Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/393

Rh REMBRANDT 375 greatest of this series, and one of the prominent pictures of Rembrandt's work, is the Marriage of Samson of the Dresden Gallery, painted in 1638. Here Rembrandt gives the rein to his imagination and makes the scene live before us. Except the bride (Saskia), who sits calm and grand on a dais in the centre of the feast, with the full light again playing on her flowing locks and wealth of jewels, all is animated and full of bustle. Samson, evidently a Rembrandt of fantasy, leans over a chair pro- pounding his riddle to the Philistine lords. In execution it is a great advance on former subject pictures ; it is bolder in manner, and we have here signs of his ap- proaching love of warmer tones of red and yellow. It is also a fine example of his magic play of colour. The story of Susannah also occupied him in these early years, and he returned to the subject in 1641 and 1653. The Bather of the National Gallery may also be another interpretation of the same theme. In all of these pictures the woman is coarse in type and lumpy in form, though the modelling is soft and round, the effect which Rembrandt always strove to gain. Beauty of form was outside his art. But the so-called Danae (1636) at St Petersburg is a sufficient reply to those who decry his nude female forms. As flesh painting it glows with colour and life, and the blood seems to pulsate under the warm skin. In the picturesque story of Tobit Rembrandt found much to interest him, as we see in the beautiful small picture of the Arenberg collection at Brussels. Sight is being restored to the aged Tobias, while with infinite tenderness his wife holds the old man's hand caressingly. The momentary action is complete, and the picture goes straight to the heart. In the Berlin Gallery he paints the anxiety of the parents as they wait the return of their son. In 1637 he painted the fine picture now in the Louvre of the Flight of the Angel ; and the same subject is grandly treated by him, 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 (16-U). Whether it was that he was getting tired of painting commissioned portraits, that he was independent of them, or that he aimed at higher flights, it is certain that these portraits painted "to order" became more rare about this time, and that those which we have are chiefly friends of his circle, such as the Mennonite Preacher (C. C. Ansloo) and the Gilder (Le Doreur), a fine example of his golden tone, formerly in the Moray 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 eye-brows, 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 gathered his large collection of paintings, engrav- ings, 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 Marc- antonio Raimondi print he gave in exchange a fine impression of his Christ Healing the Sick, which has since been known as the Hundred Guilder Print. The stadt- holder was not a prompt payer, and an interesting corre- spondence 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 willing 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 W T atch, 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 guilds of arque- busiers 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. One can almost hear the beating of the drum and the barking of the dog. 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. 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 treats with 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. It is true indeed that the circumstances of his time and country made it impos- sible for him to attempt to realize the ancient forms of Hebrew life, or to revive the bye-past race of Judaea. He was content, as the old Italians were, with the types around him. The street in which he lived swarmed with Dutch and Portuguese Jews, and many a Jewish rabbi sat to him. He accepted their turbans and local dress as character- istic of the people. But in his religious pictures it is not the costume we look at ; what strikes us is the pro- found perception of the sentiment of the story, making them true to all time and independent of local circum- stance. 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.