Part 8

Between that early etching, the first of his mother’s portraits, and this final one, his last record of the body, to which he has imparted a slimmer charm than the charm that belonged unquestionably to Hendrickje Stoffels, the young and sympathetic companion of his later years--recorded, opulent and somewhat sensuous, in the great Edinburgh picture,--the range of Rembrandt, in about three hundred prints, is almost inconceivably great. Several of his plates, and these not really the least attractive, are, like the rare sheet of studies, with the portrait of Rembrandt himself (No. 82 in the catalogue of Mr. Middleton-Wake), so to put it, thumb-nail sketches as he passed upon his way and was struck and interested by this or that countenance, this or that gesture. Many deal with Sacred Subjects, and invariably with a directness, a homeliness, one might say almost, that is his alone. It would have been impossible so to have conceived the incidents of Bible Story if Rembrandt had not so profoundly believed in them. The conventional and perfunctory are altogether banished. And though, for reasons that the present place would not perhaps be quite the fittest for dwelling on, the Sacred Subjects of this great Dutch master do not attract or charm as the portraits and the landscapes do, there is yet in them a world of material for serious study: in them invention and imagination enrich a treatment fortified already by closeness of observation. His mind is stored; his spirit is devout. In the ‘Death of the Virgin’ he takes advantage of tradition--gives us therefore not only St. Joseph moved at his loss, St. Luke with hand on wrist as feeling the pulse of the dying, but (as Mr. Middleton-Wake reminds us) a company of Apostles, brought miraculously, legend says, from distant missions; and, above, are angels and cherubim. A religious composition better known to the public, is the ‘Christ healing the Sick,’ or, as it is called often, ‘The Hundred-Guilder Print.’ It got that latter name because, during that portion of his life in which Rembrandt was popular, the then substantial sum of a hundred guilders was wont to be obtained for it, when, out of Rembrandt’s studio, an impression of it was sold. Its intense reality and homely pathos--the qualities in it which have influenced, so greatly, later and now living etchers, like Legros and William Strang--gave it immediate value. And since those days a fine impression has always had its price, though it should be said here that the difference in money value, established more particularly in our own generation, between a fine impression of the most rare ‘First State’ of this plate and the less rare but often as desirable ‘Second,’ is a fantastic difference, dependent only upon relative difficulty of acquisition. Thank goodness, even now a twenty-pound note will buy sometimes a most desirable Rembrandt etching. A couple of hundred guineas is required to buy a fine impression of the Second State of the ‘Hundred Guilder’; and of a First State, could it come into the market, there is every reason for knowing that two thousand pounds would be about the ransom.

In various branches of his practice, Rembrandt’s fame is about equally dependent on picture, drawing, and original print; but I take leave to ask the reader to impress upon his mind that in one branch, the branch of Landscape, that is not so at all. Lord Lansdowne’s ‘Mill,’ a famous landscape at Cassel, and a few other landscapes scattered about collections private and public, could not, however undeniable their art and however complete their charm, secure for Rembrandt that exalted place amongst the makers of Landscape which the drawings give, and which is given yet more by the etchings. It may be asked, naturally enough, ‘Why were Rembrandt’s painted landscapes so few--his mastery being so great?’ The answer is, that like our own Gainsborough’s, a century later, they were painted, most of them, for his own personal delight. The painted landscape of Rembrandt could not have been warmly appreciated by a generation that made difficult the life of Hobbema, and that extended welcome less to Wynants and De Koninck than to the Dutchmen who had become Italianised in theme and treatment. How, then, about the drawings and the etchings? Well, the truth is, with these it mattered little. The drawings were generally masterly brief studies. In the case of the etchings even, hours, not weeks, for the most part--a day and not a month--had been bestowed on the performance. For Rembrandt, with at least some other sources of income, it was enough to have had the delight of execution; and then, here and there a friend--the Burgomaster Six perhaps, or Uytenbogaert, the Receiver-General to the States of Holland--would want an impression or so. There was the little sketch ‘Six’s Bridge’--a decisive, plain-sailing, by no means particularly picturesque record of the wooden way whose name is associated with Rembrandt’s lifelong friend. There is the ‘Goldweigher’s Field’--his estate, rather: the estate of Uytenbogaert, lying a few miles from Amsterdam; its pavilion and ornamental water, the surrounding lands, the modest, heathy uplands, the trees and towers, a bird’s-eye view, a very panorama of slightly undulating plain that stretches to the Zuyder Zee. Of Rembrandt’s etched landscapes--which are rare generally--this is one of the rarer, one of the more important. Art like that does not captivate at just the first glance at it; but, with knowledge, comes a deep appreciation of the vision and the chronicle.

Two other landscapes I should wish to name as at least the equals of this one, and both of them, it may be, are easier to receive, easier for the little-trained eye to enjoy promptly. One is the ‘Large Landscape with a Cottage and Dutch Hay-barn’; the other is the ‘Landscape with a Ruined Tower.’ The first is a record of sunshine; the second, of the more dramatic weather that threatens storm. The first is the more intricate. Little in keeping with the fashions of our moment, in the art of landscape, is it to present within the limits of a single composition a view so varied and so elaborately wrought. But Rembrandt, even more than Turner, could achieve without any loss of unity of impression the presentation or suggestion of every fact of the scene; and the piece remains ‘modern,’ though a Classic. The ‘Landscape with a Ruined Tower’--broad, decisive, concentrated--is, in a sense, an anticipation of the method of Constable: the interest lying less in formal elegance of line or placid light than in the strong realisation of the forces of Nature--a vivid broad illumination and an ominous shadow, and the expression of these exalting somehow the features of an everyday land, as emotion transfigures a face. The ‘tower,’ the close observer may inform me--thinking of the title--is not ‘ruined’; for here is its domed roof. Yes, but the domed roof is in the First State only, and that is so rare that it is doubtful if it had ever been examined by the cataloguer who bestowed upon the etching the name by which it is still known.

Although the etched Landscape of Rembrandt, in its singular union of simplicity and learning, in the close, uncustomary alliance of Style with personal impression, stands well-nigh alone, and suffices as the basis of a reputation as great as Titian’s, Claude’s, or Poussin’s--and one which now, with only slight and temporary declension, has endured for two hundred years--we have yet to give consideration to his triumph in that branch of Art with which, in the mind of the average educated person, he is more generally identified--I mean Portraiture: which means to some the taking of superficial likeness, and to some the revelation of character.

For this reason and that, every industrious and thoughtful, as well as every careless, student of pictorial Art, has his own favourites in Portraiture: there is our pride in Reynolds, our joy in Gainsborough, our wonder at the magic of Velasquez, our steady confidence in truth when Holbein is the draughtsman, our grave and brooding satisfaction over the august portraiture of the Venetians. But Rembrandt unites men’s suffrages--carries with him even those who admire most warmly this painter’s unswerving veracity and that one’s fluent grace. And as one thinks what was the human material which furnished elements for the creations of Rembrandt--the old men and the women and the youths of Amsterdam--one thinks all the more, how exalted was the vision, and yet how firmly with his feet on earth stood the man to whom it was vouchsafed! Over and over again, the needle, as the brush, of Rembrandt, has been occupied with a face which had no beauty--at all events no formal beauty--that we should desire him. He has given it interest and dignity--dignity without a touch of the artificial or pretentious; the dignity of the individual soul in its best hours. He did this more or less at all times, but he did it more markedly in his later time than in his earlier; for, wonderful as was the completeness of Rembrandt’s art within its self-set limits in even his earliest time, he had, in common with most of the greatest of creative and critical intellects, that gift of long development, of steady progression. Rembrandt was no juvenile prodigy. As time passed, as experience gathered, as misfortunes saddened--at all events in certain lonely hours--the spirit of a man of whom upon the whole indeed it may be said, he

‘rose distinct Above slave-sorrows, to his chariot linked,’

Rembrandt’s command of the instruments of his employment became only more complete, if also his method was more summary. More and more sonorous were the notes he uttered, and the _vox humana_ stop, which is absent in colder craftsmen, sounded with increased frequency and more assured appeal.

Of course in Portraiture, though he succeeds always, he succeeds best when his themes are the best. With the exception of ‘Clément de Jonghe,’ with the exception of ‘Lutma,’ with the exception perhaps of ‘Jan Six’--etched by him many years before he wrought the noble painted portrait which is owned still by a descendant of its sitter (Mr. Six van Hillegom of Amsterdam)--Rembrandt is most profoundly interesting, most penetrating, most sympathetic, when it is this or that member of his own family who serves as his model. Once or twice at least he portrayed the features of his son; several times those of his mother, whom in the ‘Mère de Rembrandt au voile noir’ he records in an hour of austere and guarded meditation, as in the ‘Head of a Woman lightly etched’ he records her in the relaxation of social ease. Many times, in drawing, print, and picture, he portrayed his wife, Saskia--in moods that seemed to vary with his own: now perched upon his knee, in the Dresden canvas of almost aggressive buoyancy and self-satisfaction; now demure and pretty, in a Berlin drawing; now radiant and almost stately in the ‘Great Jewish Bride,’ so it is said--though I find least witness of her here--now the healthy, blameless animal of Mrs. Joseph’s golden canvas; now the sick, worn woman, with vitality gone, eye dimmed, life surely ebbing, of the lovely and pathetic little etching which Sir Seymour Haden was, I think, the first to christen ‘The Dying Saskia.’

But oftener than he depicted any member of his family--and oftener much than he thought fit to give expression to the cordial youthful face and ample contours of Hendrickje Stoffels, the agreeable consolation of his age--he had recourse to his own countenance. In the great series of what the Germans call ‘self-portraits’ we may trace the changes in his air from spirited youth to burdened years. To-day he is comely, clean, and fit. To-morrow, after a night of revelry, it may be--for from few human experiences did Rembrandt, any more than Goethe, stand aside--he is haggard and ‘to pieces.’ Then he is proud in cap and feather; he buckles on his sword. Or, aged a little, he paints himself in loose gown, palette in hand, it may be, and mahl-stick at his side. Then, heavy and stooping, baggy below the eyes, with mouth tender yet saddened, trouble has come upon him from all the ends of the earth. He totters, scarcely yet irresolute, but weighed down certainly by years and sorrows; his wife long gone; his fame obscured; his means narrow; and, save for the sustaining power of his art, and one hopes, at least, for the consolation of one deep affection, anxiety in all his hours. We will not leave him like this--though like this we find him in Lord Iveagh’s immortal picture, and in one or two representations of kindred character in Vienna and at St. Petersburg. We will leave him happy in his drawing. It is an etching of scarcely surpassable interest, existing in many ‘States’--a print to be avoided in the later, which are flat and expressionless; to be cherished in all the earlier, of which the first is rarest and most vigorous. See its slashing directness. With blow to left and blow to right, so to say it, on the copper, he hacks his way triumphantly and speedily to his goal. He is the master of all methods. Here, as in so much besides, he has been broad and rapid. In the ‘Burgomaster Six’--which has something of the quality of a mezzotint--how tender and how slow! In the ‘Clément de Jonghe’--the printseller of Amsterdam--how large yet subtle! He is the master of many an instrument. We can apply to him the phrase, and the implied eulogy, of Robert Browning--he ‘blows through brass,’ but he can ‘breathe through silver.’

(_Pall Mall Magazine_, December 1898.)

DUTCH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DRAWINGS

The drawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools, and of all Schools besides, have these sources of interest, always admitted--they reveal to us, as studies must, the personal thought of the master in his theme, and they may often be identified as preparations for some long recognised picture with whose history we are henceforth to be the better acquainted. But some among the drawings of the Dutch School, though coming late indeed in the procession of the world’s Art, are still the earliest to possess for us that different and self-contained interest which belongs to work done for its proper sake, itself realising the intention with which it was begun, and so, in the first form in which it comes down to us, at once final and complete.

The School of Holland--that northern School to which at last, in the great Seventeenth Century, supremacy in Art had moved--was perhaps the first to adequately feel the value of those immediate impressions which the Italians and the early Flemish had recognised chiefly to control, to alter, to enlarge. And in the many methods of their Art, the masters of Holland sought to perpetuate for the beholders of their work the impressions which to themselves who recorded them had perhaps been as fleeting as vivid. Sketches in oil, sketches in water-colour, sketches in chalk, in bistre, and with the reed pen, and sketches with the etching needle--these all, in the hands of the great Dutchmen, were not merely studies for themselves, but possessions for their public, just as expressive and interesting as work more prolonged and elaborate. Therefore the amount of finish which each of such finished sketches received was not the important matter: with the greatest artists the amount was often but small: they knew that the important matter was the sufficiency of finish--its capacity for conveying to one mind the impression received by another.

And it is characteristic of Dutch Art, and especially of Dutch Landscape Art, that it had no period of painful and tentative labour, like that during which the art of earlier schools had had to struggle slowly towards freedom of expression. Profiting no doubt by the experience of the Past, and the recent Past especially of Bruges and of Leyden, it gained almost at once the power of finish always expressive, always economical, yet often very swift and summary. The work of its earliest masters--Roghman say, and Van Goyen--has neither pettiness of manipulation when it is most delicate, nor uncertainty when it is most rapid. The signs of an art mature and masculine--economy of means, decision of hand--are promptly upon it. Roghman, it appears, made few pictures, but many drawings. There are five-and-twenty in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. His drawings must have been acceptable to the public of his day, and they show that a public then existed capable of the intelligent interpretation of the work of an artist who left much to be interpreted. Van Goyen, if he did not make many drawings, painted many pictures with at least as marked an economy of means as he has used in the few drawings we know. His science of large design and the expressive completeness of his gradations of tone, enabled him--often in picture and drawing alike--to dispense with the easier attraction of various colour, so that even a modern master of colour, Théodore Rousseau, was wont to hold him up as a model to his own pupils.

Van Goyen travelled, and Roghman travelled, but their art, like that of Rembrandt--their younger and greater contemporary, who remained at home--continued to be not an imported art, but an art of the soil; and it was only at a later period that the experience of travel, and the contact with an art very different from their own, were to bring to the Dutchmen a new method with a false ideal. There was first the true Dutch time, rich and fertile--a time in which Van Goyen painted, with a seeming monotony always delicately varied, the long river banks, the low-lying towns, and the great high skies of Holland; in which Cuyp fixed interest on the common aspects of the afternoon fields, steaming in moist sunshine; in which Adrian van Ostade passed from the vulgarities of the alehouse to the skilfully rendered charm of the cottage door and the bench in the sunlight; in which Jan Steen perfected himself in as keen and comprehensive a knowledge of the world of men as Art has ever displayed; and in which Rembrandt contentedly imaged Dutch life and landscape, always with nearly equal vigour, nearly equal artistic precision, though at one time in a style that formed the style of Gerard Dow and at another in one that was inherited by Philip de Koningh or by Nicholas Maas.

There were various local centres for these various workers and their works. Leyden itself was a centre--the birthplace of Rembrandt, the birthplace of Van Goyen. The Hague became a centre, and Van Goyen removed to it; Amsterdam a centre, and Rembrandt was a leader there. But Haarlem was the favourite, and probably because of the privileges that belonged to the Guild of St. Luke--St. Luke, the painters’ patron saint--which was established in that town. The Guild of St. Luke at Haarlem has left us valuable records--not indeed the raciest, but certainly among the most trustworthy we can hope to have access to--upon Dutch Art, which has wanted always, and wants to-day, a trustworthy general historian. Laurens Van der Winne (as the Dutch writer, M. van der Willigen, tells us, in his _Artistes d’Harlem_), towards the end of the seventeenth century, made a list of one hundred and seventy-four men who in his time were all reputed as good painters, and whom he had personally known. His son, in 1702, after the father’s death, noted that of these only sixteen were then living; and the grandson, possessing himself of manuscript books and account-books of the period, was able to enlarge the list of early members of the Guild, and to add to our knowledge of its laws. ‘No one without the pale of the Society could sell or introduce his pictures. Many painters thus found themselves obliged to join the brotherhood in order to enjoy its advantages. Every year two sales were announced by the officer of the Society; each member could bring to the sale whatever he desired to sell.’ ‘Many painters were attracted to the town,’ for lesser or longer periods; but, though many painters contributed to the Guild, ‘it appears,’ writes the Haarlem citizen, ‘that they did not all live here.’ Notwithstanding the advantages of the Guild, the profession of painting was not lucrative for the many. Even the busiest and most prolific artists, like Wouvermans, were debtors sometimes to men who befriended them. Others were so indigent that they must needs be excused their payment of the yearly moneys to the brotherhood. In 1661, Frans Hals, the greatest of the Haarlem masters, found himself in this circumstance. Haarlem, since his death, has happily delighted to honour him.

The art of Holland, like the national life, saw many vicissitudes during that eventful Seventeenth Century; and the second half of the century brought changes of taste and fashion, which cast for a while into the shade even such supreme art as the art of Rembrandt. Leaders of social opinion were not proof against the attractions of the work of Both and Berghem, which sacrificed so much that it might gain, as it did gain, the outland charm of southern colour and southern light; and the friend of Rembrandt, Jan Six, as one of many, showed himself in the later years of the century a convert to that newer and brilliant but bastard art. By the time that Cuyp and Wynants had died old and Adrian Van de Velde had died young--when the seventeenth century was entering its fourth quarter--there remained among the home-bred landscape painters hardly one to hold his own against the newer fashion. Hobbema, it is true, worked on, with great and patient fidelity, but he worked unregarded and died poor.

And in other branches of Art, after this time, the school declined. William Van de Velde and Backhuysen--the two great painters of the sea and the fleet--had had a worthy precursor in Renier Zeeman, but they had no worthy successors. The best painters of gentle life and of the life of the tavern were falling away. In the comparatively humble but yet delightful field of ‘still life,’ only, could the early years of the Eighteenth Century surpass the achievements of fifty years before. The admired painter of flowers, Jan Van Huysum--whose drawings are seen in large numbers at the British Museum, and whose work is known, perhaps, at its best and boldest in his drawings--then arose. He was one of a whole family of flower and fruit painters; and not the only one who gave some excuse for the ecstasy of a French novelist who was also a connoisseur. Balzac declared of him that his work would hardly be paid for if it were covered with diamonds. But Michael, his kinsman, was perhaps almost as worthy of that praise. To their work succeeded, far on in the Eighteenth Century, the vulgar mimicry of Van Os, with the colours of the chromo-lithograph. And as to Landscape Art--that, free once more from Italian influence, was indeed natural and Dutch again in its aim, with Van Stry especially; but in its practice it insisted rather upon the importance of detail than upon the value of effect. Jacob Cats carried to its last length the trivial elaboration which had become the fashion of his day. The virtue had gone out of Dutch Art, and Dutch Art faded imperceptibly into modern painting.