The landscape of Holland, with its level distances and low horizon, has inexhaustible attractions for the painter of skies and atmosphere. To the born designer it is less stimulating. One of the things that most impress in any representative exhibition of Rembrandt’s etchings is the extraordinary variety and freshness of his designing. The proportions of the plate, upright, square, or oblong; the relation of the figures to the frame; the proportion of light to dark; the use of tone and line;—all these show a constant variety. Those who, when they think of Rembrandt, call up the image of a dark panel with light concentrated on a head or group in the middle of it, find a series of the etchings quite subversive of their preconception.
Now to an inventive designer like Rembrandt the resources of the Dutch landscape offered but little. Where he blends landscape with figure, as in the infinitely pathetic Burial of Christ, or the Woman of Samaria, or the Christ Returning with His Parents from the Temple, though the human types, as always, are taken from the world around the artist, the landscape is drawn from his imagination, or borrowed from others. In the St. Jerome (B. 104) the background is no doubt taken from a Venetian drawing. Such methods were, indeed, inevitable, since one cannot go on weaving designs of human forms and landscape material where the typical form of this last is little more than a straight line, or a series of straight lines, across the field of sight.
One may wonder, perhaps with regret, why Rembrandt did not for once etch a landscape of his inner vision, like those paintings at Cassel and at Brunswick. It may be that he felt that for such tone-effects etching was not the appropriate medium. Had he lived in a later day, he might have used mezzotint, as Turner did in his Liber Studiorum; and certainly that process should in his hands have yielded marvelous results.
But we may well be content with these landscape etchings which he has left us. They express the genius of the Dutch country, the “virtue” of it, as Pater would have said, as no other of his countrymen has expressed it. The series of plates in which Legros has expressed the genius of the country of Northern France, with its poplar-bordered streams and sunny pastures, has something of the same native quality. Each of these masters seems to have seized an essence which no one not born of the soil, however enamoured of a land’s beauty, can quite possess and make his own.
What is it that gives these landscapes their enduring charm, and why do we rank them so high? Many a later etcher has had equal skill with needle and acid; some have had even greater. Whistler is more delicate, perhaps, more exquisite, more unexpected in his gift of spacing. Yet neither Whistler nor any other master of etching has the secret power of Rembrandt. I say “secret,” because we cannot argue about it or explain it. It lay in what Rembrandt was: in the depth and greatness of his humanity. When we have wondered at the sensitive instrument of his eyesight, when we have exalted his magical draughtsmanship, when we have admired his instinctive fidelity to the capacity and limitations of the medium used, when we have recognized the profound integrity of his art, there is still something left over, beyond analysis, and that the rarest thing of all.
How it is we cannot say, but there has passed into these little works an intangible presence, of which we cannot choose but be conscious, though it was not consciously expressed,—the spirit of one of the fullest, deepest natures that ever breathed. Whatever Rembrandt does, however slight, something of that spirit escapes him, some tinge of his experience,—of those thoughts, “too deep for tears,” which things meaner than the meanest flowers could stir in him.
GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI
(1720-1778)
Part I
By BENJAMIN BURGES MOORE