[Buckingham Palace
THE BURGOMASTER PANCRAS AND HIS WIFE
(ABOUT 1635)
[National Gallery, London
PORTRAIT OF A MAN
(1635)
Apart from these, there are nine dated portraits, and five subject-pictures, together with six portraits and one subject of about the date. Only two of the portraits bearing dates are in public galleries, one "A Rabbi," at Hampton Court [No. 381], and one "A Man," in the National Gallery [No. 350], while two others of about the date are the "Portrait of Himself," in the Pitti [No. 60], and "A Young Woman," at Cassel [No. 216]. In subjects the artist on two occasions went out of his way to court failure in attempting to represent classical subjects, with the spirit of which he was utterly out of sympathy. The homely truthfulness of his art, though it may occasionally result in details somewhat shocking to the reverent mind, was, nevertheless, well adapted to set forth the humanising side of Scripture incidents. His Christ is always more the Son of Man than the God Incarnate. His Virgin Mary has none of the delicate beauty conceived for her by Italian painters, but she is first of all, and beyond all, the type of motherhood. His apostles have none of the heroic dignity of Michael Angelo's, yet they are without question devout, devoted fishers of men. But this lack of wish or power to idealise, this persistence in the search for the true and neglect of the beautiful, is entirely at variance with the classical tradition. There are no great fundamental ideas beneath the story of "Actæon, Diana, and Callisto," or "The Rape of Ganymede," for the artist to bring home to us, and the representation of the former as coarse, ungainly peasants, as in the picture belonging to Prince Salm-Salm of Anholt, or of the latter as a fat and extremely hideous baby boy blubbering in terror as he is howked upwards—no more dignified phrase will express it—by his shirt-tail in the claws of an eagle, as in the picture at Dresden [No. 1558], serve only to reveal the limitations of the artist's imagination without disguise or compensation.
Three other subject pictures, painted in or about that year, are also in public galleries: a little sketch of "The Flight into Egypt," at the Hague [No. 579]; "The Sacrifice of Abraham," in the Hermitage [No. 792]; and "Samson threatening his Father-in-law," at Berlin [No. 802].
Seven pictures only bear the date 1636, of which one formed a further addition to the collection of Prince Frederick-Henry,—"The Ascension," now at Munich [No. 328], quite the least satisfactory of the series. Rembrandt, indeed, was not in a happy vein this year in his treatment of subjects. Both the "Samson overpowered by the Philistines," in the collection of Count Schönborn at Vienna, and Lord Derby's "Belshazzar's Feast," if it be Rembrandt's, which, though unsigned, is attributed to that year, are seriously marred by a distinct melodramatic element in the conception, an extreme exaggeration of pose, gesture, and expression. On the other hand, we find the most pleasing study of the nude the painter ever made, in the "Danae," at the Hermitage [No. 802], which, though the first and third figures of the date have disappeared, leaving only two sixes, was most probably painted that year.
