into things of rare beauty, or the imagination of a Tintoret that creates and depicts scenes undreamt of before by man.  Many painted the things around them as they looked to a commonplace mind, with no glamour and no transforming touch.  When we see their pictures, our eyes are not opened to new effects.  We continue to see and to feel as we did before, but we admire the honest work, the pleasant colour, and the efficiency of the painters.  In default of Raphaels, Giorgiones, and Titians, we should be pleased to hang upon our walls works such as those.  But towering above the other artists of Holland, great and small, was one Dutchman, Rembrandt, who holds his own with the greatest of the world.

He was born in 1606, the son of a miller at Leyden, who gave him the best teaching there to be had.  Soon he became a good painter of likenesses, and orders for portraits began to stream in upon him from the citizens of his native town.  These he executed well, but his heart was not wrapped up in the portrayal of character as John Van Eyck’s had been.  Neither was it in the drawing of delicate and beautiful lines that he wished to excel, as did Holbein and Raphael.  He was the dramatist of painting, a man who would rather paint some one person ten times over in the character of somebody else, high priest, king, warrior, or buffoon, than once thoroughly in his own.  But when people ordered portraits of themselves they wanted good likenesses, and Rembrandt was happy to supply them.  At first it was only when he was working at home to please himself that he indulged his picturesque gift.  He painted his father, his mother, and himself over and over again, but in each picture he tried some experiment with expression, or a new pose, or a strange effect of lighting, transforming the general aspect of the original.  His own face did as well as any other to experiment with; none could be offended with the result, and it was always to be had without paying a model’s price for the sitting.  Thus all through his life, from twenty-two to sixty-three, we can follow the growth of his art with the transformation of his body, in the long series of pictures of his single self.

More than any artist that had gone before him, Rembrandt was fascinated by the problem of light.  The brightest patch of white on a canvas will look black if you hold it up against the sky.  How, then, can the fire of sunshine be depicted at all?  Experience shows that it can only be suggested by contrast with shadows almost black.  But absolutely black shadows would not be beautiful.  Fancy a picture in which the shadows were as black as well-polished boots!  Rembrandt had to find out how to make his dark shadows rich, and how to make a picture, in which shadow predominated, a beautiful thing in itself, a thing that would decorate a wall as well as depict the chosen subject.  That was no easy problem, and he had to solve it for himself.  It was his life’s work.  He applied his new idea in the painting of portraits and in subject pictures, chiefly illustrative of dramatic incidents in Bible history, for the same quality in him that made him love the flare of light, made him also love the dramatic in life.