satisfying.  Not one of the six men could have had any fault to find with the way in which he was portrayed.  Each looks equally prominent in vivid life.  Yet they are not a row of six individual men, but an organic group held together you hardly know how.  At last you realize that all but one are looking at you. You are the unifying centre that brings the whole picture together, the bond without which, metaphorically speaking, it would fall to pieces.

This picture of six men in plain black clothes and black hats, sitting around a table, is by some considered the culmination of Rembrandt’s art.  It shows that, in spite of misfortune and failure, his ardour for new artistic achievement remained with him to the end.

In 1662 Rembrandt seems to have paid a brief and unnoticed visit to England.  If Charles II. had heard of him and made him his court painter, we might have had an unrivalled series of portraits of court beauties by his hand instead of by that of Sir Peter Lely.  As it was, a hasty sketch of old St. Paul’s Cathedral, four years before it was burnt down, is the sole trace left of his visit.

The story of his old age is dreary.  Even Titus died a few months before his father, leaving him alone in the world.  In the autumn of 1669 he himself passed away, leaving behind him his painting-clothes, his paint-brushes, and nothing else, save a name destined to an immortality which his contemporaries little foresaw.  All else had gone:  his wife, his child, his treasures, and his early vogue among the Dutchmen of his time.

The last picture of all was a portrait of himself, in the same attitude as his first, but disillusioned and tragic, with furrowed lines and white hair.  No one cared whether he died or not, and it is recorded that after his death pictures by him could be bought for sixpence.  Thus ended the life of one of the world’s supremely great painters.

CHAPTER X

PETER DE HOOGH AND CUYP

Let us now turn from the splendid gloom of Rembrandt’s ’Knight in Armour,’ to delight in this beautiful little interior of a Dutch house by Peter de Hoogh.  Still you see the prepossession for light, but for more tempered rays and softer shadows.  The sunshine is diffused by the yellow curtains throughout the room.  The old lady need not fear its revelations, to be sure, for it is Holland—­she knows that the whole house has been duly scrubbed with soap and water.  Dust and dirt are banished.  It is a cloudless day and dry under foot, otherwise the little boy would have worn clogs over his shoes, and you might see them outside.  Mud on the polished stones of the passage would have ruffled the housewife’s calm.  As it is, we can see she has had no worries this morning.  She has donned her fresh red dress and clean white apron, and will soon be seated to prepare the vegetables and fruit that are being brought her.  Perhaps they are a present from the old lady in the house over the way, who from her front door watches the child delivering the gift.