MASTERPIECES
IN COLOUR

EDITED BY
T. LEMAN HARE

Others in Preparation.

PLATE 1--SUZANNA VAN COLLEN

This portrait, painted about 1633, and one of the gems of the Wallace Collection, presents Susanna van Collen, wife of Jan Pellicorne, and her daughter.

Rembrandt

BY JOSEF ISRAELS

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

The plates are printed by Bemrose Dalziel, Ltd., Watford

The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

While the world pays respectful tribute to Rembrandt the artist, it has been compelled to wait until comparatively recent years for some small measure of reliable information concerning Rembrandt the man. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have been very little concerned with personalities. A man was judged by his work which appealed, if it were good enough, to an ever-increasing circle. There were no newspapers to record his doings and, if he chanced to be an artist, it was nobody's business to set down the details of his life. Sometimes a diarist chanced to pass by and to jot down a little gossip, quite unconscious of the fact that it would serve to stimulate generations yet unborn, but, for the most part, artists who did great work in a retiring fashion and were not honoured by courts and princes as Rubens was, passed from the scene of their labours with all the details of their sojourn unrecorded.

Rembrandt was fated to suffer more than mere neglect, for he seems to have been a light-hearted, headstrong, extravagant man, with no capacity for business. He had not even the supreme quality, associated in doggerel with Dutchmen, of giving too little and asking too much. Consequently, when he died poor and enfeebled, in years when his collection of works of fine art had been sold at public auction for a fraction of its value, when his pictures had been seized for debt, and wife, mistress, children, and many friends had passed, little was said about him. It was only when the superlative quality of his art was recognised beyond a small circle of admirers that people began to gather up such fragments of biography as they could find.

Shakespeare has put into Mark Antony's mouth the statement that "the evil that men do lives after them," and this was very much the case with Rembrandt van Ryn. His first biographers seem to have no memory save for his undoubted recklessness, his extravagance, and his debts. They remembered that his pictures fetched very good prices, that his studio was besieged for some years by more sitters than it could accommodate, that he was honoured with commissions from the ruling house, and that in short, he had every chance that would have led a good business man to prosperity and an old age removed from stress and strain. These facts seem to have aroused their ire. They have assailed his memory with invective that does not stop short at false statement. They have found in the greatest of all Dutch artists a ne'er-do-well who could not take advantage of his opportunities, who had the extravagance of a company promoter, an explosive temper and all the instincts that make for loose living.

PLATE II.--A PORTRAIT OF SASKIA

Rembrandt's portraits of his wife Saskia are distributed fairly equally throughout the world's great galleries, but this one from the Brera in Milan is not so well known as most, and on this account it is reproduced here. It is called "Portrait of a Woman" in the catalogue, but the features justify the belief that the lady was the painter's wife.

Alas for these poor biographers, who, had they but taken the trouble to trust to the pictures rather than to the lies that were current, would have seen that the artist's life could not have been nearly as bad as they imagined. Happily, to-day, we have more than the testimony of the painted canvas, though that would suffice the most of intelligent men. Further investigation has done a great deal to remove the blemishes from Rembrandt's name; MM. Vosmaer and Michel have restored it as though it were a discoloured