He looked at life through his eyes and through his imagination, and related his adventures.  One day it was a flayed ox hanging outside a butcher’s shop, which he saw through his eyes; another day it was Christ healing the sick, which he saw through his imagination.  You can imagine the healthy, full-blooded Rembrandt of this portrait painting the Carcase of a Bullock at the Louvre, or that prank called The Rape of Ganymede, or that delightful, laughing picture of his wife sitting upon his knee at Dresden, which Ruskin disliked.

The other portrait of Rembrandt by himself at the National Gallery shows that he was not a vain man, and that he was just as honest with himself as with his other sitters.  It was painted when he was old and ailing and time-marked, five years before his death.  His hands are clasped, and he seems to be saying—­“Look at me!  That is what I am like now, an old, much bothered man, bankrupt, without a home, but happy enough so long as I have some sort of a roof above me under which I can paint.  I am he of whom it was said that he was famous when he was beardless.  Observe me now!  What care I so that I can still see the world and the men and women about me—­’When I want rest for my mind, it is not honours I crave, but liberty.’”

[Illustration:  REMBRANDT LEANING ON A STONE SILL

1640.  National Gallery, London.]

Twenty-eight seemed a great age to the child; but he thought it wonderful that the portrait of an Old Lady at the National Gallery should have been painted when Rembrandt was but twenty-eight.  She was too strong and determined for his liking, and he wondered why some of Rembrandt’s pictures, like The Woman taken in Adultery, should be so mysterious and poetical, and others like this old lady so lifelike and straightforward.  He was too young to understand that the composition of the fortuitous concourse of atoms called Rembrandt, included not only the power that Velasquez possessed in so supreme a degree of painting just what his eyes saw, exemplified by this portrait of An Old Lady, aged 83, and by the portrait of Elizabeth Bas at Amsterdam, but that it also included the great gift of creative imagination, exemplified by the Christ at Emmaus, and The Good Samaritan of the Louvre, and in a way by the Portrait of a Slav Prince at the Hermitage, where a man in the alembic of Rembrandt’s imagination has become a type.  Also in The Reconciliation of David and Absalom at the Hermitage, where behind the sham trappings of the figures shine the eternal motives of reconciliation and forgiveness.

When the child was much older he saw the Christ at Emmaus, and The Good Samaritan in the little room at the Louvre, hanging side by side, and he never forget the hour that he spent with them.  He had seen, year by year, many of the world’s pictures; but at the sight of these two works, his childish predilection for Rembrandt became a deep-rooted reverence and admiration, which was never to pass from him.