HANFSTAENGL

XV. THE THREE TREES

PICTURE FROM ORIGINAL ETCHING IN THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

XVI. THE PORTRAIT OF REMBRANDT (_See Frontispiece_)

PRONOUNCING VOCABULARY OF PROPER NAMES AND FOREIGN WORDS

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INTRODUCTION

I. ON REMBRANDT'S CHARACTER AS AN ARTIST

A general impression prevails with the large picture-loving public
that a special training is necessary to any proper appreciation of
Rembrandt. He is the idol of the connoisseur because of his superb
mastery of technique, his miracles of chiaroscuro, his blending of
colors. Those who do not understand these matters must, it is
supposed, stand quite without the pale of his admirers. Too many
people, accepting this as a dictum, take no pains to make the
acquaintance of the great Dutch master. It may be that they are
repelled at the outset by Rembrandt's indifference to beauty. His
pictures lack altogether those superficial qualities which to some are
the first requisites of a picture. Weary of the familiar commonplaces
of daily life, the popular imagination looks to art for happier scenes
and fairer forms. This taste, so completely gratified by Raphael, is
at first strangely disappointed by Rembrandt. While Raphael peoples
his canvases with beautiful creatures of another realm, Rembrandt
draws his material from the common world about us. In place of the
fair women and charming children with whom Raphael delights us, he
chooses his models from wrinkled old men and beggars. Rembrandt is
nevertheless a poet and a visionary in his own way. "For physical
beauty he substitutes moral expression," says Fromentin. If in the
first glance at his picture we see only a transcript of common life,
a second look discovers something in this common life that we have
never before seen there. We look again, and we see behind the
commonplace exterior the poetry of the inner life. A vision of the
ideal hovers just beyond the real. Thus we gain refreshment, not by
being lifted out of the world, but by a revelation of the beauty which
is in the world. Rembrandt becomes to us henceforth an interpreter of
the secrets of humanity. As Raphael has been surnamed "the divine,"
for the godlike beauty of his creations, so Rembrandt is "the human,"
for his sympathetic insight into the lives of his fellow men.

Even for those who are slow to catch the higher meaning of Rembrandt's
work, there is still much to entertain and i