THE EDITOR.
IN THE HERMITAGE, PETROGRAD
SOBIESKI—Portrait by Rembrandt
REMBRANDT
Early Years
ONE
Sometimes it is difficult to learn the truth about a great man. This is particularly so in the case of one who lived three centuries ago; for in those days people were not as careful to keep records as they are today. For years the great painter Rembrandt was regarded as having been ignorant, boorish, and avaricious. Fables making him out to be such a character sprang up without any foundation. It is only within the last fifty years that we have come to know the true Rembrandt, and to realize that he had profound sympathy, a powerful imagination, and originality of mind, and that he was a poet as well as a painter, an idealist and also a realist. He has justly been called “the Shakespeare of Holland.”
Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn—for that is his full name—was born at Leyden, a town near Amsterdam, in Holland, on July 15, 1605. Leyden is famous in history as the birthplace of many great artists and other men of renown. Rembrandt’s home overlooked the river Rhine. He was the son of a well-to-do miller, and his parents were ambitious that Rembrandt enter the law, for his older brothers had been sent into trade.