In the Gallery at Cassel, Germany
Rembrandt as a Leader
No country in Europe produced a finer quality of art, or a more learned school of craftsmen, than Holland. There was a master genius there as elsewhere, and that genius was Rembrandt. He came when Holland had reached her highest pitch of power—came on the crest of the wave of which he and his fellow painters were the light and color. He has been acclaimed as her great painter and he deserves that title, for of all the Dutch masters he was practically the only one who was universal in his scope. His art alone, in its appeal, travels beyond the confines of the Netherlands. What he has to say is world-embracing, and finds sympathetic response with all peoples. He is profound in his humanity, in his penetration into life problems, in his sympathy with his fellow man. The poor, mean-looking Amsterdam Jews that he portrayed in so many of his pictures are pathetic in their humility, their suffering, their patience. He was always taking for models the humble, the despised, the lowly. His heart seemed to go out to them.
His Biblical Pictures
And with such types what a new interpretation he gave the Bible! How he realized Bible truth and brought it home to his own people by using the Jew of the quarter and the boor of the polder for models! Look at the “Supper at Emmaus”—look for the intensity of the types rather than for any regularity of form. What pathos in the pale, blue-lipped Christ, with the phosphorescent glimmer of the tomb about the architecture at the back! What amazement in the disciples at the table! What fear in the boy bringing in the dish! This was perhaps the first time in art that the “Supper at Emmaus” was made real and believable. The story was not only realized, but humanized. All of Rembrandt’s Biblical pictures were of this nature. Look again at the “Manoah’s Prayer,” or the “Tobit and the Angel,” or the “Sacrifice of Abraham.” They are Dutch types again, in Dutch costumes and surroundings. Rembrandt knew very well that the Biblical characters were not Dutch in type, and that the people in the time of Christ did not dress like the boors and burghers of Holland. He purposely painted his own people in their native costumes, that he might the better and the more forcefully bring realization home to them. It was not, is not, affectation. Study the Manoah and his wife, the Abraham, the family of Tobit on the doorstep, and you cannot find in all art people of more unconscious sincerity. Rembrandt believed in them. And that is why you and I believe in them today.
Rembrandt as a Portrait Painter
JAN HERMANSZ KRUL
In the Gallery at Cassel, Germany
