On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Above slave-sorrows, to his chariot linked,’

Rembrandt’s command of the instruments of his employment became only more complete, if also his method was more summary. More and more sonorous were the notes he uttered, and the vox humana stop, which is absent in colder craftsmen, sounded with increased frequency and more assured appeal.

Of course in Portraiture, though he succeeds always, he succeeds best when his themes are the best. With the exception of ‘Clément de Jonghe,’ with the exception of ‘Lutma,’ with the exception perhaps of ‘Jan Six’—etched by him many years before he wrought the noble painted portrait which is owned still by a descendant of its sitter (Mr. Six van Hillegom of Amsterdam)—Rembrandt is most profoundly interesting, most penetrating, most sympathetic, when it is this or that member of his own family who serves as his model. Once or twice at least he portrayed the features of his son; several times those of his mother, whom in the ‘Mère de Rembrandt au voile noir’ he records in an hour of austere and guarded meditation, as in the ‘Head of a Woman lightly etched’ he records her in the relaxation of social ease. Many times, in drawing, print, and picture, he portrayed his wife, Saskia—in moods that seemed to vary with his own: now perched upon his knee, in the Dresden canvas of almost aggressive buoyancy and self-satisfaction; now demure and pretty, in a Berlin drawing; now radiant and almost stately in the ‘Great Jewish Bride,’ so it is said—though I find least witness of her here—now the healthy, blameless animal of Mrs. Joseph’s golden canvas; now the sick, worn woman, with vitality gone, eye dimmed, life surely ebbing, of the lovely and pathetic little etching which Sir Seymour Haden was, I think, the first to christen ‘The Dying Saskia.’

But oftener than he depicted any member of his family—and oftener much than he thought fit to give expression to the cordial youthful face and ample contours of Hendrickje Stoffels, the agreeable consolation of his age—he had recourse to his own countenance. In the great series of what the Germans call ‘self-portraits’ we may trace the changes in his air from spirited youth to burdened years. To-day he is comely, clean, and fit. To-morrow, after a night of revelry, it may be—for from few human experiences did Rembrandt, any more than Goethe, stand aside—he is haggard and ‘to pieces.’ Then he is proud in cap and feather; he buckles on his sword. Or, aged a little, he paints himself in loose gown, palette in hand, it may be, and mahl-stick at his side. Then, heavy and stooping, baggy below the eyes, with mouth tender yet saddened, trouble has come upon him from all the ends of the earth. He totters, scarcely yet irresolute, but weighed down certainly by years and sorrows; his wife long gone; his fame obscured; his means narrow; and, save for the sustaining power of his art, and one hopes, at least, for the consolation of one deep affection, anxiety in all his hours. We will not leave him like this—though like this we find him in Lord Iveagh’s immortal picture, and in one or two representations of kindred character in Vienna and at St. Petersburg. We will leave him happy in his drawing. It is an etching of scarcely surpassable interest, existing in many ‘States’—a print to be avoided in the later, which are flat and expressionless; to be cherished in all the earlier, of which the first is rarest and most vigorous. See its slashing directness. With blow to left and blow to right, so to say it, on the copper, he hacks his way triumphantly and speedily to his goal. He is the master of all methods. Here, as in so much besides, he has been broad and rapid. In the ‘Burgomaster Six’—which has something of the quality of a mezzotint—how tender and how slow! In the ‘Clément de Jonghe’—the printseller of Amsterdam—how large yet subtle! He is the master of many an instrument. We can apply to him the phrase, and the implied eulogy, of Robert Browning—he ‘blows through brass,’ but he can ‘breathe through silver.’

(Pall Mall Magazine, December 1898.)

DUTCH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DRAWINGS

The drawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools, and of all Schools besides, have these sources of interest, always admitted—they reveal to us, as studies must, the personal thought of the master in his theme, and they may often be identified as preparations for some long recognised picture with whose history we are henceforth to be the better acquainted. But some among the drawings of the Dutch School, though coming late indeed in the procession of the world’s Art, are still the earliest to possess for us that different and self-contained interest which belongs to work done for its proper sake, itself realising the intention with which it was begun, and so, in the first form in which it comes down to us, at once final and complete.

The School of Holland—that northern School to which at last, in the great Seventeenth Century, supremacy in Art had moved—was perhaps the first to adequately feel the value of those immediate impressions which the Italians and the early Flemish had recognised chiefly to control, to alter, to enlarge. And in the many methods of their Art, the masters of Holland sought to perpetuate for the beholders of their work the impressions which to themselves who recorded them had perhaps been as fleeting as vivid. Sketches in oil, sketches in water-colour, sketches in chalk, in bistre, and with the reed pen, and sketches with the etching needle—these all, in the hands of the great Dutchmen, were not merely studies for themselves, but possessions for their public, just as expressive and interesting as work more prolonged and elaborate. Therefore the amount of finish which each of such finished sketches received was not the important matter: with the greatest artists the amount was often but small: they knew that the important matter was the sufficiency of finish—its capacity for conveying to one mind the impression received by another.

And it is characteristic of Dutch Art, and especially of Dutch Landscape Art, that it had no period of painful and tentative labour, like that during which the art of earlier schools had had to struggle slowly towards freedom of expression. Profiting no doubt by the experience of the Past, and the recent Past especially of Bruges and of Leyden, it gained almost at once the power of finish always expressive, always economical, yet often very swift and summary. The work of its earliest masters—Roghman say, and Van Goyen—has neither pettiness of manipulation when it is most delicate, nor uncertainty when it is most rapid. The signs of an art mature and masculine—economy of means, decision of hand—are promptly upon it. Roghman, it appears, made few pictures, but many drawings. There are five-and-twenty in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. His drawings must have been acceptable to the public of his day, and they show that a public then existed capable of the intelligent interpretation of the work of an artist who left much to be interpreted. Van Goyen, if he did not make many drawings, painted many pictures with at least as marked an economy of means as he has used in the few drawings we know. His science of large design and the expressive completeness of his gradations of tone, enabled him—often in picture and drawing alike—to dispense with the easier attraction of various colour, so that even a modern master of colour, Théodore Rousseau, was wont to hold him up as a model to his own pupils.

Van Goyen travelled, and Roghman travelled, but their art, like that of Rembrandt—their younger and greater contemporary, who remained at home—continued to be not an imported art, but an art of the soil; and it was only at a later period that the experience of travel, and the contact with an art very different from their own, were to bring to the Dutchmen a new method with a false ideal. There was first the true Dutch time, rich and fertile—a time in which Van Goyen painted, with a seeming monotony always delicately varied, the long river banks, the low-lying towns, and the great high skies of Holland; in which Cuyp fixed interest on the common aspects of the afternoon fields, steaming in moist sunshine; in which Adrian van Ostade passed from the vulgarities of the alehouse to the skilfully rendered charm of the cottage door and the bench in the sunlight; in which Jan Steen perfected himself in as keen and comprehensive a knowledge of the world of men as Art has ever displayed; and in which Rembrandt contentedly imaged Dutch life and landscape, always with nearly equal vigour, nearly equal artistic precision, though at one time in a style that formed the style of Gerard Dow and at another in one that was inherited by Philip de Koningh or by Nicholas Maas.