but is now standing and looking over his shoulder toward the spectator. He has exchanged his costume of black and golden brown, with its scarf of rose and white, for a snuff-colored jerkin, pearl-gray under-coat, and a sky-blue sash and feather; and the difference is reflected in the superior delicacy of color that distinguishes the later picture.
In this Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew the corporation pictures reach their highest water-mark. The background, however, of brownish-olive foliage, showing through an opening some red roofs against the sky, is dry in color and lacking in luminosity. The heads, in consequence, do not present the same suggestion of being enveloped in light as those in the previous picture. In what, then, does the superiority of this acknowledged masterpiece consist? Comparing it with the earlier examples, we discover that its color-scheme of blue and amber, while less resplendent, is more choice, delicate, and subtle, and that the loveliness of color has been made contributory to the characterization of the figures. This is scarcely to be appreciated from the photographic reproduction, but in presence of the original one has a lively sense of it. There is no suggestion of the display of color having been considered by itself or as itself an end; the tonal harmony so accords with the harmony of expression that characterizes the separate individualities of the group that tone and expression are in complete unity. Again, as a result or, more probably, a cause of this harmony of expression, there is a complete simplicity of attitude and gesture. “What shall I do with my hands?” Any one who has stage-managed amateur theatricals knows how frequently this question is asked by the performers. In nine cases out of ten the best advice, though the hardest to follow, is to do nothing. It is just the fact that the members of this group are so admirably doing nothing which gives at once such a naturalness and so high a distinction to this picture.
Here, in fact, we touch perhaps the clue to the whole superiority of this canvas. In one word, it is control; that almost unconscious self-control on the artist’s part which results from his consciousness of assured capacity. He has won beyond the point of experiment, beyond the later temptation to indulge in display of knowledge and skill; he has so absolutely acquired both and attuned the one to the other, that the tricks and devices of his craft no longer sway his imagination; he shows, in fact, his mastery not so much by what he does as by what he withholds; he has reached in this great work a plane of extraordinary artistic conscientiousness. The picture, in fact, has that appearance of inevitableness, that suggestion of having grown rather than of having been made, which is the highest expression of genius. It represents Hals at his zenith. The date is 1633 and the artist’s age forty-nine.
The next picture, Officers of the Archers of St. George, is dated 1639, six years later. It is conspicuously inferior not only to the masterpiece (that were excusable), but to all the preceding works. It represents a falling off not so much in actual craftsmanship as in artistic morality. The artist appears to have been satisfied to do less well than he could; to do, in fact, as little as he might. He has saved himself expenditure of invention in the composition by stringing the figures out in a line across the front, and raising another line of figures behind them; this having been the niggard, unimaginative arrangement of the older corporation pictures, from which his other work had presented so happy a departure. Correspondingly the heads, while forcible in characterization, are lacking in luminosity, and the fabrics are without vivacity. The general effect is stockish; the breath of life and of art, as Hals could suggest both, is absent.
Nor in the next picture, dated two years later, the Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth, do we detect the true Frans Hals. The faces are trickily modeled, brilliant high lights being contrasted with heavy greenish-drab shadows; and the figures are lumpish, except the second from the right, which alone reveals sympathy and enthusiasm.
Of the last two groups nothing need be said but that they are the work of a veteran of eighty years, whose hand has lost its cunning, while his brain, no longer active, retains only some wavering recollections of its original activity.
The important point to be suggested in conclusion is that Hals’s best period included the years from 1625 to 1635; that after the latter period this enthusiasm waned, and his work became too often perfunctory. In such cases the flesh parts exhibit an uninspired use of green lower tones that have a tendency to become drab; features are often crudely emphasized by a stroke or dab of exaggerated value, and luminosity has faded into a dull, sometimes lumpish inertness. Even so, however, compared with the work of other Hollanders, apart from Rembrandt, it still had a quality and a character that render it distinguished; but much of this distinction disappears when you compare him with himself, the later with the earlier Hals. Many of his portraits suggest the perfunctoriness of a man who has got his method down pat, and tediously repeats it. In a word, his technique was so personal and so dependent upon the mood of the moment that it needed the stimulus of enthusiasm, and when this was absent, the vitality of the technique became impaired.
CHAPTER V
REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN
IT is surely no accident that the name of Rembrandt is familiar to thousands who know little or nothing of his art. It has, in fact, become so embedded in the mental consciousness of modern times, that, even as it must have been a household word in his own day, so almost it has grown to be in ours. And for this there seem to be two reasons. In the very use of the word “household” there is a hint of one: the homely, in the sense of plain and simple, and very heartfelt appeal that his conception of the subject-matter generally makes to the imagination. But there is another reason and a greater. It is the magnitude of his personality as an artist. This was but dimly recognized in his own day, in the succeeding century forgotten, and is only beginning to be fully understood in our own times. The influence with which he fertilized art was to prove so great, that it needed a long period of gestation before it came to birth, and a correspondingly long period of development before it reached maturity. Now it has grown to be recognized and felt, until, like all the great contributions to human ideas, it is, so to say, in the air. Unwittingly as well as by conviction the world is conscious of it. Briefly, the nature of the influence is that it has revolutionized our attitude toward beauty. It has not eliminated the old idea of beauty, but supplemented it with a newer one, no less potent and far more adapted to our modern needs. The absolutism of the classic ideal has been overthrown by it. Art, that once was solely aristocratic, has been expanded to include the democratic ideal. It was therefore necessary for the world to have mastered the latter, as a principle of life and conduct, before it could be capable of appreciating Rembrandt to the full.
For Rembrandt’s art is the antithesis of Greek art. The Greek is founded upon a hypothesis, upon the assumption of a possible perfection; Rembrandt’s upon an acceptance of imperfection, upon the facts of life in relation to things as they exist. The one is based upon an artificially constructed absolutism, and is technically expressed through form—form, absolute and supreme. The other, in its recognition of the relativity of everything in life, is based upon tone, as affected by its environment of light. The difference is fundamental both in its technical and psychological aspect.