earn to draw in such a way that every stroke
of his pencil would be the expression of some living thing. That is
exactly what Rembrandt has attained here, and, in this portrait, he
realised at the age of twenty-four the ideal of the old Japanese; it is
one of his earliest etchings.

I re-open the portfolio to have a look at the pictures of the wonderful
old Jewish beggars. They were types that were to be found by the score
in the Amsterdam of those days, and Rembrandt delighted to draw them.
One is almost inclined to say that they cannot be beggars, because the
master's hand has endowed them with the warmth and splendour with which
his artistic temperament clothed everything he looked at.

When I had looked enough at the etchings, I used to go home through the
town, and it seemed to me as if I were meeting the very people I had
just seen in the engravings. As I went through the "Hoog Straat" and
"St. Anthony's Breestraat" to the "Joden Breestraat," where I lived a
few doors from the famous house where Rembrandt dwelt and worked so
long, I saw the picturesque crowd passing to and fro; I saw the vivid
Hebrew physiognomies, with their iron-grey beards; the red-headed women;
the barrows full of fish or fruit, or all kinds of rubbish; the houses,
the people, the sky. It was all Rembrandt--all Rembrandtesque. A great
deal has been changed in those streets since the time of which I have
been writing, yet, even now, whenever I pass through them I seem to see
the colours, and the kind of people Rembrandt shows us in his works.

In the meantime I had found a third manifestation of Rembrandt's talent,
viz., his drawings. To a young painter, who himself was still groping in
the dark for means of expressing his feelings, these drawings were
exceedingly puzzling, but at the same time full of stimulus.

Less palpably living than his etchings, it was some time before I could
properly appreciate them, but when I understood what I firmly believe
still, namely, that the master did not draw with a view to exhibiting
them or only for the pleasure of making graceful outlines I felt their
true meaning. They were simply the embodiments of his deeper feelings;
emanations from the abundance of his fertile imagination. They have been
thrown on the paper with an unthinking, careless hand; the same hand
that created masterpieces, prompted by the slightest impulse, the least
sensation. When I looked at them superficially they seemed disfigured by