he National Gallery, London

VIII. Head of a Young Man 70
In the Louvre

INTRODUCTION

While the world pays respectful tribute to Rembrandt the artist, it has
been compelled to wait until comparatively recent years for some small
measure of reliable information concerning Rembrandt the man. The
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have been very little
concerned with personalities. A man was judged by his work which
appealed, if it were good enough, to an ever-increasing circle. There
were no newspapers to record his doings and, if he chanced to be an
artist, it was nobody's business to set down the details of his life.
Sometimes a diarist chanced to pass by and to jot down a little gossip,
quite unconscious of the fact that it would serve to stimulate
generations yet unborn, but, for the most part, artists who did great
work in a retiring fashion and were not honoured by courts and princes
as Rubens was, passed from the scene of their labours with all the
details of their sojourn unrecorded.

Rembrandt was fated to suffer more than mere neglect, for he seems to
have been a light-hearted, headstrong, extravagant man, with no
capacity for business. He had not even the supreme quality, associated
in doggerel with Dutchmen, of giving too little and asking too much.
Consequently, when he died poor and enfeebled, in years when his
collection of works of fine art had been sold at public auction for a
fraction of its value, when his pictures had been seized for debt, and
wife, mistress, children, and many friends had passed, little was said
about him. It was only when the superlative quality of his art was
recognised beyond a small circle of admirers that people began to gather
up such fragments of biography as they could find.

Shakespeare has put into Mark Antony's mouth the statement that "the
evil that men do lives after them," and this was very much the case with
Rembrandt van Ryn. His first biographers seem to have no memory save
for his undoubted recklessness, his extravagance, and his debts. They
remembered that his pictures fetched very good prices, that his studio
was besieged for some years by more sitters than it could accommodate,
that he was honoured with commissions from the ruling house, and that in
short, he had every chance that would have led a good business man to
prosperity and an old age removed from stress and strain. These facts
seem to have aroused their