REMBRANDT

A PAINTER with so marked a personality as Rembrandt, with his warmth of golden colour, would be less safe for the student to attempt to approach than the more sober-hued Van Dyck and Velazquez, where departures from the silver light of nature are less perceptible. But underlying the golden hue there is a mighty resourcefulness that will repay no end of research.

We are for the moment less concerned with the overflowing human sympathy with which this greatest of poetic painters has invested every being he has portrayed, than with an analysis of his workmanship ; but as his every touch, every shade, every gesture, is impregnated with humanity, we should do well, while investigating his means of expression, to keep in touch with the spirit inherent in his work.

The portrait of himself as a youngish man is smooth, almost polished in surface, for him, tight and detailed in the drawing, fine in colour, but has no signs of the daring use of pigment [182] seen in his later work. Nor is it possible with so much completeness of detail to combine absolute freedom of brushwork. On the other hand, the sureness and vigour he exhibits later in life is the outcome of the knowledge gained by this close application in his earlier studies; and it is well to remember that to attempt to begin where he left off would result in those pretentious daubs that expose all their weaknesses, including the pretensions.

The "Portrait of an Old Lady," in the white cap and ruff, is executed in the Rubens manner. Look closely into it and you will find that the burnt siena shadows of the first ébauche are here and there left transparent. The warm over-painting with liquid scumbling is very like that of the Flemish master. It is freely and rapidly executed, and with small brushed the varnish impasto is touched solidly in the lights.

The cap, so exquisitely modelled, is in a like manner thinly floated over the dark of the ground and the white of the ruff.

Now turn to the "Woman Bathing " and examine the consummate rendering of flesh in the bosom, head, and legs, the riot of fat paint in the chemise, and the rich glazes in the coloured draperies on the bank by the pool.

This is certainly a study to copy some day, not so much with the idea of making an exact replica-that would have too restraining an effect-but [185] rather with the purpose of rendering its unctuous properties.

The grisaille composition of "Christ before Pilate" gives a clue to the first laying in. "We have now to consider for the following stage the nature of the grey in the legs and head. Extract from them the warm tones and we shall get it. There is a cooler note in the half-tone under the breasts ; with such a grey, and a loaded varnish white, in a full brush, we should paint the shoulders and breast, and the chemise with a very liquid white played wet into a greyer ground, aided with touches of the palette knife ; and then the shadows of the background fairly transparently. Over the whole, when dry, float a golden glaze which should give us some of the qualities of this gem. It is to the varnish glazes that much of its liquidity is due.

The small monochrome of a " Crucifixion " has great charm. " The Flight into Egypt " is a slightly tinted monochrome, like several small religious subjects in Munich, which are practically monochromes, with but a few positive colour glazes.

" The Jewish Merchant " is of the firmer type of workmanship, with a rare subtlety of modelling in the head. With your half-closed eyes, see how the undulations of its surface are effected by the delicate variations of its tones.

An enthusiastic sculptor, when an old man and blind, was often led to that wonderful fragment " The Torso Belvedere " in the Vatican, the beauties [186] of which, denied to his eyes, he would enjoy by caressing with his hands. So with this portrait of Rembrandt one longs to feel with one's fingers to test the apparent solidity of its planes, which were always the chief object of the painter's care ; in itself an excellent lesson, for in this way a comprehensive and large outlook is attained and preserved. Ever keep the big things in view. Simplicity is the greatest virtue, and the last achieved in any art.

" The Head of a Rabbi " is again in a more liquid manner. The transparent shadow on the forehead cast by the cap, the blue-grey touches beside the eye, the varnish impasto on the nose and cheek, the cool boundary of the beard against the face, the shadow of the nostril fused wet into the upper lip, are, among many others, qualities of this masterpiece to revel in.

The virility of Rembrandt, with his full loadings and broken colour, was something of a shock to his contemporaries, who prized most the suave surfaces to which they were habituated. This looseness became accentuated as he advanced in years, and to a criticism of it the master retorted that he was a painter, not a dyer. At this stage the portrait of an old man with a grey beard and his own with a turban were done.

The foreheads are in full light, for he is striving now for greater brilliancy. We see the hard, stiff white through which the firm brush is ploughed ; and always the luscious silver-grey of the underground, [189] which is sometimes, as in the beard of the old man with the red cap, liquidly scumbled in the after stage, the broken glazes finding their way in and around the furrows made by the brush. But the craftsmanship in these is so fine, the modelling so just, the hand so assured, and the surface actually so beautiful, that the centuries have enhanced rather than detracted from their ripeness. Only in the hands of a transcendent genius is such free use of material, backed as it is with vast experience, made possible. The raw white loadings that are thrown at us now, as a make-believe for sunshine, and trowelled over the whole of a canvas, are not of the stuff that Rembrandts are made of. Nor do impastos answer their legitimate end, except as accents or rare variations from the general level, and then only in fitting proportion to the scale of a work in which they are used. When wisely and discreetly left, the deposits of a real, not assumed enthusiasm, fired spontaneously in the warmth of production-then and then only, like the moving passion of the orator, they move us to a real admiration.