiet, and artificial; it radiates from the inside to the outside, it dissolves the objects that it illuminates. I see some focal spots of brilliance, but I see nothing illuminated; the light is neither beautiful, true, nor reasonable (motivée).”

Before discussing this judgment let us note Fromentin’s approval of Rembrandt’s use of light—in the case of subjects that seem to him to justify it. He instances particularly The Supper at Emmaus and The Good Samaritan, both in the Louvre. He speaks with fine sympathy of the original and infinitely human conception of Christ in the former picture, while upon the technique of the latter he comments as follows: “The canvas is enveloped in smoke (enfumée), all impregnated with somber golds, very rich in depth and, above all, very grave. The material is muddy, yet transparent; the brushwork heavy, yet subtle; hesitating and resolute; labored and free; very unequal, uncertain, vague in some parts, astonishingly precise in others. No contour appears, not an accent added in the way of routine. There is evident an extreme timidity, which is not the result of ignorance and proceeds, one would say, from the fear of being banal or from the price which the thinker attaches to the immediate and direct expression of life. The objects have a structure that seems to exist in itself, almost without the help of formulas, rendering, without any means that you can seize upon, the uncertainties of nature. There are some nude limbs and feet of irreproachable construction—moreover, ‘style.’ In the pale, pinched, groaning visage of the wounded man, there is nothing save expression, something that comes from the soul, from within outward; tonelessness (atonie), suffering; as it were, the sad joy of collecting one’s self when one feels about to die. Not a contortion, not a trait that overreaches moderation, not a touch in this rendering of the inexpressible that is not pathetic and restrained; everything dictated by profound emotion and interpreted by means altogether extraordinary.” And, adds Fromentin: “Examine other painters of sentiment, of physiognomy and characterization, the men of scrupulous observation or of verve. Take account of their intentions; study their scrutiny, measure their domain, weigh well their language, and ask yourself, if anywhere you perceive an equal intimacy in the expression of a visage, an emotion of this nature, such ingenuity in the manner of feeling; anything, in a word, which is as delicate to conceive, as delicate to say, and is said in terms more original, more exquisite, or more perfect.”

Nothing else, I suppose, has ever been written about this phase of Rembrandt’s art that is at once so fine in thought and diction, so enlightening, and so memorable. For one here meets in union the trained thinker and practised writer and the painter; thus getting much more than the painter’s exclusive point of view, and at the same time the latter, interpreted by the painter at first hand. The gist of it is that, when the subject involved an idea, Rembrandt was not only justified in sacrificing the corporeal to the incorporeal, but was master of a technique that could express the idea conclusively and with supreme emotional appeal.

In conclusion, Fromentin considers that the whole life of Rembrandt represents a struggle between the two sides of his nature. The earliest battle-ground was The Sortie, from which, owing to the nature of the problem, he came off worsted. But did he ever succeed in reconciling the “exterior” and the “interior” man? If ever, Fromentin concludes, surely in The Syndics, which, in a word, is a work of imagination and yet of real life.

The whole exposition of Fromentin’s argument, from which these fragments have been gathered, is worth careful study, particularly because of the constructive nature of the criticism. In its combination of technical information and logical point of view, in its subtlety and human sympathy, it affords a model for the method of approaching the serious examination of a great artist’s work. One may acknowledge its value and the benefit derived from it, without subscribing entirely to its conclusions. It may be possible to feel that it has the defect, if one is to find a single word for it, of excessive concentration. It centers too exclusively around one picture, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company.

This picture has suffered from too much exploitation. It has been praised “not wisely but too well” by artists and has been worshiped by the public. Fromentin may have approached it with undue expectations; at any rate, he found himself disappointed; and, being at variance with the general judgment, felt the need of justifying his own attitude. He has done it so exhaustively as to warp his own judgment, until what there is of weakness in the picture has become almost an obsession with him. It is never absent from his thoughts, and continually peeps in on one page after another, and mingles with the judgment of other pictures. Fromentin has used it as a pivot around which to swing his whole appreciation of Rembrandt; and, more than this, has himself been sucked into the vortex of his own revolving argument. It is an expedient scarcely to be warranted by breadth of criticism to select one picture of any artist as a focusing-point for a consideration of his whole work, and least of all in the case of an artist so universal as Rembrandt.

Moreover, Fromentin does not persuade us that he had a very wide acquaintance with the master’s work. He knew his Louvre well; grew up with it, and had become habituated to it and fixed in the impressions he had derived. Later in life he made the acquaintance of the National Gallery and visited Dresden. Then he makes the pilgrimage to Holland. He first reaches The Hague, where The Lesson in Anatomy fails to satisfy his expectations. He is alive to its excellence in parts, but does not find the strength and character of two or three of the heads sustained throughout the canvas. He feels that an unreasonable amount of adulation has been lavished on the picture. It arouses his antagonism and piques in him the critical vein. Then an interval in his approach to Rembrandt ensues. He alights at Haarlem and notes with what definitive skill and clearness of comprehension Frans Hals treated the corporation subject. Fresh from these impressions, he finds himself in front of Rembrandt’s treatment of a corresponding theme. By contrast it seems to him a work of confused motives and manifold uncertainties. Yet how extravagantly it has been lauded! Like The Lesson in Anatomy, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company has been prejudiced by uncritical applause. The critic in Fromentin is now thoroughly roused. With every wish to be fair to Rembrandt, he proceeds to build upon these two pictures a fabric of constructive and destructive criticism. His faculties are narrowed to a focus spot of concentrated heat, are swept into the ardor of their centripetal momentum, and become caught up in the subtleties of their own compressed invention. He elaborates a theory, and into its compact limits would squeeze the genius of Rembrandt.

Further, what kind of mind did Fromentin bring to bear upon this examination? A generous one, desirous of being broad; but a Frenchman’s and an Academician’s; one, that is to say, which clings to logic and bases its expression upon form. It exhibits and demands clarity of reasoning; declares itself in refined exactness. It knew of Impressionism, yet was too old in its convictions, too fixed in earlier traditions, to comprehend it. But, since the day when Fromentin’s mind was in the forming, the world’s point of view toward art, even one may say toward life, has changed; and its attitude toward the manner of expression has progressed, until it has come back to Rembrandt with a new and more intimate comprehension. It recognizes him as an Impressionist of sensations and tries to judge him by what we now know and feel about Impressionism.

Briefly, we have learned that there may be something in art more valuable than the record of a person, place, or incident, and this is, the impression of it conceived and rendered by the artist; that, through this interpretation, the place, person, or incident becomes illuminated, more vitally represented. How, for example, can Bartholdi’s