The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rembrandt, by Mortimer Menpes

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Title: Rembrandt

Author: Mortimer Menpes

Commentator: C. Lewis Hind

Illustrator: Rembrandt

Release Date: December 3, 2005 [EBook #17215]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A SLAV PRINCE

1637. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

REMBRANDT

BY

MORTIMER MENPES

WITH AN ESSAY ON THE LIFE AND WORK
OF REMBRANDT

BY

C. LEWIS HIND

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1905

PREFACE

Although I am familiar with Rembrandt's work, through photographs and black
and white reproductions, I invariably experience a shock from the colour
standpoint whenever I come in touch with one of his pictures. I was
especially struck with that masterpiece of his at the Hermitage, called the
_Slav Prince_, which, by the way, I am convinced is a portrait of himself;
any one who has had the idea suggested cannot doubt it for a moment; it is
Rembrandt's own face without question. The reproductions I have seen of
this picture, and, in fact, of all Rembrandt's works, are so poor and so
unsatisfactory that I was determined, after my visit to St. Petersburg, to
devise a means by which facsimile reproductions in colour of Rembrandt's
pictures could be set before the public. The black and white reproductions
and the photographs I put on one side at once, because of the impossibility
of suggesting colour thereby.

Rembrandt has been reproduced in photograph and photogravure, and by every
mechanical process imaginable, but all such reproductions are not only
disappointing, but wrong. The light and shade have never been given their
true value, and as for colour, it has scarcely been attempted.

After many years of careful thought and consideration as to the best, or
the only possible, manner of giving to those who love the master a work
which should really be a genuine reproduction of his pictures, I have
adapted and developed the modern process of colour printing, so as to brin