The ladies of the Dorcas Society expressed in eyes and gestures their disapproval of the Amsterdam vandals who mutilated The Night Watch.  One of them remarked:  “It happened a long time ago.  So gross a barbarity could not be perpetrated now.”

Twenty years later, at the age of fifty-six, Rembrandt, having known what it was to be homeless and penniless, painted his masterpiece, The Syndics of the Cloth Hall, merely five figures grouped round a table, with a servant, uncovered, in attendance.  It is an extraordinarily real picture, the final statement of Rembrandt’s knowledge of painting, combined with that rare power of seeing things just as they are—­the hundred subtleties that the untrained eye never sees, as well as the accents that all see.  It is the perfect painter’s vision—­a scene grasped as a whole, character searched out but not insistent, the most delicate suggestion of equally diffused light knitting the figures together.  He made no attempt to be picturesque as in The Night Watch; he was content just to paint five men dressed in black, with flat white collars and broad-brimmed hats, and a servant.  With these simple materials Rembrandt produced the picture that the world has agreed to regard as his masterpiece.  Contemporary criticism says nothing about it.  The place of honour at the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam is given to The Night Watch, but it is The Syndics of the Cloth Hall—­a simple presentation of five grave men seated at a table—­that we remember with wonder and admiration.

Our enthusiast, having dwelt upon these three masterpieces, marking epochs in Rembrandt’s life, referred again to the magnificent array of portraits scattered in such regal profusion through the thirty years that passed between the painting of The Anatomy Lesson and The Syndics.  Then noticing, while enlarging upon the etchings, that his mother was casting anxious glances at the clock, he hurriedly referred to the last portrait that Rembrandt painted of himself, two years before his death.  He could not describe this portrait, which is in a private collection in Berlin, as he had never seen it, so he quoted M. Michel’s description:  “This extraordinary work, perhaps the last Rembrandt painted, is modelled with prodigious vigour and freedom.  With superb audacity, the master shows us once more the familiar features, on which age and sorrow have worked their will.  They are distorted, disfigured, almost unrecognisable.  But the free spirit is still unbroken.  The eyes that meet ours are still keen and piercing; they have even the old twinkle of good-humoured irony, and the toothless mouth relaxes in frank laughter.  What was the secret of this gaiety?  In spite of his poverty, he had still a corner in which to paint.  Beside him stand an easel and an antique bust, perhaps a relic of his former wealth.  He holds his maul-stick in his hand, and pauses for a moment in his work.  He is happy because he can give himself up to his art.”