Rembrandt

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

While the world pays respectful tribute to Rembrandt the artist, it has been compelled to wait until comparatively recent years for some small measure of reliable information concerning Rembrandt the man. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have been very little concerned with personalities. A man was judged by his work which appealed, if it were good enough, to an ever-increasing circle. There were no newspapers to record his doings and, if he chanced to be an artist, it was nobody's business to set down the details of his life. Sometimes a diarist chanced to pass by and to jot down a little gossip, quite unconscious of the fact that it would serve to stimulate generations yet unborn, but, for the most part, artists who did great work in a retiring fashion and were not honoured by courts and princes as Rubens was, passed from the scene of their labours with all the details of their sojourn unrecorded.

Rembrandt was fated to suffer more than mere neglect, for he seems to have been a light-hearted, headstrong, extravagant man, with no capacity for business. He had not even the supreme quality, associated in doggerel with Dutchmen, of giving too little and asking too much. Consequently, when he died poor and enfeebled, in years when his collection of works of fine art had been sold at public auction for a fraction of its value, when his pictures had been seized for debt, and wife, mistress, children, and many friends had passed, little was said about him. It was only when the superlative quality of his art was recognised beyond a small circle of admirers that people began to gather up such fragments of biography as they could find.

Shakespeare has put into Mark Antony's mouth the statement that "the evil that men do lives after them," and this was very much the case with Rembrandt van Ryn. His first biographers seem to have no memory save for his undoubted recklessness, his extravagance, and his debts. They remembered that his pictures fetched very good prices, that his studio was besieged for some years by more sitters than it could accommodate, that he was honoured with commissions from the ruling house, and that in short, he had every chance that would have led a good business man to prosperity and an old age removed from stress and strain. These facts seem to have aroused their ire. They have assailed his memory with invective that does not stop short at false statement. They have found in the greatest of all Dutch artists a ne'er-do-well who could not take advantage of his opportunities, who had the extravagance of a company promoter, an explosive temper and all the instincts that make for loose living.

Rembrandt's portraits of his wife Saskia are distributed fairly equally throughout the world's great galleries, but this one from the Brera in Milan is not so well known as most, and on this account it is reproduced here. It is called "Portrait of a Woman" in the catalogue, but the features justify the belief that the lady was the painter's wife.

Alas for these poor biographers, who, had they but taken the trouble to trust to the pictures rather than to the lies that were current, would have seen that the artist's life could not have been nearly as bad as they imagined. Happily, to-day, we have more than the testimony of the painted canvas, though that would suffice the most of intelligent men. Further investigation has done a great deal to remove the blemishes from Rembrandt's name; MM. Vosmaer and Michel have restored it as though it were a discoloured picture, and those who hail Rembrandt master may do so without mental reservation. His faults were very human ones and his merits leave them in the shade.

Rembrandt was born in the pleasant city of Leyden, but it is not easy to name the precise year. Somewhere between 1604 and 1607 he started his troubled journey through life, and of his childhood the records are scanty. Doubtless, his youthful imagination was stirred by the sights of the city, the barges moving slowly along the canals, the windmills that were never at rest, the changing chiaroscuro of the flooded, dyke-seamed land. Perhaps he saw these things with the large eye of the artist, for he could not have turned to any point of the compass without finding a picture lying ready for treatment. Even when he was a little boy the fascination of his surroundings may have been responsible in part for the fact that he was not an industrious scholar, that he looked upon reading and writing as rather troublesome accomplishments, worth less than the labour involved in their acquisition. And yet his father was a wealthy man, he would seem to have had no occasion to neglect his studies, and the best one can find to say about these early years is that they may have been directed badly by those in authority. In any case, it is well-nigh impossible to make rules for genius. The boy who sits unmoved at the bottom of his class, the butt of his companions, the horrible example to whom the master turns when he wishes to point a moral, may do work in the world that no one among those who attended the school since its foundation has been able to accomplish and, if Rembrandt did not satisfy his masters, he was at least paving the way for accomplishment that is recognised gratefully to-day wherever art has found a home.

His family soon knew that he had the makings of an artist and, in 1620, when he could hardly have been more than sixteen, and may have been considerably less, he left Leyden University for the studio of a second-rate painter called Jan van Swanenburch. We have no authentic record of his progress in the studio, but it must have been rapid....