Happily those days are far behind us. A great number of books and pamphlets have been published on Rembrandt during the last fifty years, and they are almost unanimous in their praise and admiration of the great master. The more liberal feelings of the modern world have achieved some victories in the realms of art as well as elsewhere. We moderns feel that the apparent shortcomings and exaggerations are nothing but the inevitable peculiarities attendant upon genius. And we even go so far that we would not have him be without a single one of them, for fear of losing the slightest trait in the character of the great man whose every movement roused our intellectual faculties.
So Rembrandt has been raised in our days to the pinnacle of fame which is his by right; the festival of his tercentenary was acknowledged by the whole civilised world as the natural utterance of joy and pride of our small country in being able to count among its children the great Rembrandt.
I finish,—"with the pen, but not with the heart!" For if I should go on until the inclination to add more to what I have written here should fail me, my readers would have tired of me long before I had tired of my subject. I am thinking of that rare gem, the portrait of Jan Six—of the Louvre, of Cassel, of Brunswick, of what not!
May these pages convey to the reader the fact that I have always looked upon Rembrandt as the true type of an artist, free, untrammelled by traditions, genial in all he did; in short, a figure in whom all the great qualities of the old Republic of the United Provinces were concentrated and reflected.
Footnotes
[1] The "Trippenhuis" was used as a picture gallery before the Ryksmuseum was built. It was an old patrician family mansion belonging to the Trip family. Several members of this family filled important posts in the government of the old Republic of the United Provinces, and some were burgomasters of Amsterdam.
[2] "Arti et Amicitiæ" is a society of modern Dutch painters. Occasionally the members organise exhibitions of the work of contemporary countrymen or of foreign artists, and every year there is an exhibition of their own works. These shows are held in the society's own building in Amsterdam at the corner of the "Rokin" and "Spui."