Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/553

In Holland. 523 the people with whom he was brought in contact — a sym- pathy which enabled him to catch and fix a likeness on canvas or on copper with the fidelity of photography with- out its coldness. That he was not without the power of appreciating spiritual elevation of sentiment is proved by the pathos of some of the heads in his Descent from the Cross, in the Pinakothek, Munich, and in a similar subject in our National Gallery. Of his numerous works we can only name a few of the most celebrated. The Lesson in Anatomy, in the gallery of the Hague — representing the dissection of a corpse by a celebrated surgeon of the time, the professor Tulp, before seven other doctors — is universally considered the most excellent work of the master's earlier period. In the Museum of Amsterdam is the celebrated Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company. This famous pic- ture, which contains twenty-three persons of life-size, represents a platoon of the civic guard — officers, soldiers, standard-bearer and drummer — starting to patrol the streets of Amsterdam. It is usually called, in error, the Night Watch ; the scene is in daylight. But the popular misnomer arises from the luminous and trans- parent tints, the great effects of light and shade, which seem produced by an artificial light rather than by the sun. Another picture by Rembrandt in the Amsterdam Gal- lery, the Syndics of the Staalhof (the Clothweavers' Hall), although only a simple collection of portraits, shares the renown of the Night Watch. In Italy there are only a few portraits dispersed in Florence, Naples and Turin. In the rich museum of Madrid there is only one Portrait of a Lady, the date of which shows it to be one of his earliest works. Of the