Saskia By Rembrandt.
When Rembrandt painted his bride Saskia,[28] for instance, the extent to which he exercised his simplifying and transfiguring power is amazing, and precludes all possibility of our classing this work among the portraits which should be condemned. He knew perfectly well that poor Saskia was not beautiful—what beautiful girl would have condescended to look at Rembrandt?—so what did he do? He cast all the upper and right side of her face in shadow, and deliberately concentrated all his attention, and consequently the attention of the beholder as well, upon three or four square inches of nice round muscle in the lower part of Saskia's young cheek and neck. But how many plain daughters of rich bourgeois would allow three or four square inches of their cheek and neck to be exalted in this way, at the cost of their eyes and their nose and their brow? The same remarks also apply to Rembrandt's "Jewish Rabbi" in the National Gallery. There he had to deal with an emaciated, careworn old Jew. How did he overcome the difficulty? All of you who know this picture will be able to answer this question for yourselves, and I need not, therefore, go into the matter.
This, then, is not the class of portrait work which need necessarily deteriorate the power of art. What does deteriorate this power, is that other and more common class of portrait painting which began in Holland in the seventeenth century, and in which each sitter insisted upon discovering all his little characteristics and individual peculiarities; in which, as Muther says, each sitter wished to find "a counterfeit of his personality," and in which "no artistic effect, but resemblance alone was the object desired."[29]
It was the insistence upon this kind of portrait work by the wealthy bourgeoisie of England, which well-nigh drove Whistler, with his ruler spirit, out of his mind, and it is precisely this portrait work which is dominant to-day. In order to be pleasing and satisfactory to the people who demand it, this class of painting presupposes the suppression of all those first principles upon which Ruler-Art relies in order to flourish and to soar; and where it is seriously and earnestly pursued, art is bound to suffer.
This was recognized three hundred years ago by the Spanish theoretician Vincenti Carducho, and his judgment still remains the wisest that has ever been written on the subject. In formulating the credo of the sixteenth century, he wrote as follows—
"No great and extraordinary painter was ever a portraitist, for such an artist is enabled by judgment and acquired habit to improve upon nature. In portraiture, however, he must confine himself to the model, whether it be good or bad, with sacrifice of his observation and selection; which no one would like to do who has accustomed his mind and his eye to good forms and proportions."[30]
Our art at the present day is, unfortunately, very largely the development and natural outcome of the two influences I have just described, and that accounts for a good deal for which I have failed to account hitherto.