Finally, I like to fancy, though it certainly cannot be proved, that Rembrandt had already, in one of his flying visits to that city, met the girl upon whom, while she lived, the larger part of his life's happiness was to depend. The evidence is, it must be owned, slight, but is not altogether wanting. Among the pictures of the year 1630, and, according to M. Michel, even of 1628 and onwards, we find a series of portraits of a fair-haired girl with a round, full forehead, and rather small eyes and mouth, which Dr Bode believes to be portraits of the painter's sister Lysbeth, while M. Michel considers that some of the later ones are really portraits of Saskia, urging the objection that many of them were undoubtedly painted after his removal to Amsterdam, whither there is not the slightest reason to suppose that Lysbeth accompanied him, what evidence there is pointing directly to the contrary. On the other hand, M. Michel admits that the type which is known to be Saskia blends almost indistinguishably with that supposed to be Lysbeth, and offers the distinctly dubious explanation that Rembrandt was, so to speak, so imbued with the features of his sister that he unconsciously transferred them to a large extent to the girl he loved. If, however, as we may quite reasonably suppose, Rembrandt had met and admired Saskia during his first stay in Amsterdam, and continued to do so during his after-visits, the occurrence of her features in his work would be what we ought to expect.
There was, on the other hand, but a single objection to the scheme—the parting with his mother; and to such an affectionate and home-loving nature as Rembrandt's the difficulty can have been no small one. Still, a man has to do a man's work in this life. Adriaen, his brother, and Lysbeth, his sister, were there to minister to her comfort, while Amsterdam was no great distance away; and though, doubtless, it was not altogether without tears that the widowed Neeltje consented to the departure of her youngest son, the decision was taken, and the consent yielded at last.
Indeed, it was inevitable that so great and, at one time, so popular an artist should, sooner or later, gravitate to the capital of his country; for, since the decay of Antwerp, Amsterdam was without a rival in the world for prosperity—the head-centre of commerce, the hub of the trade-universe. Sir Thomas Overbury, in 1609, describes it as surpassing "Seville, Lisbon, or any other mart town in Christendom." Evelyn, writing in 1641, says in his diary, "that it is certainly the most busie concourse of mortalls now upon the whole earth and the most addicted to com'erce."
Neither tempest nor battle could check her energy; and throughout the long desultory war from 1621 to 1648 between Spain and Holland, her traders hurried to and from the enemy's ports, supplying her even with the very munitions of war to carry on the contest; while for all this accumulated wealth there was but a limited outlet. Necessities being superabundant, it must be either hoarded or expended on luxuries, and among these pictures held high place. Quoting once more from Evelyn, we find him writing on August 13th, 1641: "We arrived late at Roterdam, where was their annual marte or faire, so furnished with pictures (especially Landskips and Drolleries, as they call those clounish representations), that I was amaz'd. Some I bought and sent into England. The reson of this store of pictures and their cheapness proceedes from their want of land to employ their stock, so that it is an ordinary thing to find a common Farmer lay out two or three thousand pounds in this comodity. Their houses are full of them, and they vend them at their faires to very great gaines." So, for a time, the Dutch painters drove a thriving trade; and as Amsterdam was by far the richest city, to Amsterdam the successful painter must needs repair.
CHAPTER III
DAYS OF PROSPERITY
Some time then in 1631 the die was cast, and the removal accomplished. There is reason to believe that he went at first to stay or lodge with Hendrick van Uylenborch, a dealer in pictures and other objects of art. Among his first proceedings on his arrival, was one sufficiently characteristic of him and destined to be repeated only too often in the future. He lent Hendrick money, one thousand florins, to be repayable in a year with three months' notice. Soon after, if not before, this indiscreet financial operation, as it proved later, he found the suitable residence he had meanwhile been seeking, on the Bloemgracht, a canal on the west side of the town, running north-east and south-west between the Prinsen Gracht and the Lynbaan Gracht, in a district, at that time on the extreme outskirts of the town, known as the Garden, from the floral names bestowed upon its streets and canals.
Here he settled to his work, and here in a short time fortune came to him. The enthusiasm aroused by "The Anatomy Lesson," when it was finished and hung in its predestined place in the little dissecting-room or Snijkamer of the Guild of Surgeons in the Nes, near the Dam, was immediate and immense. The artist leapt at once into the front rank, and became the fashionable portrait painter of the day. From three portraits, other than those of his own circle, painted in 1631, and ten in 1632, the number rose to forty between that year and 1634; or, taking all the surviving portraits between 1627 and 1631, we have forty-one, while from the five following years, from 1632 to 1636, there are one hundred and two. Commissions, indeed, flowed in faster than he could execute them, so Houbraken assures us, and the not infrequent occurrence of a pair of portraits, husband and wife, one painted a year or more after the other, tends to confirm this; so that those who wished to be immortalised by him had often to wait their turn for months together, while all the wealth and fashion of the city flocked to the far-off studio in the outskirts, the more fortunate to give their sittings, the later comers to put down their names in anticipation of the future leisure. From the beginning, too, pupils came clamouring to his doors, Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol, Philips Koninck, Geerbrandt van den Eeckhout, Jan Victors, Leendeert Cornelisz, and others, eager to pay down their hundred florins a year, as Sandrart says they did, and work with and for the lion of the day.
Not Fortune alone, however, with her retinue of patrons, and Fame, with her train of pupils, sought him out; Love, too, came knocking at his portal, and won a prompt admission. To the many admirable works produced at this time I shall return later, but three of those painted in 1632 call for further notice now. One is an oval picture, belonging to Herr Haro of Stockholm, representing the half-length figure of a girl in profile, facing to the left, fair-haired, and pleasant-looking rather than pretty; the second, in the Museum at Stockholm, shows us the same girl in much the same position, but differently dressed; while the third, in the collection of Prince Liechtenstein at Vienna, is a less pleasing representation of her in full face, wherein the tendency to stoutness and the already developing double chin detract from the piquancy of her expression and make her look more than her actual age, which we know to have been twenty at the time that these were painted.