Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/392

374 REMBRANDT on the number of portraits of the same young woman paintoil in the early years of his stay in Amsterdam and before he met his bride. Then, again, in the many portraits of himself painted in his early life we can see with what zeal he set himself to master every form of expression, now grave now gay, at one time with a smile at another with a frown, how thoroughly he learned to model the human face not from the outside but from the inner man. Careful in detail and thorough in work, these studies were the foundation of his later triumphs. Dr Bode gives fifty as the number of the portraits of himself, most of them painted iu youth and in old age, the times when he had leisure for such work. Rembrandt's earliest pictures were painted in the last four years of his stay at Leyden, from 1627 to 1631. Bode mentions about nine pictures as known to belong to these 3 r ears, chiefly paintings of single figures, as St Paul in Prison and St Jerome ; but now and then compositions of several, as Samson in Prison and Presentations in the Temple. The prevailing tone of all these pictures is a greenish-grey, the effect being somewhat cold and heavy. The gallery at Cassel gives us a typical example of his studies of the heads of old men, firm and hard in workmanship and full of detail, the effects of light and shade being carefully thought out. His work was now attracting the attention of the lovers of art iu the great city of Amster- dam : and, urged by their calls, he removed about 1631 to live and die there. His life has few incidents and these only personal, for he lived among the simple burgher citizens, moving in an excellent circle of men of science, divines, poets, artists, and friends of art. At one bound he leaped into the position of the first portrait painter of the city, and received numerous commissions. During the early years of his residence there are at least forty known portraits from his hand, firm and solid in manner and staid in expression. It has been remarked that the fantasy in which he indulged through life was reserved only for the portraits of himself and his immediate connexions. The excellent painter Thomas De Keyser was then in the height of his power, and his influence is to be traced in some of Rembrandt's smaller portraits. Pupils also now flocked to his house in the Bloemgracht, among them Gerard Douw, who was nearly of his own age. The first important work executed by Rembrandt in Amsterdam is Simeon in the Temple, of the Hague Museum, a fine early example of his treatment of light and shade and of his subtle colour. The concentrated light falls on the principal figure, his favourite way of arresting attention, while the background is full of mystery. The surface is smooth and enamelled, and all the details are carefully wrought out, while the action of light on the mantle of Simeon shows how soon he had felt the magical effect of the play of colour. Between the small Simeon of 1631 and the life-sized Lesson in Anatomy of 1632 there is a great difference. In the latter we have the first of the great portrait subjects, Tulp the anatomist, the early friend of Rembrandt, dis- coursing to his seven associates, who are ranged with eager heads round the foreshortened body. The subject was not new, for it had been treated in former years by the Miere velds, A. Pietersen, and others, for the Hall of the Surgeons. But it was reserved for Rembrandt to make it a great picture by the grouping of the expressive portraits and by the completeness of the conception. The colour is quiet and the handling of the brush timid and pre- cise, while the light and shade are somewhat harsh and abrupt. But it is a marvellous picture for a young man of twenty-five, and it is generally accepted as the first milestone in the career of the painter, and as marking a new departure. In the forty long years of Rembrandt's incessant activity as an artist about seven hundred pictures are known to have come from his own hand. It is therefore clearly impossible within the space at our disposal to notice more than the prominent works in their order. Besides the Pellicorne family portraits of 1632, we have the caligra- phist Coppenol of the Cassel Gallery, interesting in the 1ii t place as an early example of Rembrandt's method of giving permanent interest to a portrait by converting it into a picture. He invests it with a sense of life by a momen- tary expression as Coppenol raises his head towards the spectator while he is mending a quill. The same motive is to be found in the Shipbuilder, 1633 (of Buckingham Palace), who looks up from his work with a sense of interruption at the approach of his wife. But the worthy Coppenol, "the Phoenix of the Pen," has another charm for us ; he was one of Rembrandt's earliest friends in his new abode and remained true to the end, being painted thrice and etched twice by the artist, the last of whose portrait etchings (1661) was the Coppenol of large size. The two small pictures of the Philosopher of the Louvre date from 1633, delicate in execution and full of mysterious effect. The year 1634 is especially remarkable as that of his marriage with Saskia van Ulenburgh, a beautiful, fair-haired Frisian maiden of good connexions. Till her death in 1642 she was the centre of his life and art, and lives for us in many a canvas as well as in her own portraits. On her the painter lavished his magical power, painting her as the Queen Artemisia or Bathsheba, and as the wife of Samson, always proud of her long fair locks, and covering her with pearls and gold as precious in their play of colour as those of the Indies. A joyous pair as we see them in the Dresden Gallery, Saskia sitting on his knee while he laughs gaily, or promenading together in a fine picture of 1636, or putting the last touches of ornament to her toilette, for thus Bode interprets the so-called Burgo- master Pancras and his Wife. These were his happy days when he painted himself in his exuberant fantasy, and adorned himself, at least in his portraits, in scarfs and feathers and gold chains. Saskia brought him a marriage portion of forty thousand guilders, a large sum for those times, and she brought him also a large circle of good friends in Amsterdam. She bore him four children, Rum- bartus and two girls successively named Cornelia after his beloved mother, all of whom died in infancy, and Titus, named after Titia a sister of Saskia. We have several noble portraits of Saskia, a good type of the beauty of Holland, all painted with the utmost love and care, at Cassel (1633), at Dresden (1641), and a posthumous one (1G43) at Berlin. But the greatest in workmanship and most pathetic in expression seems to us, though it is decried by Bode, that of Antwerp (1641), in which it is impossible not to trace declining health and to find a melancholy pre- sage of her death, which took place in 1642. Then truly went out the light of Rembrandt's life. Returning to Rembrandt's work, we find one of the greatest portraits of 1634 to be the superb full length portrait of Martin Daey, which with that of Madame Dacy, painted according to Vosmaer some years later, formed one of the ornaments of the Van Loon collection at Amsterdam. Both now belong to Baron Gustavo de Rothschild. From the firm detailed execution of this portrait one turns with wonder to the broader handling of the Old Woman, aged eighty-three, in the National Gallery, of the same year, remarkable for the effect of reflected light and still more for the sympathetic rendering of character. The life of Samson supplied many subjects in these early days. The so-called Count of Gueldres Threatening his Father-in-law of the Berlin Gallery has been restored to its proper signification by M. Kolloff, who finds it to be Samson. It is forced and violent in its action. But the