Rembrandt lived among the poor, as a matter of artistic policy, mingling with them on an absolute equality.  He considered their attitudes simpler, more natural, and their conduct less artificial, than the manners of those in higher walks.

About Sixteen Hundred Twenty-nine, there came into his hands a set of Callot’s engravings, and the work produced on his mind a profound impression.  Callot’s specialty was beggardom.  He pictured decrepit beggars, young beggars, handsome girl-beggars, and gallant old beggars who wore their fluttering rags with easy grace.

The man who could give the phlegmatic Rembrandt a list to starboard must have carried considerable ballast.  Straightway on making Callot’s acquaintance he went forth with bags of coppers and made the acquaintance of beggars.  He did not have to travel far—­“the Greeks were at his door.”  The news spread, and each morning, the truthful Orles has told us, “there were over four hundred beggars blocking the street that led to his study,” all willing to enlist in the cause of art.  For six months Rembrandt painted little beside “the ragged gentry.”  But he gradually settled down on about ten separate and distinct types of abject picturesqueness.

Ten years later, when he pictured the “Healing Christ,” he introduced the Leyden beggars, and these fixed types that he carried hidden in the cells of his brain he introduced again and again in various pictures.  In this respect he was like all good illustrators:  he had his properties, and by new combinations made new pictures.  Who has not noticed that every painter carries in his kit his own distinct types—­sealed, certified to, and copyrighted by popular favor as his own personal property?

Can you mistake Kemble’s “coons,” Denslow’s dandies, Remington’s horses, Giannini’s Indians, or Gibson’s “Summer Girl”?  These men may not be Rembrandts, but when we view the zigzag course art has taken, who dare prophesy that this man’s name is writ in water and that man’s carved in the granite of a mountain-side!  Contemporary judgments usually have been wrong.  Did the chief citizens of Leyden in the year Sixteen Hundred Thirty regard Rembrandt’s beggars as immortal?  Not exactly!

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In Sixteen Hundred Thirty-one, Rembrandt concluded that his reputation in the art-world of Holland was sufficient for him to go to Amsterdam and boldly pit himself against De Keyser, Hals, Lastman and the rest.  He had put forth his “Lesson in Anatomy,” and the critics and connoisseurs who had come from the metropolis to see it were lavish in their praise.  Later we find him painting the subject again with another doctor handling the tweezers and scalpel.

Rembrandt started for Amsterdam the second time—­this time as a teacher, not as a scholar.  He rented an old warehouse on the canal for a studio.  It was nearly as outlandish a place as his former quarters in the mill at Leyden.  But it gave him plenty of room, was secluded, and afforded good opportunity for experiments in light and shade.