hen Rembrandt lived in it. This
does not so much apply to the interior, because everybody will understand
the impossibility of reconstructing the artist's direct surroundings, for
lack of the furniture and works of art with which Rembrandt had crowded
it. More noteworthy is the fact that the facade has quite a different
character. The outer appearance of a house should as much as possible
give a true illustration of the time at which it was built, especially as
this one had retained its original form, apparently, when its greatest
occupant inhabited it. In its restored condition it still preserves
important additions which date from a later period. The two sketches on
_plate 16_ show us how the original picturesque stepped gable was changed
into a cornice with a tympanon, giving a different appearance to the
house. Any eye familiar with Dutch architecture will detect in the front,
in its present state, a difference in period between its lower and upper
part. The latter is about fifty years later, and the whole shows a
mixture of the two styles which we have described: the earlier, varied
style of a De Keyser and the later, more classical style of Van Campen's
school (his pupil Vingboons?). Probability, based on maps and documents
like Rembrandt's inventory of 1656, and a recently discovered account
regarding alterations done by the subsequent owners, and, moreover, the
convincing difference in style, lead us to the conviction that the
alteration in the front dates very shortly after Rembrandt's departure
from the house, i.e. about 1660, when it was divided into two narrower
residences. The house-front, as it looks now, was probably familiar to
Rembrandt in the last ten years of his life, even though we take into
consideration his probable disinclination to look again and again at the
place, where he had passed twenty years of his life, and where misfortune
had cruelly put an end to better days; it is, however, an open question
whether such a consideration offers sufficient ground for a restoration of
the kind recently carried out. Nevertheless we have to be thankful to the
trustees that the house was saved, because it is Rembrandt's most intimate
memorial, aside from his own work, left to posterity.

[Plate 13. The Tower Called "Westertoren" In Amsterdam.]

Plate 13. The Tower Called "Westertoren" In Amsterdam. After the drawing
by Rembrandt, in the Fodor Museum, Amsterdam

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