The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rembrandt, by Mortimer Menpes
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Rembrandt
Author: Mortimer Menpes
Commentator: C. Lewis Hind
Illustrator: Rembrandt
Release Date: December 3, 2005 [EBook #17215]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REMBRANDT ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sigal Alon and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[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
|