Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/96

Rh apparently about 1645, in the picture exhibited in the winter exhibition at Burlington House in 1885. Reverence and awe are shown in every attitude of the Tobit family. A similar lofty treatment is to be found in the “Christ as the Gardener,” appearing to Mary, of 1638 (Buckingham Palace);

We have now arrived at the year 1640, the threshold of his second manner, which extended to 1654, the middle age of Rembrandt. During the latter part of the previous decade we find the shadows more transparent and the blending of light and shade more perfect. There is a growing power in every part of his art. The coldness of his first manner had disappeared, and the tones were gradually changing into golden-brown. He had passed through what Bode calls his “Sturm-und-Drang” period of exaggerated expression, as in the Berlin Samson, and had attained to a truer, calmer form of dramatic expression, of which the “Manoah” of Dresden is a good example (1641). The portraits painted “to order” became more rare about this time, and those which we have are chiefly friends of his circle, such as the “Mennonite Preacher” (C. C. Ansloo) and the “Gilder,” a fine example of his golden tone, formerly in the Morny collection and now in America. His own splendid portrait (1640) in the National Gallery illustrates the change in his work. It describes the man well-strong and robust, with powerful head, firm and compressed lips and determined chin, with heavy eyebrows, separated by a deep vertical furrow, and with eyes of keen penetrating glance—altogether a self-reliant man that would carry out his own ideas, careless whether his popularity waxed or waned. The fantastic rendering of himself has disappeared; he seems more conscious of his dignity and position. He has now many friends and pupils, and numerous commissions, even from the stadtholder; he has bought a large house in the Breedstraat, in which during the next sixteen years of his life he gathers his large collection of paintings, engravings, armour and costume which figure afterwards in his inventory. His taste was wide and his purchases large, for he was joint owner with picture-dealers of paintings by Giorgione and Palma Vecchio, while for a high-priced Marcantonio Raimondi print he gave in exchange a line impression of his “ Christ Healing the Sick, ” which has since been known as the “ Hundred Guilder Print.” The stadtholder was not a prompt payer, and an interesting correspondence took place between Rembrandt and Constantin Huygens, the poet and secretary of the prince. The Rembrandt letters which have come down to us are few, and these are therefore of importance. Rembrandt puts a high value on the picture, which he says had been painted “ with much care and zeal, ” but he is wil-ling to take what the prince thinks proper; while to Huygens he sends a large picture as a present for his trouble in carrying through the business. There is here no sign of the grasping greed with which he has been charged, while his unselfish conduct is seen in the settlement of the family affairs at the death of his mother in 1640.

The year 1642 is remarkable for the great picture formerly known as the “Night Watch,” but now more correctly as the “Sortie of the Banning Cock Company,” another of the landmarks of Rembrandt's career, in which twenty-nine life-sized civic guards are introduced issuing pell-mell from their club house. Such gilds of arquebusiers had been painted admirably before by Ravesteyn and notably by Frans Hals, but Rembrandt determined to throw life and animation into the scene, which is full of bustle and movement. The dominant colour is the citron yellow uniform of the lieutenant, wearing a blue sash, while a Titian-like red dress of a musketeer, the black velvet dress of the captain, and the varied green of the girl and drummer, all produce a rich and harmonious effect. The background has become dark and heavy by accident or neglect, and the scutcheon on which the names are painted is scarcely to be seen. It is to be observed that, as proved by the copy by Gerrit Lundens in the National Gallery, it represents not a “night watch,” except in name, but a day watch.

But this year of great achievement was also the year of his great loss, for Saskia died in 1642, leaving Rembrandt her sole trustee for her son Titus, but with full use of the money till he should marry again or till the marriage of Titus. The words of the will express her love for her husband and her confidence in him. With her death his life was changed. Bode has remarked that there is a pathetic sadness in his pictures of the Holy Family-a favourite subject at this period of his life. All of these he treatswith the naive simplicity of Reformed Holland, giving us the real carpenter's shop and the mother watching over the Infant reverently and lovingly, with a fine union of realism and idealism.

The street in which he lived was full of Dutch and Portuguese Jews, and many a Jewish rabbi sat to him. He acce ted or invented their turbans and local dress as characteristic of the people. But in his religious pictures it is not the costume we look at; what strikes us is the profound perception of the sentiment of the story, making them true to all time and independent of local circumstance. A notable example of this feeling is to be found in the “Woman Taken in Adultery” of the National Gallery, painted in 1644 in the manner of the “Simeon” of the Hague. Beyond the ordinary claims ofart, it commands our attention from the grand conception of the painter who here, as in other pictures and etchings, has invested Christ with a majestic dignity which recalls Lionardo and no other. A similar lofty ideal is to be found in his various renderings of .the “Pilgrims at Emmaus, " notably in the Louvre picture of 1648, in which, as Mrs jameson says, " he returns to those first spiritual principles which were always the dowry of ancient art." From the same year we have the “ Good Samaritan ” of the Louvre, the story of which is told with intense pathos. The helpless suffering of the wounded man, the curiosit of the boy on tiptoe, the excited faces at the upper window, are aff conveyed with masterly skill. In these last two pictures we find a broader touch and freer handling, while the tones pass into a dull yellow and brown with a marked predilection for deep rich red. Whether it was that this scheme of colour found no favour with the Amsterdamers, who, as Hoogstraten tells us, could not understand the “ Sortie, " it seems certain that Rembrandt was Hot invited to take any leading part in the celebration of the congress of Westphalia (1648).

Rembrandt touched no side of art without setting his mark on it, whether in still life, as in his dead birds or the “Slaughtered Ox” of the Louvre (with its repetitions at Glasgow and Budapest), or in his drawings of elephants and lions, all of which are instinct with life. But at this period of his, career we come upon a branch of his art on which he left, both in etching and in painting, the stamp of his genius, viz. landscape. Roeland Roghman, but ten years his senior, evidently influenced his style, for the resemblance between their works is so great that, as at Cassel, there has been confusion of authorship. Hercules Seghers also was much appreciated by Rembrandt, for at his sale eight pictures by this master figure in the inventory, and Vosmaer discovered that Rembrandt had worked on a plate by Seghers and had added figures to an etched “ Flight into Egypt." The earliest pure landscape known to us from Rembrandts hand is that at the Ryks Museum (1637–38), followed in the latter year by those at Brunswick, Cracow and Boston (U.S.A.), and that dated 1638 and belonging to Mr G. Rath in Budapest. Better known is the “ Winter Scene ” of Cassel (1646), silvery and delicate. As a rule in his painted landscape he aims at grandeur and poetical effect, as in the “ Repose of the Holy Family " of 1647 (formerly called the “Gipsies”), a moonlight effect, clear even in the shadows. The “Canal” of Lord Lansdowne, and the “ Mountain Landscape with Approaching Storm, ” the sun shining out behind the heavy clouds, are both conceived and executed in this spirit. A similar poetical vein runs through the “Castle on the Hill” of Cassel, in which the beams of the setting sun strike on the castle while the valley is sunk in the shades of approaching night. More powerful still is the weird effect of Lord Lansdowne's “Windmill,” with its glow of light and darkening shadows. In all these pictures light with its magical influences is the theme of the poet-painter. From the number of landscapes by himself in the inventory of his sale, it would appear that these grand works were not appreciated by his contemporaries. The last of the landscape series dates from 1655 or 1656, the close of the middle age or manhood of Rembrandt, a period of splendid power. In the “Joseph Accused by Potiphar's Wife” of 1654 we have great dramatic vigour and perfect mastery of expression, while the brilliant colour and glowing effect of light and shade attest his strength. To this period also belongs the great portrait of himself in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.

But evil days were at hand. The long-continued wars and civil troubles had worn out the country, and money was scarce. Rembrandt's and doubtless Saskia's means were tied up in his house and in his large collection of valuable pictures, and we find Rembrandt borrowing considerable sums of money on the security of his house to keep things going. Perhaps, as Bode suggests, this was the reason of his extraordinary activity at this time. Then, unfortunately, in this year of 1654, we find Rembrandt involved in the scandal of having a child by his servant Hendrickje Jaghers or Stoffels, as appears by the books of the Reformed Church at Amsterdam. He recognized the child and gave it the name of Cornelia, after his much-loved mother, but there is no proof that he married the mother, and the probability is against such a marriage, as the provisions of Saskia/s will would in that case have come into force, and her fortune would have passed at once to her son Titus. Hendrickje seems to have continued