ses in which he extols the painter for having made
a figure look like the life, as though that were the real thing to be
aimed at. We remember Ben Jonson's lines under Shakespeare's
portrait----

"Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature to outdo the life."

And though Ben Jonson was not a critic, and if he had been there was
little enough art in his time in England for him to criticize, still he
expresses the general feeling of the public for any work of art.

With the Dutch people this was most certainly the case, and the
popularity of the painters of scenes of everyday life is a proof of it.
That Hals, Brouwer, or Ostade were great painters was not half so
important to them, if indeed they thought of it all, as that they were
capable of turning out pictures which reflected their everyday life like
a mirror.

So long as Rembrandt painted portraits like those of the Pellicornes and
their offspring--the two pictures at Hertford House--or a plain
straightforward group like Dr Tulp's _Anatomy Lesson_ (though in this he
was already getting away from convention), he was tolerated. And it was
not so much his freedom in living and his extravagant notions of the
pleasures of life that brought about his downfall, as his failure to
realize that when he took the money subscribed for the group of Captain
Banning Cocq's Company, the subscribers expected something else for
their money than a picture (_The Night Watch_) which might be a
masterpiece according to the painter's notions, but was certainly not a
portrait group of the subscribers.

Here, then, for the first time in the history of painting, we find an
artist definitely at issue with the public. I do not say that this was
the first time that an artist had failed to please the public, but it is
the first occasion on which it was decided that if a painter was to
undertake commissions, he must consider the wishes of the patron, or
starve. It was something new for a painter of Rembrandt's repute to be
told that not he, but the persons who commissioned the work, were to be
the judges of whether or not it was satisfactory.

The consequences were important. For Rembrandt, instead of taking the
matter as a man of business, devoted the rest of his life to being an
artist, and leaving the business of painting to men like Backer, Helst,
and others, betook himself seriously to developing his art irrespective
of what the public might or might not think of it. As a resul