been at great pains to fashion a countenance
sorrowful enough and patient enough to represent the subject of the
Mater Dolorosa, that is, the Sorrowing Mother of Christ. Perhaps they
would have succeeded better if they had turned away from their own
imaginations to some mother in real life, who has loved and worked
and suffered like this one. The face answers in part our first
question. A woman like this is capable of mothering great sons.
Industrious, patient, self-sacrificing, she would spare herself
nothing to train them faithfully. And the life of which her face
speaks--a life of self-denying toil, ennobled by high ideals of
duty--is the stuff of which heroes are made. Some of the great men of
history had such mothers.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN
_Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg_]

The picture illustrates the fact that a face may be interesting and
even artistic, if not beautiful. This idea may surprise many, for when
one calls a person "as pretty as a picture," it seems to be understood
that it is only pretty people who make suitable models for pictures.
Rembrandt, however, was of quite another mind. He was a student of
character as well as a painter, and he cared to paint faces more for
their expression than for beauty of feature.

Now the expression of a face is to a great extent the index of
character. We say that the child has "no character in his face,"
meaning that his skin is still fair and smooth, before his thoughts
and feelings have made any record there. Gradually the character
impresses itself on his face. Experience acts almost like a sculptor's
chisel, carving lines of care and grooving furrows of sorrow, shaping
the mouth and the setting of the eyes.

The longer this process continues, the more expressive the face
becomes, so that it is the old whose faces tell the most interesting
stories of life. Rembrandt understood this perfectly, and none ever
succeeded better than he in revealing the poetry and beauty of old
age.

His way of showing the character in the face of this old woman is very
common with him. The high light of the picture is concentrated on the
face and is continued down upon the snowy kerchief. This forms a
diamond of light shading by gradations into darker tints. It was the
skillful use of light and shadow in the picture, which made a poetic
and artistic work of a subject which another painter might have made
very commonplace.

XIV

THE SYNDICS OF THE C