Rembrandt is completely mysterious in his spirit, his character, his
life, his work and his method of painting. What we can divine of his
essential nature comes through his painting and the trivial or tragic
incidents of his unfortunate life; his penchant for ostentatious
living forced him to declare bankruptcy. His misfortunes are not
entirely explicable, and his oeuvre reflects disturbing notions and
contradictory impulses emerging from the depths of his being, like the
light and shade of his pictures. In spite of this, nothing perhaps in
the history of art gives a more profound impression of unity than his
paintings, composed though they are of such different elements, full of
complex significations. One feels as if his intellect, that genial,
great, free mind, bold and ignorant of all servitude and which led him
to the loftiest meditations and the most sublime reveries, derived from
the same source as his emotions. From this comes the tragic element he
imprinted on everything he painted, irrespective of subject; there was
inequality in his work as well as the sublime, which may be seen as the
inevitable consequence of such a tumultuous existence. It seems as
though this singular, strange, attractive and almost enigmatic
personality was slow in developing, or at least in attaining its
complete expansion. Rembrandt showed talent and an original vision of
the world early, as evidenced in his youthful etchings and his first
self-portraits of about 1630. In painting, however, he did not
immediately find the method he needed to express the still
incomprehensible things he had to say, that audacious, broad and
personal method which we admire in the masterpieces of his maturity and
old age. In spite of its subtlety, it was adjudged brutal in his day and
certainly contributed to alienate his public. From the time of his
beginnings and of his successes, however, lighting played a major part
in his conception of painting and he made it the principal instrument of
his investigations into the arcana of interior life. It already
revealed to him the poetry of human physiognomy when he painted The
Philosopher in Meditation or the Holy Family, so deliciously absorbed in
its modest intimacy, or, for example, in The Angel Raphael leaving
Tobias. Soon he asked for something more. The Night Watch marks at once
the apotheosis of his reputation. He had a universal curiosity and he
lived, meditated, dreamed and painted thrown back on himself. He thought
of the great Venetians, borrowing their subjects and making of them an
art out of the inner life of profound emotion. Mythological and
religious subjects were treated as he treated his portraits. For all
that he took from reality and even from the works of others, he
transmuted it instantly into his own substance.
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