Finally, in this use of form and color, Rembrandt is nearer to what is most modern in the art of to-day than has been generally recognized. For of late Impressionism has entered on a new development. During some time it was intent upon a more vivid and truthful representation of the facts of life. It sat at the feet of Velasquez, trying to do again what he did so supremely well. It did not succeed in equaling his authority, for the sufficient reason that an imitator never rivals the master; but at the same time it added something to what Velasquez stands for. Helped by science, it has carried further than he did the study of light in the variety and quality of its manifestations, and has gained, especially in landscape, an instrument for interpreting sentiment and moods of temperament. In the intellectual analysis of the appearance of nature Velasquez said the last word; and now in the domain of emotion and of spiritual expression, as interpreted by the representation of nature, there is nothing further to be said. In a word, the ideal of graphic art, as based upon the representation of nature, which since the thirteenth century has occupied the artists of the Western world, is now found to have reached a development beyond which no further development is possible. As a commentary upon this is the development of photography, which along the line of representation vies with painting.
Certain original minds,[E] therefore, have realized the need of a new ideal, a new motive with which to refertilize their art. They are seeking to discover it in a new conception of Impressionism. Their position, in effect, is this: Need the impression that is derived from nature be limited by the necessities of naturalistic representation? Can it not free itself from the liability of being judged by the standard of what it is derived from, and claim to be enjoyed for its own abstract qualities of form and color? May it not detach itself more freely from the concrete, and attain nearer to the abstract? Are there not further possibilities in the conception of form and color as symbols?
The new movement, for such it has grown to be, in France, Germany, Austria, and England, has come by way of the East. The harvest of a century of Eastern exploration, ripened during the last fifty years by an increasing intimacy with the art of Egypt, China, Korea, Japan, India, and Mesopotamia, is at length being stored. We are beginning to realize the Oriental conception of art as decoration, relying upon the abstract qualities of form and color, and using them, not as vehicles of natural representation, but as symbols, appealing freely, without concrete reference, to the imagination. To repeat, these pioneers of the new movement find themselves at the point where the Renaissance started in the thirteenth century. The latter broke away from the remnant of the Oriental ideal, left in Byzantine art, to conquer a new world of natural representation, and its evolution has been completed. The new movement has recovered the Oriental standpoint from which to attempt the conquest of a new ideal. It is a movement, at present, mainly of experiment, and necessarily so. For all of us, whether artists or laymen, are as yet too much under the influence of centuries of inherited tradition to be able to free ourselves from the consciousness of what it stands for.
The artist of our own time whose intuition steered him first in the direction of this new conception and use of form and color is Whistler; and among the potent influences of his own life was Rembrandt. That the latter was habitually desirous of evading the concrete significance of form is contradicted by innumerable pictures; but that in some he did evade it, even as Whistler did in his Nocturnes, is undeniable. Moreover, Rembrandt showed less regard for the traditional use of form and color than any artist up to our own day. With all his sense of its significance, he used it with the complete freedom of personal expression; and so enveloped it in the half-lights and obscurities of an atmosphere of his own invention, that, while the picture represents an incident, it contradicts the idea of material representation. It is, to a more abstract degree than has been reached by any other Caucasian artist, the record of a spiritual impression, based on the symbolic use of form and color. It approaches the brink of that still further detachment from the necessities of natural representation that characterizes the New Thought in modern art.
CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT
BOTH Hals and Rembrandt, each in his different way, have influenced the art of modern times much in the same way in which they influenced their contemporaries. Hals was and still remains a great exemplar of technical method which may be practically adopted, while Rembrandt, with a technique that defies imitation, has influenced his own times and ours by inspiring principles not only of technique but of motive. The difference is inherent in their characters—Hals the raconteur; Rembrandt the thinker.
Hals, with his masterful gift of summarizing the incidents and accidents of an occasion or a personality, resembles the best examples of the modern journalist and magazine writer; keenly alive to the temper of his own time; reflecting everything vividly, as in a mirror, yet with a discrimination for effects. Rembrandt, on the other hand, so absorbed in his own contemplation as to be an enigma to the man who runs and reads, is yet so passionately human that the place he by degrees makes for himself in the imagination and the heart of those who learn to know him expands and deepens. The difference between them is epitomized in their respective kinds of technique. While Rembrandt is a constructor, Hals is a “follower of surfaces.”
THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS REMBRANDT