nd makes something sacred of this
common scene.

As we compare this picture with the etching of Christ Preaching, we
get a better idea of Rembrandt's aim in representing Christ. He did
not try to make his face beautiful with regular classical features,
after the manner of the old Italian painters. He did not even think it
necessary to make his figure grand and imposing. Something still
better Rembrandt sought to put into his picture, and this was a gentle
expression of love.

X

PORTRAIT OF SASKIA

We should have but a very imperfect idea of Rembrandt's work if we did
not learn something about the portraits he painted. It was for these
that he was most esteemed in his own day, being the fashionable
portrait painter of Amsterdam at a time when every person of means
wished to have his likeness painted. A collection of his works of this
kind would almost bring back again the citizens of Amsterdam in the
seventeenth century, so life-like are these wonderful canvases. Among
them we should find the various members of his family, his father and
mother, his sister, his servant, his son, and most interesting of all,
his beloved wife, Saskia.

Saskia was born in Friesland, one of nine children of a wealthy
patrician family. Her father, Rombertus van Uylenborch, was a
distinguished lawyer, who had had several important political missions
intrusted to him. At one time he was sent as a messenger to William of
Orange, and was sitting at table with that prince just before his
assassination. He died in 1624, leaving Saskia an orphan, as she had
lost her mother five years before. The little girl of twelve now began
to live in turn with her married sisters. At the age of twenty she
came to Amsterdam to live for a while with her cousin, the wife of a
minister, Jan Cornelis Sylvius, whose face we know from one of
Rembrandt's etchings. Saskia had also another cousin living in
Amsterdam, Hendrick van Uylenborch, a man of artistic tastes, who had
not succeeded as a painter, and had become a dealer in bric-a-brac and
engravings. He was an old friend of Rembrandt; and when the young
painter came to seek his fortune in the great city in 1631, he had
made his home for a while with the art dealer.

It was doubtless Hendrick who introduced Rembrandt to Saskia. Probably
the beginning of their acquaintance was through Rembrandt's painting
Saskia's portrait in 1632. The relation between them soon grew quite
friendly, for in the same y