But Rembrandt was by no means the only Dutch master who profited by the German’s art. The whole of the Italianised Dutch school at Rome, men like Poelenburg for instance, felt his influence more or less strongly. Nor was he without followers in the native school of landscape painters and etchers in Holland, as we shall see when we come to them.
Elsheimer, in fine, though by no means a great painter, is of considerable historical importance, and the admiration which he excited in his
Fig. 4.—The Child and the Doll. By Ostade. B. 16.
own day can hardly be over-estimated. So great a man as Rubens admired him so much that he had three of his landscapes on his walls, and made copies from his paintings and designs.
This is the more remarkable, because Rubens rarely occupied himself with the problems that fascinated Elsheimer. And while these problems were of a kind to appeal to etchers, it was not on etching but on line-engraving, an art admitting little scope for subtlety of chiaroscuro, that Rubens cast his potent influence. Without using the burin himself, he employed a number of brilliant engravers to reproduce his designs, just as Raphael had employed Marc Antonio for the like purpose. Even in our day, when public picture-galleries are numerous and the distances between various capitals have so immensely shrunk, the fame of the great painters rests still to a large extent on photographs and engravings from their works; it is easy, therefore, to comprehend of what capital importance it was for masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to secure competent interpreters.
Line-engraving was admirably suited for the reproduction of pictures like those of Rubens, with their large design and flowing sweep. And so potent was Rubens’s example, that etching found in Belgium only a few isolated, and with the single exception of Vandyck, unimportant followers.
In Holland it was just the reverse. Perhaps it was the result of some vital difference in temperament between the Flemings and the Dutchmen, such as caused the one country to embrace the severer, soberer religion of Protestantism, while the other clung to the more ancient creed of Rome, with its strong appeal to the senses; at any rate, it seems characteristic that line-engraving, with its capacity for reproducing qualities of splendour and spacious action, should have found in Antwerp its most effective, various, and brilliant exposition, while the plainer, more self-contained, more intense spirit of the great Dutchmen developed the more personal, intimate, subtle art of etching, as it had never been developed before.
But Dutchmen, no less than Flemings, felt the need for reproducing their designs, and here arose a difficulty. For etching is not, in spite of modern successes, so well adapted to reproduction as line-engraving is.
As we have said, it was only a certain number of the Dutchmen who divined this. Rembrandt, of course, perceived it; and though he spread his fame by working steadily on copper as well as on canvas, he made his etched work independent of his painting and never a simple reproduction of pictures. Lesser men had not the intelligence to do as he did; and many of the artists of whom we shall treat, though they produced fine work on copper, cannot be esteemed true etchers.