9.

The formal style of art, the essence of line-engraving, reached its zenith
in Albrecht Duerer. And Duerer was so great a master that human feeling
told through the medium of the severest formalism. But it was not till a
century later that human expression found its full outlet in an artist
whose sympathy was at once penetrating and comprehensive, who perfected a
medium capable of the most spontaneous rendering of the deepest as well as
the most fleeting emotions of life.

As a painter Rembrandt was chiefly devoted to portraiture, a devotion no
doubt largely due to the conviction that its study gives the most
immediate opportunity for depicting human character. But it must also be
confessed that the overwhelmingly large proportion of portraits to other
subjects in his painted work may be partly owing to the demands of
clients. That it was not entirely so is immediately evident when one
considers the master's untiring industry in painting portraits of himself
after his popularity had waned, and commissions nearly ceased.
Nevertheless as works for the most part uncommissioned and less lucrative
than the paintings, we may take it that the etchings are a true reflection
of the actual tendency of Rembrandt's genius when least affected by
demands from outside. In his etched work we find that portraits are much
less numerous, and by far the largest place is given to the subjects from
scripture, treated with the same reality that characterises his sketches
from daily life.

Rembrandt's affection for scriptural subjects is a striking fact in face
of the general character of Dutch art in the seventeenth century. The
reformation in Holland seems to have helped towards the exclusion of art
from the domain of religion; and the merely formal and superficial
rendering of biblical stories by the classicists of the late sixteenth
century may have also had much to account for the secular reaction of the
succeeding period. But Rembrandt had no need to seek new ground to escape
from a formal rendering of well-known themes. Like most masters of
supreme genius, his originality consisted in the realisation of his own
deepest and most personal emotion in his treatment of the old stories.
They appealed to him as the vehicle of the noblest thoughts of man in
relation to himself and God, and he was practically the first artist who
dared approach the Scriptures in the spirit of reality that implied a
living faith rather than an offic