IN THE ALTMAN COLLECTION, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
OLD WOMAN CUTTING HER NAILS, BY REMBRANDT
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Rembrandt van Rijn
TWO
The keeping of a few dates in mind greatly aids in understanding Rembrandt’s pictures. His birth date has been variously given as 1605, 1606, and 1607. Rembrandt’s story has been told at length in previous numbers of The Mentor. It is said that “whatever he turned to was treated with that breadth of view that overlooked the little and grasped the great.” His earliest work dates from 1627. In 1632 came his first great success, the famous “Lesson in Anatomy.” He was at that time living in Amsterdam, having moved there from his birth city, Leyden, Holland. Pupils and patrons flocked to his studios, and the world was very bright. He became the best-known portrait painter of the richest art and commercial center of Holland. In 1634 he married Saskia van Uylenborch, daughter of an aristocratic family and a young girl of attractive qualities, who brought him many friends and bore him four children. Rembrandt loved his wife devotedly. He made many portraits of her, including one of her with himself that hangs in the Royal Gallery at Dresden. In 1641, the fourth child was born, a son, whom they named Titus. A portrait of this “Golden Lad,” as his father liked to call him, hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. It was painted when he was fourteen: “The wide-set eyes and full upper lids mark his artistic inheritance, but the far-away haunting expression seems a premonition of his death in early manhood.” Saskia’s death came in 1642, when Titus was less than a year old.
Broken by the loss of his wife, Rembrandt continued to paint under increasingly bitter circumstances, but his work showed no diminution in merit, only a deeper feeling. When he was about thirty-five he received an order to paint Captain Banning Cock’s company of Dutch musketeers. His manner of handling the lights and shadows of this renowned masterpiece was misunderstood by French writers of a later period, who called it “The Night Patrol,” and Sir Joshua Reynolds, falling into the same error, named it “The Night Watch,” instead of “The Day Watch.” Great dissatisfaction followed the original exhibition of this sortie of the civic guards through the jealousy of those that thought they had been slighted in the composition of the grouping. This dissatisfaction cost Rembrandt much subsequent patronage, and thereafter he was no longer the darling of Amsterdam, but a man saddened by personal griefs and overwhelmed by adversity.
“The Mill,” now in the Widener Collection in Philadelphia, was executed during this dark period of Rembrandt’s life. Under the same influences he painted “The Old Woman Cutting Her Nails,” judged one of the rarest gems of all the Rembrandt pictures owned in this country. It portrays the sympathetic feeling of the artist for old age, and is “typical of the careworn, sorrow-wrecked woman of all time.” Says a critic, “This picture is simply of a poor old woman intent on cutting her nails, with a pair of sheep-shears it seems, yet we are overcome with the power of it—no details, dull in color, homely in subject, but bathed with a light that never was on land or sea. Rembrandt’s light! What cared he for poverty or neglect with such a comforter at hand?” The “Portrait of Rembrandt” in the Museum was painted by himself when he was fifty-four, and is one of about sixty self-portraits. In 1668, he painted the “Man with a Magnifying Glass.” This, too, hangs in the Museum, and also the grim “Pilate Washing His Hands.” The last picture purchased by Mr. Altman, whose entire collection was obtained in the space of a few years, was “The Toilet of Bathsheba,” thought by many judges to be the loveliest of Rembrandt’s pictures that tell a story. It was painted in 1643.
Rembrandt died in 1669. Twelve years before, he had been sold out of house and home. It is said that there are in America today more paintings by this greatest of Dutch masters than in any one country of Europe. Thirteen pictures signed by him became a part of the Altman Collection. There are now about one hundred Rembrandt paintings owned in this country. The “Orphan Girl at Window” is in the Art Institute, Chicago. Mr. Frick, of New York, acquired the so-called “Polish Rider” and “Rembrandt Seated.” Other examples of Rembrandt’s genius are in galleries in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Cincinnati.