Rembrandt was the son of a miller named Harmann Geritz, who called himself Van Ryn, from the hamlet on the arm of the Rhine which runs through Leyden. His mother was the daughter of a baker. He was entered as a student at the University of Leyden, his parents being comfortably off; but he showed so little taste for the study of the law, for which they intended him, that he was allowed to follow his own bent of painting, in the studio of a now forgotten painter, Jacob van Swanenburg. Here he studied for about three years, after which he went to Amsterdam and was for a short time with another painter named Lastman, who was a clever but superficial imitator of the Italian School then flourishing in Rome.
Returning to Leyden, Rembrandt set up his easel and remained there painting till 1631, when he went to Amsterdam. His works during this first period are not very well known in this country, but at Windsor and at Edinburgh are portraits of his mother, which must belong to it.
The next decade was the happiest and most prosperous in Rembrandt's career. At Amsterdam he soon found favour with wealthy patrons, and his happiness and success were completed by his marrying Saskia van Ulenburgh, the sister of a wealthy connoisseur and art dealer, with whom Rembrandt had formed an intimate friendship. To this period belong the numerous portraits of himself and Saskia, alone or together, most of which are characterized by a barbaric splendour of costume, utterly different from the profusion of Rubens, but far more intense. Living among the wealthiest Jews in Amsterdam, he seems to have been strongly attracted by their orientalism, and while Rubens gloried in natural abundance of every sort, and painted the bounty of nature in the full sunlight, Rembrandt chose out the treasures of art, and painted costume and jewels gleaming out of the darkness. The portraits of himself in a cap at Hertford House (No. 52), and of the Old Lady in the National Gallery (No. 775), both painted in 1634, are notable examples of this period, though they have none of the orientalism to be seen in the various portraits of Saskia, or in The Turk at Munich. The two double portraits at Hertford House of Jean Pellicorne and his wife with their son and daughter respectively, were among the commissions which he received after he set up at Amsterdam, and are therefore less interesting as self-revelations. Prosperity is not always the best condition under which to produce the highest work, and the temperament of Rembrandt was so peculiar that there is little wonder that the prim Dutchmen were not entirely captivated by his exuberant sensuality, or that we ourselves reserve our admiration principally for the more sombre and mysterious products of his later years after misfortune began to fall upon him.
In 1642 the beloved Saskia died, leaving an only child, Titus, whose features are familiar to us in the portrait at Hertford House. As though this were not affliction enough, Rembrandt had the mortification of offending his patrons over the commission to paint Captain Banning Cocq's Company. From this time onward, as the world and Rembrandt drifted farther and farther apart, his work becomes more and more wonderful.
Dr Muther, in his History of Painting, observes that perhaps it is only possible to understand Rembrandt by interpreting his pictures not as paintings but as psychological documents. "A picture by Rembrandt in the Dresden Gallery," he says, "represents Samson Putting Riddles to the Philistines; and Rembrandt's entire activity, a riddle to the philistines of his time, has remained puzzling to the present day.... As no other man bore his name, so the artist, too, is something unique, mocks every historical analysis, and remains what he was, a puzzling, intangible, Hamlet nature—Rembrandt." The author's theory of the psychological document is hardly a solution of the admitted puzzle, though it is interesting to follow him in tracing it out in Rembrandt's religious pictures, from the Samson already mentioned to his last dated work, in 1668, the Darmstadt Crucifixion. What distinguishes Rembrandt from all painters up to, and considerably later than his time, and in particular from those of his own school, is the mental, as compared with the physical activity that his pictures represent. Perhaps this is only another way of stating Dr Muther's theory of the psychological documents, but it enables us to test that theory by comparing his work with that of others. In technical skill Beruete claims a far higher place for Velasquez, going so far as to say that the Lesson in Anatomy is not a lesson in painting. But the difference between the two is not as great as that in technique, though infinitely wider in the mental process which led to the production of a picture. A reproduction of the Portrait of an Old Pole, at S. Petersburg, is in front of me, as it happens, as I am writing; and I see in this no inferiority in firmness and precision, in truth and vigour, to any portrait by Velasquez.
In their technical ability to present the life-like portrait of a real man, we can place Rembrandt, Velasquez, Hals, and Van Dyck on pretty much of a level; if we had Van der Geest, Montanes, the Old Pole and the Laughing Cavalier all in a row, we should find there was not much to choose between them for downright realization. But while in the work of Velasquez we see the working of a fine and sensitive appreciation of his friend's personality, and the most exquisite realization of what was before him, in that of Rembrandt we seem to see less of the Pole and more of Rembrandt himself. It is as though he were singing softly to himself while he was painting, thinking his own thoughts: while Velasquez was simply concerned with the appearance and the thoughts of his model.
That Rembrandt's pictures are self-revelations, or psychological documents, is certainly true; and a proof of it is in the extraordinary number of portraits of himself. The famous Dresden picture of himself with Saskia on his knee can only be regarded in that light, and that brings into the category all the numerous pictures of Saskia and of Hendrike Stoffels, who formed so great a part of his life. If to these we add, with Dr Muther, his Biblical subjects, we find that there is not so very much left, and when we turn to the life's work of Rubens, Titian, Velasquez, or in fact any of the great painters, the difference is at once apparent. So that in the pictures of Rembrandt we may expect to find less of what we look for in those of others in the way of display, but infinitely more of the qualities which, to whatever extent they exist in other artists, are bound to be sacrificed to display. When we are asked to a feast, we find the room brilliantly lit, and our host the centre of an assemblage for whom he has felt it his duty to make a display consistent with his means and his station. If we were to peep into his house one night we might find him in a room illumined only with his reading-lamp, absorbed in his favourite study; but instead of only exchanging a few conventional phrases with him, and passing on to mingle with his guests and to enjoy his hospitality, we might sit and talk with him into the small hours. That is the difference between the success of Hals with his Feast of S. George, and the failure of Rembrandt with The Night Watch. Hals was at the feast, and of it. Rembrandt was wrapped up in himself, and didn't enter into the spirit of the company—he was carried away by his own. That is why his pictures are so dark—not of deliberate technical purpose, like those of the Tenebrosi, but because to him a subject was felt within him rather than seen as a picture on so many square feet of canvas. When we call up in our own minds the recollection of some event of more than usually deep significance in our past, we only see the deathbed, the two combatants, the face of the beloved, or whatever it may be; the accessories are nothing, unless our imagination is stronger than the sentiment evoked, and sets to work to supply them. It is this characteristic which so sharply distinguishes the work of Rembrandt from that of his closest imitators. There is a large picture in the National Gallery, Christ Blessing the Children, catalogued as "School of Rembrandt," in which we see as near an approach to his manner as to justify the attribution, but that is all. I do not know why it has never been suggested that this is the work of Nicolas Maes, who was actually his pupil, and who was one of the few Dutch artists to paint life-sized groups, as he is known to have done in his earlier days when still under the influence of Rembrandt. The Card Players, close beside it, has marked affinities in style, and especially in the very natural characterization of the faces, which is also apparent in that of the child in the other picture, and another on the extreme left of the picture. That it cannot be Rembrandt's is quite evident; the grouping and the lighting of it proclaim the picture seen on the canvas, and not felt within the artist's own consciousness.