Nothing else, I suppose, has ever been written about this phase of Rembrandt’s art that is at once so fine in thought and diction, so enlightening, and so memorable. For one here meets in union the trained thinker and practised writer and the painter; thus getting much more than the painter’s exclusive point of view, and at the same time the latter, interpreted by the painter at first hand. The gist of it is that, when the subject involved an idea, Rembrandt was not only justified in sacrificing the corporeal to the incorporeal, but was master of a technique that could express the idea conclusively and with supreme emotional appeal.
In conclusion, Fromentin considers that the whole life of Rembrandt represents a struggle between the two sides of his nature. The earliest battle-ground was The Sortie, from which, owing to the nature of the problem, he came off worsted. But did he ever succeed in reconciling the “exterior” and the “interior” man? If ever, Fromentin concludes, surely in The Syndics, which, in a word, is a work of imagination and yet of real life.
The whole exposition of Fromentin’s argument, from which these fragments have been gathered, is worth careful study, particularly because of the constructive nature of the criticism. In its combination of technical information and logical point of view, in its subtlety and human sympathy, it affords a model for the method of approaching the serious examination of a great artist’s work. One may acknowledge its value and the benefit derived from it, without subscribing entirely to its conclusions. It may be possible to feel that it has the defect, if one is to find a single word for it, of excessive concentration. It centers too exclusively around one picture, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company.
This picture has suffered from too much exploitation. It has been praised “not wisely but too well” by artists and has been worshiped by the public. Fromentin may have approached it with undue expectations; at any rate, he found himself disappointed; and, being at variance with the general judgment, felt the need of justifying his own attitude. He has done it so exhaustively as to warp his own judgment, until what there is of weakness in the picture has become almost an obsession with him. It is never absent from his thoughts, and continually peeps in on one page after another, and mingles with the judgment of other pictures. Fromentin has used it as a pivot around which to swing his whole appreciation of Rembrandt; and, more than this, has himself been sucked into the vortex of his own revolving argument. It is an expedient scarcely to be warranted by breadth of criticism to select one picture of any artist as a focusing-point for a consideration of his whole work, and least of all in the case of an artist so universal as Rembrandt.
Moreover, Fromentin does not persuade us that he had a very wide acquaintance with the master’s work. He knew his Louvre well; grew up with it, and had become habituated to it and fixed in the impressions he had derived. Later in life he made the acquaintance of the National Gallery and visited Dresden. Then he makes the pilgrimage to Holland. He first reaches The Hague, where The Lesson in Anatomy fails to satisfy his expectations. He is alive to its excellence in parts, but does not find the strength and character of two or three of the heads sustained throughout the canvas. He feels that an unreasonable amount of adulation has been lavished on the picture. It arouses his antagonism and piques in him the critical vein. Then an interval in his approach to Rembrandt ensues. He alights at Haarlem and notes with what definitive skill and clearness of comprehension Frans Hals treated the corporation subject. Fresh from these impressions, he finds himself in front of Rembrandt’s treatment of a corresponding theme. By contrast it seems to him a work of confused motives and manifold uncertainties. Yet how extravagantly it has been lauded! Like The Lesson in Anatomy, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company has been prejudiced by uncritical applause. The critic in Fromentin is now thoroughly roused. With every wish to be fair to Rembrandt, he proceeds to build upon these two pictures a fabric of constructive and destructive criticism. His faculties are narrowed to a focus spot of concentrated heat, are swept into the ardor of their centripetal momentum, and become caught up in the subtleties of their own compressed invention. He elaborates a theory, and into its compact limits would squeeze the genius of Rembrandt.
Further, what kind of mind did Fromentin bring to bear upon this examination? A generous one, desirous of being broad; but a Frenchman’s and an Academician’s; one, that is to say, which clings to logic and bases its expression upon form. It exhibits and demands clarity of reasoning; declares itself in refined exactness. It knew of Impressionism, yet was too old in its convictions, too fixed in earlier traditions, to comprehend it. But, since the day when Fromentin’s mind was in the forming, the world’s point of view toward art, even one may say toward life, has changed; and its attitude toward the manner of expression has progressed, until it has come back to Rembrandt with a new and more intimate comprehension. It recognizes him as an Impressionist of sensations and tries to judge him by what we now know and feel about Impressionism.
Briefly, we have learned that there may be something in art more valuable than the record of a person, place, or incident, and this is, the impression of it conceived and rendered by the artist; that, through this interpretation, the place, person, or incident becomes illuminated, more vitally represented. How, for example, can Bartholdi’s
PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH BAS REMBRANDT