Rembrandt looms out like some amorphous boulder, stationary, lichen-stained, gathering time unto itself.  He travelled so little that it can be said he was untravelled.  The works of other painters affected him not at all.  We are without proof that he was even interested in the work of his contemporaries or predecessors.  Life was his passion.  One model was as good as another.  He looked at life, and life fired his imaginations.  He painted himself fifty times; he painted his friends, his relations, and the people he met while prowling about the streets.  His pencil was never idle.  Imagination, which confuses the judgment of so many, aided him, for his imagination was not nourished by vanity, or the desire to produce an effect, but flowed from the greatness of his brooding heart.  He stood alone during his life, an absorbed man, uninfluenced by any school; he stands alone to-day.  The world about him, and his thoughts and reflections, were his only influences.  He read few books, and the chief among them was the Bible.  Mr. Berenson has written an exhaustive and learned work on Lorenzo Lotto, analysing his pictures year by year, and exhuming the various painters who influenced Lotto at the different periods of his life.  Mr. Berenson’s book extends to nearly three hundred pages.  The influences of the painting fraternity upon Rembrandt would not provide material for the first paragraph of the first page of such a book.

His fame is assured.  He is one of the great triumvirate.  “He was greater, perhaps,” says Mr. Clausen, “than any other painter in human feeling and sympathy, in dramatic sense and invention; and his imagination seemed inexhaustible.”

The Ryks Museum at Amsterdam may be said to have been designed as a shrine for his Night Watch.  Near by it hangs The Syndics of the Cloth Company, excelled, in this particular class of work, by no picture in the world; but it is by the portraits and the etchings that the sweep, profundity, and versatility of Rembrandt’s genius is exemplified.  Truly his imagination was inexhaustible.

It is an education to stand before his portraits in the National Gallery.  Observe the Old Lady, aged 83, the massive painting of her face, and the outline of her figure set so firmly against the background.  Here is Realism, frank and straightforward, almost defiant in its strength.  Turn to the portrait of A Jewish Rabbi.  Here is Idealism.  You peer and peer, and from the brown background emerges a brown garment, relieved by the black cap, and the black cloak that falls over his left shoulder.  Luminous black and luminous brown!  Brown is the side of the face in shadow, brown is the brow in shadow.  All is tributary to the glory of the golden brown on the lighted portion of the face.  The portrait composes into a perfect whole.  The dim blacks and browns lead up to the golden brown illuminating the old weary head, that wonderful golden brown—­the secret of Rembrandt.  This old Jew lives through the magic art of Rembrandt.  He crouches in the frame, wistful and waiting, the eternal type, eternally dreaming the Jews’ dream that is still a dream.