It must be borne in mind that in the beginning of the 17tli century Holland had risen to great power. Though not yet formally free from the Spanish yoke, she had broken the fetters by the heroic efforts of the former generation, and had entered on her grand career of national enterprise. Science and literature flourished in her universities, poetry and the stage were favoured by her citizens, and art found a home not only in the capital but in the provincial towns. It was a time also of new ideas. Old conventional forms in religion, philosophy, and art had fallen away, and liberty was inspiring new conceptions. It is with those of art that we have to deal. Here there were no church influences at work to fetter the painter in the choice and treatment of his subject, no academies to prescribe rules.

Left to himself, therefore, the artist painted the life of the people among whom he lived and the subjects which interested them. It was thus a living history that he painted,—scenes from the everyday life and amusements of the people, often mean and vulgar it must be confessed, the civic rulers, the regents of the hospitals and the heads of the guilds, and the civic guards who defended their towns. So also with the religious pictures which were produced under the influence of these environments. The dogmas and legends of the Church of Rome were no longer of interest to such a nation; but the Bible was read and studied with avidity, and from its page the artist drew directly the scenes of the simple narrative. The Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha were the sources from which, without any interference of Jesuit inquisitors, he drew his inspiration. This change had been coming on steadily since the Reformation, a change that implied a growing freedom from trammels and a larger and more human view of the subjects treated. Perhaps the earliest trace of this new aspect of Bible story is to be found in the pictures painted in Rome about the beginning of the 17 th century by Adam Elsheimer of Frankfort, who had undoubtedly a great influence on the Dutch painters studying in Italy. These in their turn carried back to Holland the simplicity and the picturesque effect which they found in Elsheimer’s work. Among these, the precursors of Rembrandt, may be mentioned Moeyaert, Ravesteyn, Lastman, Pinas, Honthorst, and Bramer. Influenced doubtless by these painters, Rembrandt determined to work out his own ideas of art on Dutch soil, resisting apparently every inducement to visit Italy. Though an admirer of the great Italian masters, he yet maintained his own individuality in the most marked manner. It is strange that we have no evidence that he ever met his greatest Dutch rival, the brillant Frans Hals, his senior by some fifteen years.

Rembrandt was born in the house No. 3 Weddesteg, on the rampart at Leyden overlooking the Rhine. The house belonged to his father Gerrit Harmen van Rijn, a well-to-do miller, and still exists, but the windmill is no more. He was the fourth son, and, as the older boys had been sent to trade, his parents resolved that he should enter a learned profession. With this view he was sent to the High School at Leyden; but the boy soon manifested his dislike of the prospect and determined to be a painter. Accordingly he was placed for three years under Swanenburch, a connexion of the Van Rijn family. This master was a painter of no great merit, but he enjoyed some reputation from his having studied in Italy. His next master was Lastman of Amsterdam, a painter of very considerable power. In Lastman’s works we can trace the germs of the colour and sentiment of his greater pupil, though his direct influence cannot have been great, as it is said by Orlers that Rembrandt remained with him only six months, after which time he returned to Leyden, about 1623. During the early years of his life at Leyden Rembrandt seems to have devoted himself entirely to studies, painting and etching the people around him, the beggars and cripples, every picturesque face and form he could get hold of. Life, character, and above all light were the aims of these studies. His mother was a frequent model, and we can trace in her features the strong likeness to her son, especially in the portraits of himself at an advanced age. So far as we know there is no likeness of his father, who died about 1632. The last portrait of his mother is that of the Belvidere Gallery of Vienna, painted the year before her death in 1640. One of his sisters also frequently sat to him, and Bode suggests that she must have accompanied him to Amsterdam and kept house for him till he married. This conjecture rests on the number of portraits of the same young woman painted in the early years of his stay in Amsterdam and before he met his bride. Then, again, in the many portraits of himself painted in his early life we can see with what zeal he set himself to master every form of expression, now grave now gay, at one time with a smile at another with a frown,—how thoroughly he learned to model the human face not from the outside but from the inner man. Careful in detail and thorough in work, these studies were the foundation of his later triumphs. Dr Bode gives fifty as the number of the portraits of himself, most of them painted in youth and in old age, the times when he had leisure for such work.

Rembrandt’s earliest pictures Avere painted in the last four years of his stay at Leyden, from 1627 to 1631. Bode mentions about nine pictures as known to belong to these years, chiefly paintings of single figures, as St Paul in Prison and St Jerome; but now and then compositions of several, as Samson in Prison and Presentations in the Temple. The prevailing tone of all these pictures is a greenish-grey, the effect being somewhat cold and heavy. The gallery at Cassel gives us a typical example of his studies of the heads of old men, firm and hard in workmanship and full of detail, the effects of light and shade being carefully thought out. His work was now attracting the attention of the lovers of art in the great city of Amsterdam; and, urged by their calls, he removed about 1631 to live and die there. His life lias few incidents and these only personal, for he lived among the simple burgher citizens, moving in an excellent circle of men of science, divines, poets, artists, and friends of art. At one bound he leaped into the position of the first portrait painter of the city, and received numerous commissions. During the early years of his residence there are at least forty known portraits from his hand, firm and solid in manner and staid in expression. It. has been remarked that the fantasy in which he indulged through life was reserved only for the portraits of himself and his immediate connexions. The excellent painter Thomas De Keyser was then in the height of his power, and his influence is to be traced in some of Rembrandt’s smaller portraits. Pupils also now flocked to his house in the Bloemgracht, among them Gerard Douw, who was nearly of his own age. The first important work executed by Rembrandt in Amsterdam is Simeon in the Temple, of the Hague Museum, a fine early example of his treatment of light and shade and of his subtle colour. The concentrated light falls on the principal figure, his favourite way of arresting attention, while the background is full of mystery. The surface is smooth and enamelled, and all the details are carefully wrought out, while the action of light on the mantle of Simeon shows how soon he had felt the magical effect of the play of colour. Between the small Simeon of 1631 and the life-sized Lesson in Anatomy of 1632 there is a great difference. In the latter we have the first of the great portrait subjects, —Tulp the anatomist, the early friend of Rembrandt, discoursing to his seven associates, who are ranged with eager heads round the foreshortened body. The subject was not new, for it had been treated in former years by the Mierevelds, A. Pietersen, and others, for the Hall of the Surgeons. But it was reserved for Rembrandt to make it a great picture by the grouping of the expressive portraits and by the completeness of the conception. The colour is quiet and the handling of the brush timid and precise, while the light and shade are somewhat harsh and abrupt. But it is a marvellous picture for a young man of twenty-five, and it is generally accepted as the first milestone in the career of the painter, and as marking a new departure.

In the forty long years of Rembrandt’s incessant activity as an artist about seven hundred pictures are known to have come from his own hand. It is therefore clearly impossible within the space at our disposal to notice more than the prominent ’ works in their order. Besides the Pellicorne family portraits of 1632, we have the caligra-phist Coppenol of the Cassel Gallery, interesting in the first place as an early example of Rembrandt’s method of giving permanent interest to a portrait by converting it into a picture. He invests it with a sense of life by a momentary expression as Coppenol raises his head towards the spectator while he is mending a quill. The same motive is to be found in the Shipbuilder, 1633 (of Buckingham Palace), who looks up from his work with a sense of interruption at the approach of his , wife. But the worthy Coppenol, “the Phoenix of the Pen,” has another charm for us; he was one of Rembrandt’s earliest friends in his new abode and remained true to the end, being painted thrice and etched twice by the artist, the last of whose portrait etchings (1661) was the Coppenol of large size. The two small pictures of the Philosopher of the Louvre date from 1633, delicate in execution and full of mysterious effect. The year 1634 is especially remarkable as that of his marriage with Saskia van Ulenburgh, a beautiful, fair-haired Frisian maiden of good connexions. Till her death in 1642 she was the centre of his life and art, and lives for us in many a canvas as well as in her own portraits. On her the painter lavished his magical power, painting her as the Queen Artemisia or Bathsheba, and as the wife of Samson,—ahvays proud of her long fair locks, and covering her with pearls and gold as precious in their play of colour as those of the Indies. A joyous pair as we see them in the Dresden Gallery, Saskia sitting on his knee while he laughs gaily, or promenading together in a fine picture of 1636, or putting the last touches of ornament to her toilette, for thus Bode interprets the so-called Burgomaster Pancras and his Wife. These were his happy days when he painted himself in his exuberant fantasy, and adorned himself, at least in his portraits, in scarfs and feathers and gold chains. Saskia brought him a marriage portion of forty thousand guilders, a large sum for those times, and she brought him also a large circle of good friends in Amsterdam. She bore him four children, Rum-bartus and two girls successively named Cornelia after his beloved mother, all of whom died in infancy, and Titus, named after Titia a sister of Saskia. We have several noble portraits of Saskia, a good type of the beauty of Holland, all painted with the utmost love and care, at Cassel (1633), at Dresden (1641), and a posthumous one (1643) at Berlin. But the greatest in workmanship and most pathetic in expression seems to us, though it is decried by Bode, that of Antwerp (1641), in which it is impossible not to trace declining health and to find a melancholy presage of her death, which took ])lace in 1642. Then truly Avent out the light of Rembrandt’s life.

Returning to Rembrandt’s work, Ave find one of the greatest portraits of 1634 to be the superb full length portrait of Martin Daey, Avhich with that of !Madame Daey, painted according to Vosmaer some years later, formed one of the ornaments of the Van Loon collection at Amsterdam. Both iioav belong to Baron Gustave de Rothschild. From the firm detailed execution of this portrait one turns with Avonder to the broader handling of the Old Woman, aged eighty-three, in the National Gallery, of the same year, remarkable for the effect of reflected light and still more for the sympathetic rendering of character.

The life of Samson supplied many subjects in these early days. The so-called Count of Gueldres Threatening his Father-in-law of the Berlin Gallery has been restored to its proper signification by M. Kolloff, who finds it to be Samson. It is forced and violent in its action. But the greatest of this series, and one of the prominent pictures of Rembrandt’s work, is the Marriage of Samson of the Dresden Gallery, painted in 1638. Here Rembrandt gives the rein to his imagination and makes the scene live before us. Except the bride (Saskia), who sits calm and grand on a dais in the centre of the feast, with the full light again playing on her flowing locks and wealth of jewels, all is animated and full of bustle. Samson, evidently a Rembrandt of fantasy, leans over a chair propounding his riddle to the Philistine lords. In execution it is a great advance on former subject pictures; it is bolder in manner, and we have here signs of his approaching love of warmer tones of red and yellow. It is also a fine example of his magic play of colour.

The story of Susannah also occupied him in these early years, and he returned to the subject in 1641 and 1653. The Bather of the National Gallery may also be another interpretation of the same theme. In all of these pictures the woman is coarse in type and lumpy in form, though the modelling is soft and round, the effect which Rembrandt always strove to gain. Beauty of form was outside his art. But the so-called Danae (1636) at St Petersburg is a sufficient reply to those who decry his nude female forms. As flesh painting it glows with colour and life, and the blood seems to pulsate under the warm skin. In the picturesque story of Tobit Rembrandt found much to interest him, as we see in the beautiful small picture of the Arenberg collection at Brussels. Sight is being restored to the aged Tobias, while with infinite tenderness his wife holds the old man’s hand caressingly. The momentary action is complete, and the picture goes straight to the heart. In the Berlin Gallery he paints the anxiety of the parents as they wait the return of their son. In 1637 he painted the fine picture now in the Louvre of the Flight of the Angel; and the same subject is grandly treated by him, apparently about 1645, in the picture exhibited in the winter exhibition at Burlington House in 1885. Reverence and awe are shown in every attitude of the Tobit family. A similar lofty treatment is to be found in the Christ as the Gardener appearing to Mary of 1638 (Buckingham Palace).

We have now arrived at the year 1640, the threshold of his second manner, which extended to 1654, the middle age of Rembrandt. During the latter part of the previous decade we find the shadows more transparent and the blending of light and shade more perfect. There is a growing power in every part of his art. The coldness of his first manner had disappeared, and the tones were gradually changing into golden-brown. He had passed through what Bode calls his “Sturm-und-Drang” period of exaggerated expression, as in the Berlin Samson, and had attained to a truer, calmer form of dramatic expression, of which the Manoali of Dresden is a good example (1641). Whether it was that he was getting tired of painting commissioned portraits, that he was independent of them, or that he aimed at higher flights, it is certain that these portraits painted “to order” became more rare about this time, and that those which we have are chiefly friends of his circle, such as the Mennonite Preacher (C. C. Ansloo) and the Gilder (Le Doreur), a fine example of his golden tone, formerly in the Morny collection and now in America. His own splendid portrait (1640) in the National Gallery illustrates the change in his work. It describes the man well,—strong and robust, with powerful head, firm and compressed lips and determined chin, with heavy eye-brovs, separated by a deep vertical furrow, and with eyes of keen penetrating glance,—altogether a self-reliant man that would carry out his own ideas, careless whether his popularity waxed or waned. The fantastic rendering of himself has disappeared; he seems more conscious of his dignity and position. He has now many friends and pupils, and numerous commissions, even from the stadtholder; lie has bought a large house in the Breedstraat, in which during the next sixteen years of his life lie gathered his large collection of paintings, engravings, armour, and costume which figure afterwards in his inventory. His taste was wide and his purchases large, for he was joint owner with picture dealers of paintings by Giorgione and Palma Veccliio, while for a high-priced Marc-antonio Raimondi print he gave in exchange a fine impression of his Christ Healing the Sick, which has since been known as the Hundred Guilder Print. The stadt-liolder was not a prompt payer, and an interesting correspondence took place between Rembrandt and Constantin Huygens, the poet and secretary of the prince. The Rembrandt letters which have come down to us are few, and these are therefore of importance. Rembrandt puts a high value on the picture, which he says had been painted “with much care and zeal,” but he is willing to take what the prince thinks proper; while to Huygens he sends a large picture as a present for his trouble in carrying through the business. There is here no sign of the grasping greed with which he has been charged, while his unselfish conduct is seen in the settlement of the family affairs at the death of his mother in 1640.

The year 1642 is remarkable for the great picture formerly known as the Night Watch, but now more correctly as the Sortie of the Banning Cock Company, another of the landmarks of Rembrandt’s career, in which twenty-nine life-sized civic guards are introduced issuing pell-mell from their club house. Such guilds of arque-busiers had been painted admirably before by Ravesteyn and notably by Frans Hals, but Rembrandt determined to throw life and animation into the scene, which is full of bustle and movement. One can almost hear the beating of the drum and the barking of the dog. The dominant colour is the...