His son, as was indicated in the second chapter, was indifferent to art history, and he would not have walked across the road to read an unedited document; but I see him tramping ten miles to seek a picture that promised to stir his emotions and stimulate his imagination.  Rembrandt, the maker of pictures, had become a vivid personality, a master whom he reverenced; but Rembrandt the etcher was unknown to him.

There are authorities who assert that in etching Rembrandt’s art found its amplest and most exquisite expression.  None will deny that his is the greatest name in etching.  If all Rembrandt’s pictures were destroyed, if every record of them by photograph or copy was blotted out, the etchings alone would form so ample a testimony to his genius that the name of Rembrandt would still remain among the foremost artists of the world.

Rembrandt enjoyed a period of popularity with his pictures, followed by years of decline and neglect, when lesser and more accommodating men ousted him from popular favour.  But from first to last the products of his needle were appreciated by his contemporaries, even if he himself did not set great store by them.  He began to etch early in life:  he ceased only when his eyesight failed.  He found in etching a congenial and natural means of self-expression.  His artistic fecundity threw them off in regal profusion.  The mood seized him:  he would take a prepared plate, and sometimes, having swiftly spent his emotion, he did not trouble to do more than indicate the secondary incidents in a composition.  Often he gave them away to friends and fellow-artists, or tossed them, when they had answered their purpose in his art life, so continuously experimental, into one of the sixty portfolios of leather recorded in the inventory of his property.

The history of Christ Healing the Sick, known as The Hundred Guilder Print, now the most prized of all the etchings, shows that he did not attach much value, either artistic or monetary, to this plate.  He did not even receive a hundred guilders (under L9) for it, but gave the etching to his friend Jan Zoomer in exchange for The Pest, by M. Anthony.  At the Holford sale, as has already been noted, L1750 was given for the Hundred Guilder Print.

It is supposed that only two of the etchings were made expressly for publication—­the Descent from the Cross, and the Ecce Homo; but Rembrandt may have benefited from the sale of them through the partnership that was formed in 1660 between his son Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels.

[Illustration:  MINERVA

1655.  The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

In the eighteenth century certain connoisseurs had already made collections of his etchings.  Catalogues began to be published, and in 1797 Adam Bartsch, keeper of the prints in the library at Vienna, issued the well-known catalogue that bears his name in two octavo volumes.  Since Bartsch’s monumental work many students of the etchings have striven to sift the authentic from the false.  Needless to say, they disagree.  Here are the figures:—­