THE LIFE AND WORK OF REMBRANDT.*
THE Art of the seventeenth century is dominated by Rembrandt, as much as that of the sixteenth is dominated by Titian, and that of the eighteenth by Watteau. That fact having been increasingly recognised, it would have been strange if Rembrandt had had no biographers. He has had biographers in plenty, but when We have removed from the list of them M. Charles Blanc, and one or two brilliant writers in the better magazines, we shall find that none have been of the ablest, until We come to the latest and most thorough-going student Of the master, a Dutchman, M. Vosmaer, Rembrandt, so Vie et ses (Mares. Par O. Voamaer. Simonds Edition, enttbre- moat Dofondue et Augment& La Hive: Ni,lhoff. Loudon: David Nutt. 1877.
whose final and complete utterance on the subject of his study is now for the first time before us. Not that there is any intention to claim for M. Vosmaer in this notice the credit of having dis- covered or imagined all that his portly volume now contains. Just as.a great artist, however individual and novel he may seem, cannot help being in part the product of his time and his fore- runners, so a good biography—especially when the subject of the biography has been dead two hundred years—cannot avoid indebtedness to work already accomplished. It is M. Vosmaer's merit to have combined the discreet use of material already accu- mulated and suggestions already made with the pursuit of fresh investigation. The result is a book that does at least as much for Rembrandt as Messrs. Crowe and Cavaleaselle's does for Titian. In both, perhaps, high literary skill is wanting, but no serious student of the masters can afford to dispense with either.
It is not unnatural that the periods of Rembrandt's life about which, until lately, there has been the most uncertainty, and the most of what has now proved to be quite incorrect conjecture, should be the periods of his childhood and his old age. It is in middle-life that a man is most in evidence. A child is rarely singled out for notice as likely to be greater than his fellows, and a man who has been illustrious pretty early—especially in art and literature—is apt to be a little overlooked in his later years, a new generation having waxed a little weary of work done for a preceding one. Rembrandt is no exception to the rule. Born of middle-class parents, presumably to nothing but a bourgeois success, his childhood was obscure. And again, the work of his art which was most heartily acclaimed was done in early man- hood and in his first maturity. M. Vosmaer, aided thereto by M. Scheltema, has been the first to establish the date of his birth. Rembrandt was born in Leyden on July 15, 1607. The death, too, until quite lately, has been wrapped in mystery. The last investigators, before M. Vosmaer, had indeed effectually disposed of the long-accepted story that the painter, after the misfortunes of the year 1656, had wandered to Stockholm and had died there miserably. But it was reserved for M. Vosmaer to show us, not only with more correctness, but with more of detail than his predecessors, what were the last years of Rembrandt,—to describe how Rembrandt, lifting himself with energy above his ill-luck, was established last of all in a comfortable house in a quiet suburb of Amsterdam, where, though the new tastes of the picture-buyers had made some of his former pupils richer now perhaps than himself, the great man was still esteemed and frequented by many in the artist-world. There, in his house on the Rosengracht, the master died, at the beginning of October, 1669. Registers show that he was buried on the 8th of that month in the Westerkirk.
Surpassed by none as a painter, and equalled by none as an etcher, Rembrandt had the good-fortune to leap early, almost suddenly, into success in both these arts. It is indeed surprising to find so early a date as that of 1628 affixed to the small, sketchy, bn,t absolutely exquisite etching of an old woman—his mother— known to connoisseurs as the "Old Woman lightly etched ; " a work perfect in technical quality, but not less perfect in its display of the artist's penetration into the last subtleties of character. The shrewdness, kindliness, and pleasantly flattered vanity of this old woman's face are caught with art and insight so complete, that further progress in this kind is already impossible,—and the etcher is twenty-one. But hardly lees surprising is it that only four years later, in 1632, we have one of his admitted master- pieces in painting—" The Lesson of Anatomy," now at the Hague—a work tentative and precise, it may be, in comparison with the masterpieces of his later time, but at all events of tre- mendous reality, a work dwelling necessarily in the memory of all who have seen it. One observer saw it the other day under circumstances perhaps somewhat peculiar, for he made a point of testing the accuracy of its representation of death by coming to it from the sight of actual death, and it stood that test as probably no other picture in the world would have stood it. Ribero, more obtrusively ghastly, is not half as veracious ; and Ribera's art relies on physical horror, while with Rembrandt this is still subordi- nated to the representation of the living with vivacity and vigour. Tulp, the expounder, and the clustering heads of his pupils are achievements not less visible than the dead body stretched out under his scissors. The masterly intellectual power of Rem- brandt was, then, displayed very early. His subsequent gain was chiefly a gain in technical qualities,—a change of manner, a more decisive sweep of the brush, and a confident passing to other work from work which, with however little of labour, did already record what wanted recording.
Two other great landmarks there are in the journey bf Rem-
brandt's life as an artist,—one of them, the picture miscalled the "Rondo de Nuit "—really, the "Company of Captain Banning Cock "—the other, the "Syndics." Both these works are at Amsterdam, the former the more popular,—a work of the middle period, noteworthy as the most elaborate of his canvases in com- position, colour, and action of the figures, but less interesting, it seems to us, than at least one other, in part for the very reason that it deals with complex materials, instead of ringing a charm out of few things and simple. That other is the " Syndics " itself, a work of the later time, which shows five grave burgher faces in their variety and similarity. The men are seated at a table, to discuss the affairs of their guild ; a servant, deferential, waits behind, and a timid light streams in on the oak wainscot of the wall. Of Rembrandt's portrait-groups this is the supreme one. Among the single portraits, we should place first the portrait of the "Burgomaster Six," now hanging in the drawing-room of that worthy's descendant, in the Herrengracht, the Park Lane of Amsterdam.
The devotees of Turner—of Turner only, in modern landscape —decline to see the excellence of the landscape of Rembrandt. Turner himself would have known better. Rembrandt's landscape paintings are so exceedingly rare, that it is to the etchings (them- selves rare) that recourse must be had. These show not only his adoption into landscape art of just those principles of reticent selection which governed him in his portraits—every touch made being a touch that told, and no touch that told being rendered ineffective by the presence of what did not tell— but they show his appreciation of the whole of the beauty that is to be found in the landscape of Holland,—a landscape of faintly undulating lines, of charm that 'wins slowly, a landscape of wide skies, with placid waters intersecting the else monotonous meadows. The charm of these gentle lines, these great distances, now clouded with mist and now lighted with sunshine, Rembrandt rendered with no modern assertion of detail, but with dignity that recoiled from no homeliness,—a greatness of style that never allowed him to lose sight of the ensemble. The better landscapes are chiefly of his middle period, and with regard to the circum- stances of their production, Mr. Haden has lately advanced an interesting theory, of which M. Vosmaer has not been able to take count.
M. Vosmaer himself is illuminating in the matter of Rem- brandt's relations with his wife, &AM Uylenburgh, and the important place she occupies in his work. M. Charles Blane was the earliest to get upon the track, the following up of which has resulted in the identification of Saskia not only with the so- called Jewish Bride (for Saskia was not a Jewess, but a near rela- tion of a famous Protestant preacher), but also with many other subjects of Rembrandt's etched and painted work. M. Vosmaer, however, has gone further than M. Charles Blanc—having tracked her portrait in half the museums of Europe—though he has stopped short of attributing as the portrait of Saskia in her last illness a pathetic etching of a woman barely middle-aged, but already in the last languors of suffering and decay. Saskia died after not many years of marriage, and the story that some timp after this event Rembrandt dissipated his goods, and led such a life that respectable Amsterdam declined to receive him, is shown by a little cool reasoning of M. Vosmaer's to be the idlest of gossip. In 1656, he and the relations of his wife, who had died many years before, are discovered to be still on good terms, though it is then that there is forced upon him that sale of his collection—drawings of the Italian masters and engravings of Lucas van Leyden—which at the time must have vexed his soul. But as we said before, the great man rose above that misfortune, and died years afterwards in sufficient prosperity.
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