Chapter 6

The art gallery of Cassel is well known to connoisseurs as containing a group of Rembrandts of the first order. The earliest example is a small painting of a boy's head supposed to be a portrait of the artist at the age of twenty or one and twenty; Dr. Bode considers 1628 too late rather than too early as the probable date, and the same authority warns us against considering such studies in the light of serious portraiture: "It had never occurred to the young artist," he says, "to make a dignified portrait of himself at the time when he painted these pictures." The execution is clumsy, the color is dull and heavy and of the brownish tone common to Rembrandt's early painting, and much of the drawing--as in the rings of hair escaping to the surface from the thick curling mass--is meaningless and indefinite, but the distribution of light and shade is not unlike that of Rembrandt's later work and the touch has a certain bold freedom that seems to have been his from the first whenever he served as his own model, even while his handling was still hard and prim in his portraits of others. Another work ascribed to his early period, about 1634, is the "Man with a Helmet," also commonly known as a self-portrait, fluent in execution and vivacious and lifelike in expression, yet not without that hint of conscious pose common with the artist in his endeavors to force the note of character. The blunt, strong features are strikingly like those of the authenticated portraits of the artist, but Dr. Karl Voll, Director of the Alt Pinakothek at Munich, declares that the idea of a "self-portrait," attractive as it is, can hardly in this case be upheld. Whoever the sitter may have been, the painting is an amazing example of dexterity of hand and acute observation. The sharp glitter of the helmet, the contrasting flesh-like quality of the painting in the face, the light vigorous drawing of the moustache and hair, give an impression of the artist's mastery of his craft hardly to be surpassed at any period of his life. Far less poetic in its color-scheme and chiaro-oscuro than the youthful portrait belonging to Mrs. Gardiner's collection, it is even more eloquent of the ease with which he managed his tools. Of a still greater charm, with subtler problems met and solved, is the portrait of Saskia van Ulenburgh, whom he married in Amsterdam in the year 1634, the probable date of the Cassel portrait. At all events the young woman carries in her hand a spray of rosemary, the symbol of betrothal, and her dress has the richness of a Dutch bride's equipment. Here we see Rembrandt's art in perhaps its most delicate and psychologically interesting phase. The character revealed by the small pretty features has neither extraordinary force nor marked individuality. The lines are neither deep-cut nor broad. One is reminded of a fine little etching in which the plate has been bitten only to a moderate depth and which requires a sensitive handling in the printing to produce anything like richness. Yet the result is rich in the fullest sense of the term. It depends for its quality not only upon the splendid color-scheme formed by the dark red of the velvet hat and gown, the white of the feather, the gold and gray and dull blue of the trimmings and ornaments, the beautiful jewels, with which Rembrandt then as later produced an appearance of great magnificence, the bright red-gold of the hair falling lightly over the softly modeled brow, and the fair warm tones of the flesh glowing as from living health and physical energy: it depends as much upon the deep research into the expression that has resulted in the intimate portraiture possible only to genius and seldom found even in the work of the great masters, never, so far as the writer's observation has gone, in the work of their later years. The smile that hesitates at the corner of the whimsical little mouth, the tender modulations of surface on the forehead and about the straight-gazing honest eyes, the swift suggestions of movement and play of mood in the flexible contours, the gaiety and sweetness and singular purity of the girlish face, are evoked with magisterial authority and precision. Never surely has there been a finer example of Dutch care and thoroughness in the observation and rendering of minute detail united to breadth of effect. The painting of the jewels and embroideries is wrought to a singularly perfect finish. It is almost as though the artist had set himself to extract the utmost beauty of which the textures of stuffs and gems are capable, to prove how much more enchanting was the beauty of the brilliant blond demure little face daintily poised above them. Dr. Bode calls the picture "one of the most attractive, not only of his early pictures, but of all his works."

To Rembrandt's early years also are ascribed certain careful studies of old men's heads and several portraits of younger men. Among these are one of the writing-master Coppenol and one of the poet Krul, the former painted in 1632, the latter in 1633. The Krul portrait is the more striking of the two, and the pictorial costume with the broad hat casting its lucent shadow over the fine brow, the silken jacket with its gleaming reflections and the wide white ruffles at neck and sleeve on which the light blazes full, adds to the dignity and richness of the effect. It is easy, however, to agree with Dr. Voll in ranking the splendid portrait of an unknown man, of some five or six years later date, far above the Krul portrait in artistic quality. Although excessively warm in tone it has in addition to excellent construction and a lifelike aspect a nobility of bearing that imposes itself directly and irresistibly upon the spectator.

The portrait of Coppenol is not easily analyzed and Dr. Bode notes that the likeness to the authenticated portraits of the famous drawing master is not altogether convincing. Simpler and homelier in appearance than the portrait of Krul, this solid and even heavy figure seated comfortably in an armchair, the well-drawn hands busy with mending a quill pen, the glance reflective, but hardly thoughtful, the mouth under the small fair moustache slightly indeterminate, the head covered with short hair, the smooth fat face three-quarters in light, presents at first glance a commonplace aspect enough. But returning to it from the Krul or even from the more masterly later portrait, the spectator is certain to be deeply impressed by the quiet yet searching execution that takes account of every significant change in plane or outline in the large cheek and full chin. From the very commonplace of the pose and type one gains a special pleasure, since the power of the artist to irradiate an ordinary subject is the more clearly seen. The serene light enveloping the good head and falling gently on the background brings no thought of method or pigment to the mind, and the fleshlike quality of the face and hands is as near imitation of reality as is possible within the bounds of synthetic art. It is easy to agree with Dr. Bode's opinion that the homely simple portraits painted in ordinary costume and under ordinary conditions of light during Rembrandt's first three years in Amsterdam are intellectually more worth while than the earlier more personal works. The theory is that he turned them out in competition with his contemporaries and eclipsed them on their own ground.

The portrait of "Rembrandt's Father in Indoor Dress," of the preceding year (1631), is in a quite different manner, and closely resembles the painting in Boston of an old man with downcast eyes, from the same model. The bald head and scanty beard, the wrinkled face and slightly uncertain mouth, are familiar to all students of Rembrandt's art. In 1631 Rembrandt was still in his father's house and one gains some notion of the old miller's amiability from the frequency with which he appeared in etchings and paintings and the variety of the poses which he took on behalf of his ardent son, adjusting his expression to his assumed character with no little dramatic skill. Never in his later years did Rembrandt so delicately render the patience and discipline of age. In this alert, unprepossessing yet kindly face we can read a not too fanciful history of the temperament of the sitter. We see, at all events, the mark of a sympathetic mind.

The next picture in the collection to mark a special period and one of brilliant achievement in Rembrandt's career is the so-called "Woodcutter's Family," belonging to the decade between 1640 and 1650. After an old fashion the Holy Family is represented as seen in a painting before which a curtain is partly drawn. The mother sits by the side of a cradle from which she has lifted the child who clings to her neck while she presses him to her in a close embrace. In the farther corner of the room is the figure of the father in his carpenter's apron, and in the center a cat is crouching near some dishes on the floor. The room is filled with a mild sunlight that filters through the air and falls across the figures of the mother and child and across the broad expanse of floor. The simplicity and poetic feeling in lighting and gesture are worthy of Rembrandt's prime, and there is no trace of the extreme drama that marks the religious compositions at Munich. The color is beautiful and the tone mysterious. Nevertheless one misses the precious quality of the earlier craftmanship as it shines in such lovely paintings as the "Saskia" and the "Portrait of a Young Woman." In these the painter shows that he was still young, that he had arrived at a skill of hand that permitted him to use his medium with ease and certainty, but that he had not yet ceased to attempt what lay just beyond his powers. His brush still sought out subtle refinements of modeling with the patience that allied him to the earlier Dutch and Flemish masters. He had, no doubt, the instinctive feeling of ardent youth, the assumption of time ahead for the carrying out of all projects, and his brilliant manipulations of his pigment showed neither haste, nor as yet the complete confidence that leaves untold the detail of the story for the imagination of the audience to supply. He was not ready to sacrifice everything else to that light and atmosphere of which he made his own world in his later years. Characteristic of his most winning use of this light that he created for his own purposes is the portrait of Nicholas Bruyningh, Secretary of one of the divisions of the Courts of Justice at Amsterdam: one of the most salient and brilliant of the Rembrandts in the Cassel Gallery. This portrait belongs to the year 1652 when the artist was about forty-five years old, and it is a superb example of matured genius. The subject offered an opportunity for daring handling and pictorial arrangement upon which Rembrandt seized with a full understanding of its possibilities. The beautiful gay face with its suggestion of irresponsibility glows from a mist of atmosphere that veils all minor detail, leaving in strong relief the mass of curling hair, the smiling dark eyes, the smiling mouth unconcealed by the slight moustache, the firmly modeled nose and pliant chin, with the tasseled collar below catching the point of highest light. It is the poetry of good humor, of physical beauty, of content with life and life's adventures. It also marks what Herr Knackfuss calls Rembrandt's "softer manner" in which all sharp outlines of objects are effaced, and the lights gleam from a general darkness. More than "The Sentinel," which sometimes is given as the starting point for this departure in style, it has the appearance of a dramatic emergence from shadow. From having been a painstaking craftsman Rembrandt at this time had become a dramatist selecting from his material those elements best adapted to sway the emotions. He has lost himself--or found himself--in the expression of character; not merely character as one element in a picture's interest, but character as _the_ element. In this picture of Nicholas Bruyningh we cannot escape from the merry careless temperament. We cannot as in the early portrait of Saskia linger in dalliance over charming accessories and beautifully discriminated textures until we reach by moderate degrees the eloquence of the profoundly studied face. Bruyningh's face is like the "_tirade_" of a French play--it is rendered at white heat and in one inconceivably long breath. Its significance is so intensified as to produce a profound feeling in a sympathetic spectator.

If we compare it with the badly named "Laughing Cavalier" of Franz Hals we see clearly enough the difference between drama and realism. Drama as defined by Robert Louis Stevenson consists not of incident but of passion that must progressively increase in order that the actor may be able to "carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest and emotion." This also defines Rembrandt's painting at all periods. As one approaches the human face in his pictures one becomes aware of an emotional quality that is irresistible, and in a portrait like that of Bruyningh the emotional quality is almost isolated from incident or detail. It is the great moment of the third act when the audience holds its breath.

"The Standard Bearer" is not accepted by Dr. Bode as a fine work or even as certainly original, the version of the same subject in Baron G. du Rothschild's collection having made much deeper an impression upon him. The Cassel version is nevertheless a work of great distinction, the grave and beautiful face and shining armor looking out of a luminous atmosphere that has more of the Rembrandtesque quality than many authenticated works of Rembrandt's riper period. The work is engaging, personal, striking, and if not entirely great certainly possessed of many of the qualities of greatness.

While the Cassel collection does not contain any of the superb self portraits of Rembrandt's later years, the one example in this kind having authority without great interest, it does include one biblical picture of unusual importance belonging to the year 1656, the "Jacob Blessing his Grandchildren," which is, however, unfinished. The square, direct brush strokes suggest those of Hals, the drapery is thinly painted with a flowing medium, the black shadows on the face of Jacob cut sharply into the half tones, there is little discrimination in the textures and the background comes forward. But the faces of the children are charming in characterization, recalling the simple tenderness of the "Girl Leaning Out of the Window" at Dulwich, one of the most enchanting embodiments of youth ever achieved by Rembrandt, and the woman, Israelitish in type, with large eyes and features rather abruptly defined, is an attractive attempt to realize feminine beauty, a task in which Rembrandt was never dexterous, however.

Of the two landscapes, that with the ruined castle is the most impressive, but neither compares favorably with the dainty perfection of the landscape etchings.

If we add to these examples the studies of old men's heads and the delightful portrait of the artist's sister holding a pink in her hand, we realize that the group as a whole covers many phases of Rembrandt's constantly changing inspiration. He betrayed in his later works the impatience of those to whom few years are left in which to complete their accomplishment, but he kept the sensitiveness of his youth well into his brief prime, although he transferred it from the field of form to that of light. It betrays itself in the quality of that light which absorbs all that is ugly, coarse, or ultra real in its poetizing glamour. From the tender explicit craftsmanship of the wonderful Saskia to the golden mist enveloping the figure of Nicholas Bruyningh, is a long step, but not longer than many a painter has taken in his progress from youth to maturity. The special comment upon Rembrandt's character as a painter which we are able to gather from the Cassel pictures is that in casting off the trammels of particularity he did not become less receptive to poetic influences. He grew more and more a dreamer, and in losing the clear objective manner of his early portraits he substituted not the idle carelessness which in the work of a painter's later years is apt to be condoned as freedom, but the generalization that excludes vulgarities of execution and makes necessary increased mastery of the difficult craft of painting.

FANTIN-LATOUR

VIII

FANTIN-LATOUR

Fantin-Latour was born in 1836, was the son of a painter, and was educated at Paris under his father's guidance and that of Lecoq and Boisbaudeau, professor at a little art school connected with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. One of the most interesting painters of the little group in France whose work began to come before the public about the middle of the nineteenth century, a close friend of Whistler, a passionate admirer of Delacroix, and an inspired student of the old masters, he managed to preserve intact an individuality that has a singular richness and simplicity seen against the many-colored tapestry of nineteenth-century art. Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Nicolaas Maas, Pieter de Hooch and Vermeer of Delft, Watteau and Chardin, Van Dyck, Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese were his true masters and his copies of their works are said by his enlightened critic, M. Arsène Alexandre, to have a masterly quality of their own, to be far removed from the conventionality of facsimiles, and to bear upon an underlying fidelity of transcription an impress of individual sentiment. He sought to be faithful to the originals beyond external imitation, by seeking to render the original tone of the painting in its first freshness, as it appeared before time and varnish had yellowed and darkened it. He thus made himself familiar with the technical methods of the great periods of painting, and, coming into his inheritance of modern ideas and ideals, he was able to achieve a beauty of execution much too rarely sought by his contemporaries, although his intimate companions like himself frequented the Louvre with a considerable assiduity, spending upon the old masters the enthusiasm which they withheld from the later academic school of painting.

His earlier subjects were largely Biblical and historical. He then passed to domestic scenes and in 1859, 1861, and 1863 was painting his pictures of _Les Liseurs_ and _Les Brodeuses_ which showed the charming face of his sister with her sensitive smiling mouth and softly modeled brows, and later that of his wife. At the Salon of 1859 he and Whistler both submitted subjects drawn from family life, Whistler his _At the Piano_ with his own sister and his niece, little Annie Haden, for the models, and Fantin his painting of young women embroidering and reading, only to have their canvases refused. Fantin was not, however, a martyr to his predilections in art. He early obtained admission to the Salon although he had enough rejected work to permit him to appear among the painters exhibiting in the famous little "Salon des Refusés" of 1863. He received medals and official recognitions. But his modesty of taste led him to hold himself somewhat apart and exclusive among those who shared his likings. His portrait of himself, painted in 1858, shows a dreamy young man with serious, almost solemn, eyes, sitting before his easel, and looking into the distance with the expression of one who sees visions.

As a matter of fact he did see visions and attempted to fix them with his art. An ardent lover of music, he was eager to translate the emotions aroused by it into the terms of his own art. As early as 1859 he was in England, to which he returned in 1861 and 1864, and while there he was surrounded by a group of people who shared his enthusiasm for German music. There he first became familiar with Schumann's melodies, and made the rare little etching representing his English friends, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, playing one of Schumann's compositions, Edwards with his flute and Mrs. Edwards at the piano. In 1862 he had the very tempered satisfaction of finding that Wagner, already beloved by him, had reached the public taste through the labors of the courageous Pasdeloup. "I always regret," he wrote to Edwards, "seeing the objects of my adoration adored by others, especially by the masses. I am very jealous when I love."

In order to celebrate Wagner's triumph over these masses, however, he at once made the lithograph called _Venusberg_, from which sprang the very different oil version of the same subject which together with the _Hommage à Delacroix_, the story of which M. Bénédite has recounted, was admitted to the Salon of 1864. Fantin's lithographs, a number of which are in the print room of the Lenox Library building in New York City, show clearly his preoccupation with music, and an interesting article on this phase of his temperament appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, September 15, 1906. Naturally a worshiper, he did not confine himself to commemorating only the musicians who were his favorites. In lithography and painting he exalted such diverse heroes of the different arts as Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Manet, Schumann, Weber, Berlioz, and Wagner. In 1877 his enthusiasm for Wagner revived in his work, and compositions based on the Ring music followed each other in rapid succession. Wolfram gazing at the evening star, or following with enchanted eyes Elizabeth's ghostly figure as it moves slowly up the hill toward the towers of Wartburg; the Rhine maidens playing with rhythmic motions in the swirling waters, with Alberic, crouched in the foreground, watching them; Sieglinde, giving Siegmund to drink, as hounded and pursued he sinks at the door of Hunding's dwelling; the evocation of Kundry by Klingner; Siegfried blowing his horn and receding from the enticements of the Rhine maidens--these are among the subjects that engaged him. It would be difficult to describe his manner of interpretation. Quite without theatrical suggestion, it combines a dramatic use of dark and light and a feeling for palpable atmosphere hardly equaled by Rembrandt himself, with a remarkably certain touch. Nothing could better emphasize the value of technical drill to a poetic temperament than these imaginative drawings. In them Fantin gives full rein to his emotional delight in tender visions and twilight dreams. The lovely rhythm of his lines, the rise and fall of his sensitive shadows and lights that play and interplay in as strict obedience to law as the waves of the sea, his delicate modeling by which he brings form out of nebulous half-tones with the slightest touches, the least discernible accents, the accurate bland drawing, the ordered composition, the subtle spacing, the innumerable indications of close observation of life--all these qualities combine to give an impression of fantasy and reality so welded and fused as to be indistinguishable to the casual glance.