It is certain, too, that he had been almost childishly reckless in expenditure on artistic and beautiful things which were unnecessary to his art and beyond his means, although those for a while had been abundant.  At the time of the failure of the ‘Night Watch,’ his wife Saskia died, leaving him their little son, Titus, a beautiful child.  Through ever-darkening days, for the next fifteen years, he continued to paint with increasing power.  It is to this later period that our picture of the ‘Man in Armour’ belongs.

[Illustration:  A MAN IN ARMOUR From the picture by Rembrandt, in the Corporation Art Gallery, Glasgow]

The picture is not a portrait, but rather a study of light upon armour.  No man came to Rembrandt and asked to be painted like that; but Rembrandt saw in his mind’s eye a great effect—­a fine knightly face beneath a shadowing helmet and set off against a sombre background.  A picture such as this is a work of the imagination in the same sense as the ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ of Tintoret.  It was an effect that only Rembrandt could see, painted as only he could paint it.  The strongest light falls upon the breastplate, the next strongest upon the helmet, and the ear-ring is there to catch another gleam.  When you look at the picture closely, you can see that the lights are laid on (we might almost say ‘buttered on’) with thick white paint.  More than once Rembrandt painted armour for the sake of the effects of light.  In one of the portraits of himself he wears a helmet, and he painted his brother similarly adorned.  A picture of a person wearing the same armour as in the Glasgow picture is in St. Petersburg, but the figure is turned in a slightly different direction and reflects the light differently.  It is called ‘Pallas Athene,’ and was no doubt painted at the same time as ours; but the person, whether named Pallas Athene or knight, was but a peg upon which to hang the armour for the sake of the light shining on it.

Rembrandt was a typical Dutch worker all his life.  Besides the great number of pictures that have come down to us, we have about three thousand of his drawings, and his etchings are very numerous and fine.

I wonder if you know how prints are made?  There are, broadly speaking, two different processes.  You can take a block of wood and cut away the substance around the lines of the design.  Then when you cover with ink the raised surface of wood that is left and press the paper upon it, the design prints off in black where the ink is but the paper remains white where the hollows are.  This is the method called wood-cutting, which is still in use for book illustrations.

In the other process, the design is ploughed into a metal plate, the lines being made deep enough to hold ink, and varying in width according to the strength desired in the print.  You then fill the grooves with ink, wiping the flat surface clean, so that when the paper is pressed against the plate and into the furrows, the lines print black, out of the furrows, and the rest remains white.