"Well, bring your work here so we can profit by it," exclaimed a joker, and the class guffawed.
The next morning the lad brought his picture—a woman's face—a picture of a face, homely, wrinkled, weather-beaten, but with a look of love and patience and loyalty beaming out of the quiet eyes.
"Who did this?" demanded the teacher.
Rembrandt hesitated, stuttered, stammered, and then confessed that he did it himself—he could not tell a lie.
He was sure the picture would be criticized and ridiculed, but he had decided to face it out. It was a picture of his mother, and he had sketched her just as she looked. He would let them laugh, and then at noon he would wait outside the door and smash the boy who laughed loudest over the head with a wooden shoe—and let it go at that.
But the scholars did not laugh, for Jacob van Swanenburch took the boy by the hand and leading him out before the class told those young men to look upon their master.
From that time forth Rembrandt was regarded by the little art world of Leyden as a prodigy.
Like William Cullen Bryant, who wrote "Thanatopsis" when scarcely eighteen, and writing for sixty years thereafter never equaled it, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who wrote "The Blessed Damozel" at the same age, Rembrandt sprang into life full-armed.
It is probably true that he could not then have produced an elaborate composition, but his faces were Rembrandtesque from the very first.
Rembrandt is the king of light and shade. You never mistake his work. As the years passed, around him clustered a goodly company of pupils, hundreds in all, who diligently worked to catch the trick, but Rembrandt stands alone. "He is the only artist who could ever paint a wrinkle," says Ruskin. All his portraits have the warts on. And the thought has often come to me that only a Rembrandt—the only Rembrandt—could have portrayed the face of Lincoln. Plain, homely, awkward, eyes not mates, sunken cheeks, leathery skin, moles, uncombed hair, neckcloth askew; but over and above and beyond all a look of power—and the soul! that look of haunting sorrow and the great, gentle, compassionate soul within!