The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

Statue of Liberty compare with the interpretation of the idea evolved by such a man as Lincoln? The idea thus logically and formally shaped in the Statue will not even bear comparison with that which is expressed by the spontaneous utterance of some poor emigrant, as he finds his foot at last planted on the free soil of his imaginings. In life, as in art, the real thing to us is what we feel about it; in Rembrandt’s art, what he feels about his subject and makes us feel.

Then, again, we have discovered that often we are made to feel most deeply, not by detailed statement, but by suggestion: in the case of a speaker, perhaps by a momentary gesture, or play of features, by a sudden inflection of the voice, or a pause in speech, and the occasional accent of a word or sentence; in the case of a writer, often as much by what he leaves unsaid, by the thought that is veiled behind the statement, by the choice and emphasis of certain features of his record. Further, we may have learned to find occasional value even in uncertainty or indecision. We may sometimes tire of, and possibly distrust, the world’s tendency to “get things down fine.” The latter may seem to imply that the thing itself is small, or that there is smallness in the vision of the man who thus approaches life. We may be conscious of life itself as an aggregate of moments of brilliant realization and more frequent half-tones, enveloped in a sea of shadow; and may reach nearer to the heart and meaning of it by welcoming its mystery.

Surely something of this sort was Rembrandt’s attitude toward life, and therefore his point of view toward art. He has been called unlearned, because he had small taste for Latin and no scholastic acquisitions. But in the wisdom of life, as drawn from life itself and distilled through the brain and temperament of one who searched life deeply and lived his own life ardently, he has had few equals, at least among artists. For the explanation of Rembrandt is that to him life presented itself as an idea.

Thus he is without a rival in the sympathetic rendering of old age. He saw more than the exterior of it; he penetrated into its psychology. For—how shall I express it?—the fruit of living is experience, and experience tends more and more to lose sight of the concrete in the abstract, to replace the substance of the form with the higher reality of the idea. The young man, as he ceases to depend upon the ministrations of the mother, enshrines her in a personal idea of motherhood; the old lover rediscovers the bride of his youth in the idea with which time has enveloped the wife. The idea is the aureole or nimbus that gathers about the form and proclaims its sanctity. It is the idea, then, that Rembrandt, the artist of ideas, the searcher after the higher reality inherent in form, discovered in old age.

On the other hand, while Rembrandt exalted the idea above the substance, he was not indifferent to form. No great artist whose domain is the world of sight can be.

Indeed, the wider the acquaintance with the master goes, whether in the galleries throughout Europe, or through the examples which occasionally emerge from private collections, as in the recent extraordinary display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more one is impressed not only with Rembrandt’s feeling for form, but also with his amazing power of rendering it.

Sometimes, as in the marvelously detailed Portrait of Elizabeth Bas (Amsterdam), the impression he derived of the original was one which he could render only by enforcing the bulk and character and precision of form. This lady, though not of gentle birth, was, as the widow of Admiral Swartenhout, a figure in society. This much we know from the written record; the rest is recorded in the portrait. As Rembrandt saw her, she was a woman of determined personality; a narrow and rigid believer in her own importance, and a stickler for its recognition; an ingrained precisionist, as upright as her backbone and as set in formalism as her corseted figure. Yet the flesh of her face and hands has the dimpled softness and delicate contours of well-preserved old age. She is fully conscious of prerogatives, but her hardness has been made gracious by the kindly touch of time. All this, no doubt, was written in detail on her ample person, and Rembrandt, feeling the intimate value of its completeness, has detailed it in the portrait.

Or take another example of the record of an impression, The Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels in the Berlin Gallery. The devotion of this woman had stayed the artist in his trials, and her exuberant youth had put fresh force into his courage. He had learned to depend upon her watchful solicitude, to lean upon her abundant vitality, and to warm his imagination in the glow of her physical ardor. In the portrait he wraps her strong figure in the rich grandeur of a mantle that burns with wonderful brown lights above an under-robe of golden cream, while a flash of crimson glows in her brown hair, and a golden warmth is exhaled from the full, firm features and hovers above the ripe harvest of her bosom. The portrait is an artist’s apotheosis of the glory and the benediction of physical vitality; and, let us not forget, in the strength of this woman’s companionship Rembrandt achieved his masterpiece of austere and virile intellectuality—The Syndics of the Cloth Workers’ Guild.