But the greatest of all the Dutch painters, in some ways the greatest painter that has ever lived, was Rembrandt van Ryn (1606-1669). Beside him all the rest seem merely commonplace, and their works the product of this or that demand, according to their different times and circumstances, executed with more or less skill. For Rembrandt there seems no place among them all—he must stand somewhere alone; and there is no standard by which to judge his perfections and imperfections except the man himself.
Perhaps the greatest difference between Rembrandt and any other painter is that he never seems to have tried to please the public, but only painted to please himself. It is for this reason, no doubt, that he was never popular with the public, and is never likely to be; but just as Beethoven is only understandable by the really musical soul, so Rembrandt's appeal is to those who have the feeling for something in painting beyond the mere representation of familiar or heroic scenes and persons on canvas. For the public it is enough that one of his landscapes should be sold for £100,000, and they all flock to see it; but put a fine Rembrandt portrait in a shop-window without a name to it, and there would be little fear of the pavement being blocked.
This failure of Rembrandt to please the public of his own day brings out the truth that the practice of painting had up to then subsisted only so long as it supplied a popular demand; and when we come to consider what that demand was, we find that it is for nothing else but a pleasing representation of natural objects, which may or may not embody some sentimental or historical association, but must first and foremost be a fair representation of more or less familiar things.
The oldest story about pictures is that of Zeuxis and the bunch of grapes, which relates that he painted the fruit so like nature that the birds came and pecked at the painting—some versions, I believe, adding that the fruit itself was there but they preferred the painting. Similar stories with innumerable variations are told of later artists. Rembrandt himself is said to have been deceived by his pupils who, knowing he was careful about collecting money in small quantities, however extravagant he might be in spending it, painted coins on the floor of the studio, and enjoyed the joke of seeing him stoop to pick them up. We have heard, too, of flies painted with surprising skill in conspicuous places to deceive the unwary. But apart from these little pleasantries, one has only to remember how the earlier writers on painting have expressed themselves to see how much importance, consciously or unconsciously, was attached to life-like resemblance to the object painted. Vasari is constantly using phrases in which he extols the painter for having made a figure look like the life, as though that were the real thing to be aimed at. We remember Ben Jonson's lines under Shakespeare's portrait——
"Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature to outdo the life."
And though Ben Jonson was not a critic, and if he had been there was little enough art in his time in England for him to criticize, still he expresses the general feeling of the public for any work of art.
With the Dutch people this was most certainly the case, and the popularity of the painters of scenes of everyday life is a proof of it. That Hals, Brouwer, or Ostade were great painters was not half so important to them, if indeed they thought of it all, as that they were capable of turning out pictures which reflected their everyday life like a mirror.
So long as Rembrandt painted portraits like those of the Pellicornes and their offspring—the two pictures at Hertford House—or a plain straightforward group like Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson (though in this he was already getting away from convention), he was tolerated. And it was not so much his freedom in living and his extravagant notions of the pleasures of life that brought about his downfall, as his failure to realize that when he took the money subscribed for the group of Captain Banning Cocq's Company, the subscribers expected something else for their money than a picture (The Night Watch) which might be a masterpiece according to the painter's notions, but was certainly not a portrait group of the subscribers.
Here, then, for the first time in the history of painting, we find an artist definitely at issue with the public. I do not say that this was the first time that an artist had failed to please the public, but it is the first occasion on which it was decided that if a painter was to undertake commissions, he must consider the wishes of the patron, or starve. It was something new for a painter of Rembrandt's repute to be told that not he, but the persons who commissioned the work, were to be the judges of whether or not it was satisfactory.
The consequences were important. For Rembrandt, instead of taking the matter as a man of business, devoted the rest of his life to being an artist, and leaving the business of painting to men like Backer, Helst, and others, betook himself seriously to developing his art irrespective of what the public might or might not think of it. As a result, we have in the later work of Rembrandt something that the world—I mean the artistic part of it—would be very sorry to do without. Now the meaning of this is, not that Rembrandt was ill-advised in deserting his patrons, or in suffering them to desert him, but that for the first time in the history of painting an artist had the personality—I will not say the conscious determination—to realize that his art was something quite apart from the affairs of this world, and that what he could express on canvas was not merely a representation of natural objects designed to please his contemporaries, but something more than human, something that would appeal to humanity for all time. That many before him had felt that of their art, to a lesser or greater degree, is unquestionable—but none of them had ever realised it. Dürer, certainly, may be cited as an exception, especially when contrasted with his phlegmatic and business-like compatriot Holbein. But then Dürer, a century before, and in totally different circumstances, was never assured of regular patronage as was Rembrandt.