Chapter V: Preface (4)

From the inventory made in his house the day after his death we learn that Nanteuil had for years been dissipating in extravagant living the large sums he had earned with his work. His household goods, his drawings, and the tools of his profession were sold under the hammer, and it is amusing at the present day to realize that a lot consisting of 2966 of his prints, together with many reams of paper and his printing-press, were valued at only seven hundred dollars.

It is also explained why most of his portraits went through so many different states; it was chiefly on account of the “theses.” A curious fashion it was by which wealthy students in law, philosophy, and the arts formally dedicated their graduating theses to one or another distinguished personage whose engraved portrait they ordered from a _peintre-graveur_. This, with a lengthy dedication, was then attached to the printed thesis as a frontispiece and sent to the patron and to many of his friends. It is thus that the Chancellor d’Aligre commissioned Nanteuil, who had the monopoly of such work, to engrave and strike off twenty-five hundred proofs of a new and extra-large portrait of the King measuring thirty inches by forty-two for his son’s thesis; for this and the printing of the thesis itself the engraver received the sum of 10,400 livres, or about $9000 of our money. The price of an ordinary engraved portrait was $2000. Other less wealthy postulants had to be content with ordering a reimpression of a plate which had already been used and which needed only a change of dedication. In this way the portrait of the Dauphin for instance went through fifteen states and one of the King went through eleven; the plates were naturally often retouched by the artist in order to enable them to withstand so much use. Not to these theses alone, however, must the great number of royal portraits which were printed be attributed, for they had become immensely popular throughout the kingdom and whoever could afford it had one hanging in his house. In 1667 Cardinal de Bouillon ordered the portrait of the King for his thesis, and some years later another student selected for his patron the Cardinal himself. In 1675 it was the son of d’Artagnan, dear to all lovers of romance, who was presented by his father with the finest of the King’s portraits for his thesis.

Engraved from the painting by Philippe de Champaigne

“It is not possible to imagine anything more admirable than the engraved portraits of _de Neufville_, bishop of Chartres, _Richelieu_, and Marshal _Turenne_. They undoubtedly represent the last word on the subject of line-engraving.... The head of the greatest captain of his time is modeled with a strength of coloring which Rembrandt himself would have admired.” Louis R. Metcalfe.

Size of the original engraving, 15⅛ × 11⅜ inches]

Engraved in 1668 from Nanteuil’s own drawing from life

To Colbert Louis XIV was indebted for much, if not all, of the success of his enterprises during the twenty-five years succeeding the death of Cardinal Mazarin.

Size of the original engraving, 19¾ × 16¾ inches]

Of course this custom does not account for all the changes of state. When an archbishop became a cardinal for instance, the engraver made the necessary modification in the costume on the copper and provided his patron with a new set of impressions; similarly for a change in a title. In the case of Fouquet, the second of five states of his portrait was made necessary by a mistake in spelling in the dedication, the others being undoubtedly due to the touching-up of the plate on account of the great number of impressions ordered by a powerful man the circle of whose friends constituted the real court of that time. In the case of Cardinal Mazarin, politics undoubtedly played a great part in the use which was made of his portraits.

It is not generally known that Nanteuil was himself the author of most of the titles and dedications both in prose and in verse, in Latin as well as in French, which form such an attractive feature of his prints. This was to be expected of the clever versifier who had written such amusing sonnets to the royal family and the leaders of the court in connection with their sittings, and of the cheerful companion who had known so intimately the _beaux-esprits_ whom the hospitality of Fouquet had so often convened at his château of Vaux. To the Queen, who had a complexion of marvelous whiteness, he wrote a poem thanking her for the order for her portrait, which ended with this line: “_Mais prenons courage, on a peint le soleil même avec un charbon!_”

Nanteuil’s original drawings in pencil, crayons, and pastels are fewer by far than those of the Clouets or the pastellists of the eighteenth century which have been preserved to us; probably not more than twenty are now to be found in public collections. To my knowledge the Louvre has two, the Museum of Rheims four, the Chartres Museum one, Florence three, Chantilly four, and Stafford House, London, six. They are supremely interesting for that simplicity and sincerity, that living truth, which make one feel as if he recognized old acquaintances. As for his engravings, there are splendid collections of them in Paris, Dresden, and Chantilly, and there doesn’t exist a private collection of any importance in the world which does not contain some of the noble work of the past-master of engraved portraiture, the painter of the most brilliant period in modern history, the genial artist who had said to his pupil: “_Le temps et la peine ne font pas tant les beaux ouvrages que la bonne humeur et l’intelligence._”

REMBRANDT’S LANDSCAPE ETCHINGS

BY LAURENCE BINYON

Assistant-Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum Author of “Dutch Etchers,” “Painting in the Far East,” etc.

The pioneers of landscape art, those who have opened up new possibilities of design in landscape themes, were, at least until the nineteenth century, certain great masters of figure-painting. Titian, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, each of these gave a fresh impulse to the painting of landscape, an impulse which even to-day has not lost its inspiration; while the conventions established by Claude, Ruysdael and Salvator Rosa seem by comparison tame and more or less artificial or demoded.

Of these masters Rembrandt is the nearest to modern feeling. The famous _Mill_, in which a landscape motive is treated with a richness and depth of humanity that hitherto had found expression only in figure-subjects, stands in this respect as a monument in European art.

Yet landscapes form a very small proportion of Rembrandt’s paintings. Rembrandt as a painter rarely seems to treat landscape for its own sake. He composes for the most part arbitrarily, using broad spaces of level and hill-masses with ruined towers as the material elements of a scene for which some visionary play of gleam and cloud seems the real motive in his mind, the counterpart of the emotions he sought to communicate and evoke.

We are now concerned with Rembrandt as an etcher. Here again the proportion of landscape to figure-subjects is small. There are seven and twenty out of a total of some three hundred etchings.

We note at once that the etched landscapes present a different aspect from the painted landscapes.

In his paintings Rembrandt shows none of the characteristics of the national landscape school of Holland, of those artists who relied on the features of their native land,--its wide pastures, its canals, its seaports, its sand-dunes, its farms, its great skies and immense horizons,--and made of the plain portraiture of these familiar scenes their pride and glory. Rather he took hints from his traveled countrymen and the painters who had sought the classic South. Landscape, whether treated simply or as an adjunct to some scene from Scriptural story, was to him a source of romantic appeal. And just as Italian masters, like Botticelli, have sometimes introduced as background foreign scenes from the Rhineland suggested by the work of Northern painters, so Rembrandt, to whom mountains had all the fascination of strangeness and romance, took from actual drawings of Titian’s school which he may have possessed or seen, or from pictures by traveled Dutchmen like Hercules Seghers, the features he desired, fusing them into a world of his own imagination.

The etchings, on the contrary, are for the most part pure Holland. Yet their inspiration is very different from that of the typical Dutch painter or etcher. They are not mere portraits of places. Even when apparently simple transcripts from the scene before the artist’s eyes, the composing spirit is at work in them, rearranging and suppressing. And perhaps just because of this absence of the literal topographical spirit, they seem to contain the essential genius and atmosphere of Dutch landscape.

Practically all Rembrandt’s landscape work belongs to the middle period of his life. Some writers have sought to account for this by supposing that he turned to such subjects in some rural retreat to soothe his overwhelming grief at the loss of his wife. The actual dates hardly support this supposition. Saskia died in the summer of 1642. But the landscapes begin a few years before that date. The first ten years of the master’s life at Amsterdam--the years of his prosperity--were, we know, crowded with portrait commissions; and landscape work would only have been a relaxation. It was hardly more than this at any time, but for some reason it interested him more during the ten or twelve years after 1640 than in his youth or old age.

The earliest date on a landscape etching is 1641; the latest, 1652. The undated plates can be placed with tolerable certainty within a year or so.

In 1634 Rembrandt had etched the large _Annunciation to the Shepherds_, in which the landscape is of the same visionary kind as appears in the paintings. The general effect is of white on black, the supernatural effulgence in the sky, which so startles the shepherds and their flocks, calling out of the gloom mysterious waving heights of foliage and obscure gleams of distance.

“In the _Windmill_ Rembrandt found a perfect subject. There is no adventitious impressiveness lent by strong effect of light and shadow in this beautiful plate: all is plain and simply rendered.... We feel the stains of weather, the touch of time, on the structure; we feel the air about it and the quiet light that rests on the far horizon as the eye travels over dike and meadow....” Laurence Binyon.

Size of the original etching, 5¹¹⁄₁₆ × 8³⁄₁₆ inches]

“In the little _Amsterdam_, as in nearly all these etchings, the sky is left absolutely clear and empty. And how far more truly it suggests to us the brightness of a cloudless day than the most successful of plein-air painting in vivid color, which stops the imagination instead of leaving it free and active! This little plate is filled with air and sun.” Laurence Binyon.

Size of the original etching, 4⅜ × 6 inches]

In none of the etchings of pure landscape does Rembrandt adopt this method and conception. None of them has that effect of illuminated gloom which is so peculiarly associated with the master’s name. Their effect is of black on white, and the line is given its full value. One of the earliest, probably, is a small plate (B. 207), sometimes called _A Large Tree and a House_. I believe some critics have cast a doubt on it, but it is unmistakably Rembrandt’s in conception and “handwriting.” The little piece might well be called _Twilight_. We seem to be near the shores of a lake; light is fading out of the sky and scarcely permits us to discern any details; the presence of a few figures and a human dwelling is felt rather than seen. All is gray and quiet; nothing stands out saliently. It is the silvery evenness of tone which is the charm of this tiny plate, in no way striking, yet indefinably revealing a master’s hand. Usually Rembrandt would make such quiet etched work, all of one biting, the basis of a rich effect produced by dry-point. He may have intended to have used the dry-point here, but perhaps thought the scale was too small.

With the _Windmill_ and the _Cottage and Hay-barn_, both dated 1641, we come to a group of plates which are typical of Rembrandt’s landscape manner in etching. Close to these in date, presumably, are the little _Amsterdam_ and the _Cottage and Large Tree_. Mr. Hind, in the latest catalogue of the etchings, follows von Seidlitz in assigning the _Amsterdam_ to 1640, though Dr. Six maintains that the absence of a tower not finished till 1638 proves it to be earlier than that year. Rembrandt, however, was quite capable of abolishing towers to suit his composition. The simplest materials presented by the country-side are used in these etchings. Though Rembrandt never seems to have cared to make pictures of such subjects, he made a great number of drawings of them. A wonderful series of these sketches, once in the possession of his pupil, Govert Flinck, is at Chatsworth; and numbers of course in the great public collections. These summary small drawings, made with a reed-pen and sepia, and sometimes with a wash of sepia added, do not appeal to every one, certainly not to those whose pleasure is in the external aspect of things, the softness of verdure, the glitter of trees; to say nothing of the want of grandeur and impressiveness in the scenes themselves, the absence of anything scenic, such as makes the most obvious appeal, whether in nature or art.

But the more one studies drawings, and the more one becomes familiar with the qualities which differentiate the first-rate from the second, the higher one inclines to rank these sketches. For one thing, they are almost miraculous in the certainty with which the reality of things is evoked, and the planes of recession indicated. Slight as is the means employed, rough and summary as is the stroke of the blunt pen, sometimes even with what seems a superficial clumsiness or carelessness, the things seen are there,--trees, buildings, bridges and canals, men and women,--and not only visible but, as it were, tangible. We can walk in imagination into these little landscapes, and not only do we breathe an infinite air but we are sure of every step. And this is the great test of mastery in such drawings. Take, for instance, the landscape drawings of Domenico Campagnola, which are also in reed-pen and sepia. These, with their broken foregrounds, upland farms among trees of delicate foliage, and distant mountain-ranges, are much more attractive to the eye at first sight than the great Dutchman’s sketches. But when in imagination we move into these pleasant landscapes, we are disconcerted by unrealities; our steps are uncertain, for they are not on solid ground. And in fact a pleasant pattern of pen-strokes remains a pattern and nothing else. But Rembrandt’s rough strokes have somehow molded all the ground with its saliences and depressions and filled the whole with light and air.

It is the same with the etchings. But there is a difference: the difference of the medium. True artist as he is, Rembrandt conceives all he does in the terms of the material used. His etchings are born as etchings and nothing else; they are not drawings transferred to copper.

There is a specific beauty of the etched line which is quite different from the beauty of a line made by the pen or chalk, or the line ploughed by a burin on copper. If it is unsuited to the sweeping rhythms of large movement in design, such as we associate with Rubens, for instance, its want of modulation and even character help a quiet dignity of draughtsmanship; and the etcher has means of enhancing homeliness of detail unrivaled in any other medium. Old buildings, wharves, boats and shipping at a river-side or quay,--such things as these naturally attract the etcher, for they are congenial to his medium. And in the _Windmill_ (B. 233, dated 1641), Rembrandt found a perfect subject.

There is no adventitious impressiveness lent by strong effect of light and shadow in this beautiful plate: all is plain and simply rendered. But we have only to compare this etching with the etchings of some of Rembrandt’s immediate predecessors, like Jan and Esaias Van de Velde, to see the difference not only between a great and an average artist, but between a great and a commonplace etcher. The picturesque tracery of a windmill’s sails and timber-work are seen and enjoyed in the Van de Veldes’ plates, but how much more than this is in Rembrandt’s _Mill_! We feel the stains of weather, the touch of time, on the structure; we feel the air about it and the quiet light that rests on the far horizon as the eye travels over dike and meadow; we are admitted to the subtlety and sensitiveness of a sight transcending our own; and even by some intangible means beyond analysis we partake of something of Rembrandt’s actual mind and feeling, his sense of what the old mill meant, not merely as a picturesque object to be drawn, but as a human element in the landscape, implying the daily work of human hands and the association of man and earth. Here is a classic in its kind which many generations of etchers have found an inspiring model. An accident in the biting apparently is the cause of an aquatint-like broken tone of gray in the sky above the mill; but it comes with congruous effect, and is rather a beauty than a blemish.

In the little _Amsterdam_, as in nearly all these etchings, the sky is left absolutely clear and empty. And how far more truly it suggests to us the brightness of a cloudless day than the most successful of plein-air painting in vivid color, which stops the imagination instead of leaving it free and active! This little plate is filled with air and sun.

A first state of this etching belongs to my friend Mr. Gustav Mayer in London, but is absolutely unknown to all catalogues previous to that of Mr. Hind. In it there is a hare running over the fields, but it is a thought too big in scale, and Rembrandt doubtless suppressed it as a distracting incident.

The _Cottage and Hay-barn_ (B. 225) and the _Cottage and Large Tree_ (B. 226) seem companion plates; and though the latter is not dated, it is natural to assume for it the same date as that inscribed on the former--1641. If the _Cottage and Large Tree_ is the finer of these two oblong plates in design, the _Cottage and Hay-barn_ is the more brilliant as an etching. The cottage and shed which give the plate its name are in the center of the design, and the dark mass, full of tender shadows and reflections, emphasizes by contrast the play of open light on the fields stretching on either side, the river, the house nestling in a wood, beyond, and the distant towers of Amsterdam. Though all is treated in Rembrandt’s broad way, it is surprising how full, how suggestive of intimate detail the landscape is. As we look at it there comes over us the sense of sleepy, bright air and sunshine, the quiet of the fields, in which, though nothing outwardly is happening, we are conscious of the stir of natural life, of growing things, of flowers and grass and insects, and peaceful human occupations going on unobtrusively; of “all the live murmur of a summer’s day.” It is interesting, in view of Rembrandt’s treatment of topography, to note that Dr. Jan Six has shown that the master has here combined two different views in a single composition.

In the _Cottage with White Palings_ (B. 232, dated 1642), effective use is made of the broad white planks of the fence to enforce the pattern of black and white in the design. Here again the subject is placed in the center with views on either side, though the horizon is higher than usual.

With the _Three Trees_ (B. 212) of 1643, we come to the most famous of Rembrandt’s etched landscapes. This plate stands in the same sort of relation to the rest as the _Mill_ to the rest of his landscape paintings. It is the grandest and most typical, most expressive of the master’s temperament. Here the composition is less accidental, and more (so to speak) architectural. The group of three trees stands up darkly on a bank of high ground at the right. At the left one looks over the level fields to the horizon and a glimmer of distant sea. A thunderstorm is passing away, with contorted clouds piled in the upper sky and trailing over the plain, and rods of violent rain slant across the corner of the scene. For once Rembrandt builds up a landscape design out of sky and earth; and the something elemental which inspires it gives the etching a pregnancy and significance which are absent from the other landscapes, in themselves, at their best, more intimately charming. There are those who object to the straight, hard lines of the rain; but I do not find them untrue, and they are of great value in the design. Then, what beauties lurk in this etching, wherever one looks into it! The return of the light after rain, than which there is nothing more beautiful in nature, gives a wet sparkle to the fields; and again we notice how the trees in their dark relief give glory to the space of luminous clearness beyond. The wagon on the top of the high bank is moving toward the light, and a painter sits by the roadside, sketching the passing of the storm. An angler fishes in a pool; lovers, hardly discerned, sit together, away from the world in a thicket’s obscurity. All the plain, so solitary at first sight, is filled with moving life. Of what particular species the three trees are, it might be difficult, as often with Rembrandt, to say with confidence; from their shape and the sturdy growth of their boughs, I suppose them to be oaks. There is no doubt, however, about the willow in the _Omval_ (B. 209). The gnarled, seamed trunk of an old tree, with its rugged wrinkles and smooth bosses, irresistibly invites the etcher’s needle; and Rembrandt, like other etchers since, has evidently found a great enjoyment in this willow-stem, as in that other old willow to which he added, not very felicitously, a St. Jerome reading, spectacles on nose, and a perfunctory lion (B. 232, dated 1648). The _Omval_ shows a different kind of composition; the willow at the edge of a thicket, in whose shadow two lovers are embowered, divides the plate; the right and larger part is all light and open--a river-bank on which a man moves down to the ferry, and the broad sunny stream, and houses, masts, and windmills across the water--a picturesque river-side such as Whistler and Haden loved to etch.

“With the _Three Trees_ of 1643, we come to the most famous of Rembrandt’s etched landscapes. This plate stands in the same sort of relation to the rest as the _Mill_ to the rest of his landscape paintings. It is the grandest and most typical, most expressive of the master’s temperament.” Laurence Binyon.

Size of the original etching, 8⁵⁄₁₆ × 11 inches]

“To the same year--1645--belongs the well-known _Six’s Bridge_, a plate in which the pure bitten line, with no close hatching or shadow-effect, is given full play. Of its kind, this is a perfect etching.” Laurence Binyon.

Size of the original etching, 5¹⁄₁₆ × 8¹³⁄₁₆ inches]

To the same year--1645--belongs the well-known _Six’s Bridge_ (B. 208), a plate in which the pure bitten line, with no close hatching or shadow-effect, is given full play. Of its kind, this is a perfect etching. Every one knows the story of its being done while Six’s servant went to fetch the mustard. But there is nothing hasty or incomplete about it: the masterly economy of lines is perfectly satisfying in its absolute directness and simplicity. There is great pleasure in contemplating a work like this, so clean, so free from any superfluous element.

But from this time onward Rembrandt seems to grow dissatisfied with pure etching. He grows more and more fond of dry-point, using it very frequently to enrich an etched plate, and in his later years preferring often to dispense with the acid altogether.

Dry-point is employed in the delightful little plate, the _Boat-house_ (B. 231), to deepen the shadows of the arch over the water; but in ordinary impressions this has worn off and only the groundwork of bitten lines remains. This is the kind of subject which most artists would have drawn in delicate detail; but Rembrandt is always rather remarkably indifferent to the particular beauty and character of vegetation (probably this was one of the reasons why he made so little appeal to Ruskin); and it is surprising that with all the indifference and roughness in the drawing of the plant-forms on the river-bank, the little plate should still have so intimate a character and suggest so much of the beauty of dark, quiet water in which reflections of flower and herbage are asleep.

In one or two of the plates of 1650 and thereabouts, as if tired of level horizons, Rembrandt closes the view with a mountain or range of hills. Such are the _Canal and Angler_ and the _Boat in the Canal_ (B. 235 and 236), which, joined together, form one composition; and one might add the _Sportsman with Dogs_ (B. 211), though Mr. Hind assigns the completion, at any rate, of this etching to a date of a few years later.

“In one or two of the plates of 1650 and thereabouts, as if tired of level horizons, Rembrandt closes the view with a mountain or range of hills. Such are the _Canal and Angler_ and the _Boat in the Canal_.” Laurence Binyon.

Size of the original etching, 3¼ × 4¼ inches]

“... a long, oblong plate, of great beauty for its pattern of light and shade. Part of the sky is shadowed, and the last light, before a shower pours over the trees, illuminates the foliage on one side.” Laurence Binyon.

Size of the original etching, 4⅞ × 12⅝ inches]

The _Hay-barn with Flock of Sheep_ (B. 224) is an instance of a favorite feature in Rembrandt’s landscape--a road seen in perspective at one side of the design. The _Landscape with a Cow Drinking_ (B. 237) is a beautiful etching in a rather slight manner, with a suggestion of wind in the branches of trees, and light coming with the wind. Even in the _Three Trees_, though there is storm, there is little impression of movement in the air; and it is characteristic of the landscape etchings as a whole that they are serene and still, and more often suggest a sunny day than gray skies.

Dry-point becomes more emphatic in the _Obelisk_ (B. 227); indeed, in the earliest impressions of this plate the black of the bur is too pronounced, and only after it had been printed from till this effect had merged and blended with the etched lines was the right effect attained. Here the obelisk gives character to the design; and in the _Landscape with a Square Tower_ (B. 218) a building dominates,--an old tower of rather blunted outlines, such as Rembrandt loved to crown dark hills with in the visionary landscapes of his painting.

Another old tower occurs, less prominently, in the _Farm with Trees and a Tower_ (B. 223), a long, oblong plate, of great beauty for its pattern of light and shade. Part of the sky is shadowed, and the last light, before a shower pours over the trees, illuminates the foliage on one side. In the first two states there is a small cupola on the tower; but Rembrandt, no doubt rightly, judged that the design would be improved by lopping it off. The change certainly subdues the local character of the scene.

Another long oblong of perhaps greater beauty is the _Gold-weigher’s Field_ of 1651 (B. 234). This is all air and sun and space, the etched lines light and open, with dry-point adding a kind of gleam and vibration to the fertile fields. It is a revelation of what a great artist can do, unaided by tone or color, with a scene that to the average eye would be tame enough. There is a sense, too, of the riches of the earth, the farmer’s pride in broad acres and growing crops, which gives a human touch, never absent from Rembrandt’s work.

In contrast with this is another plate of the previous year--the _Three Gabled Cottages_ (B. 217)--where the dry-point is freely used to give color and softness to the thatched roofs, checkered with the shadow of an old tree. But it is the gratefulness of shadow in the noonday, not its gloom, which is the motive of the etching.

The last group of landscapes are in pure dry-point. It is interesting to compare one of the earlier bitten plates with the _Road by the Canal_ (B. 221), delicious in its freshness and spontaneous effect, or the _Clump of Trees with a Vista_ (B. 222). Of this last there is a first state with a mere indication of part of the design; the trees, with the peep through the thicket, seem to have been an afterthought.

_The Wood over Palings_ (B. 364), the principal one of several unfinished studies on one plate, has velvety dry-point in the foliage. It is a plate that seems to have served for inspiration to Andrew Geddes, the Scotch artist who was one of the first to inaugurate the revival of etching in the nineteenth century and to realize once again--what had been so unaccountably forgotten since Rembrandt’s time--the possibilities and beauty of the dry-point method.

“This is all air and sun and space, the etched lines light and open, with dry-point adding a kind of gleam and vibration to the fertile fields. It is a revelation of what a great artist can do, unaided by tone or color, with a scene that to the average eye would be tame enough. There is a sense, too, of the riches of the earth, the farmer’s pride in broad acres and growing crops, which gives a human touch, never absent from Rembrandt’s work.” Laurence Binyon.

Size of the original etching, 4¾ × 12⅝ inches]

This etching, like _The Wood over Palings_, has velvety dry-point in the foliage, and may have suggested to Andrew Geddes, the Scotch artist who was one of the first to inaugurate the revival of etching in the nineteenth century and to realize once again--what had been so unaccountably forgotten since Rembrandt’s time--the possibilities and beauty of the dry-point method.

Size of the original etching, 2⁹⁄₁₆ × 6⅞ inches]

And so the series comes to an end, and landscape disappears from the master’s work, save as a background to figure-compositions. One of these backgrounds may be noticed for its special interest. About 1653 Rembrandt took up a copperplate already etched by Hercules Seghers--a _Tobias and the Angel_ (after a composition of Elsheimer’s)--and transformed it into a _Flight into Egypt_. Suppressing the two figures, which were of very large size in proportion to the design, he masked the traces of them by a mass of trees, put in his own figures on a much smaller scale, and by the most vigorous use of the dry-point wrought the whole into harmony. The treatment of shadowy masses of foliage reminds us how little there is of this element of landscape in the etchings we have been considering. There is nothing of that feeling for the majesty and mystery of leafy forest-trees which Claude expressed so beautifully in the _Bouvier_ etching, and still more in his sepia drawings. Critics have also remarked on other limitations of landscape interest in Rembrandt--the absence of seas and water in movement, the comparative absence of wind and weather, in his etchings.

For all that, when we think of the other Dutch etchers of landscape, we realize how far he towers over those who professed no other subject,--over Molyn. Ruysdael, Everdingen, Waterloo, and Italianizers like Both.

Hercules Seghers is the one who showed most variety and temperament; and his work evidently had a great interest for Rembrandt. He was a curious experimenter, and though he rarely seems quite master of his intentions, he was the antithesis of those landscape artists, so frequent, who “take out a patent,” as has been said, for some particular corner or aspect of nature, and never do anything else but repeat their favorite theme with variations.

With Rembrandt landscape was a kind of interlude and holiday from more serious design. We feel it in the sunny temper which pervades the majority of the etchings. But how far superior he is to all the rest in his sensitiveness to beauty! As we have seen, he is not greatly interested in the details of landscape form. We find scribbles and shapelessness in his foliage and plants; but his grasp of essential truths overrides all criticism of this kind, and always and everywhere we feel his intense joy in expressing light. The etchings of his contemporaries seem cold and hueless, without air or sun, beside his.

I find it hard to express a preference among the series. The _Three Trees_ stands by itself, but there are others which touch one with a more vivid charm. Turning from one to another, I find each arresting the eye with some particular beauty, though the set of oblong plates, from the _Cottage and Hay-barn_ to the _Gold-weigher’s Field_, contain, I think, the most delight; they are those in which all Holland seems to lie before us, with its pastures and its many peaceful waters.

The landscape of Holland, with its level distances and low horizon, has inexhaustible attractions for the painter of skies and atmosphere. To the born designer it is less stimulating. One of the things that most impress in any representative exhibition of Rembrandt’s etchings is the extraordinary variety and freshness of his designing. The proportions of the plate, upright, square, or oblong; the relation of the figures to the frame; the proportion of light to dark; the use of tone and line;--all these show a constant variety. Those who, when they think of Rembrandt, call up the image of a dark panel with light concentrated on a head or group in the middle of it, find a series of the etchings quite subversive of their preconception.

Now to an inventive designer like Rembrandt the resources of the Dutch landscape offered but little. Where he blends landscape with figure, as in the infinitely pathetic _Burial of Christ_, or the _Woman of Samaria_, or the _Christ Returning with His Parents from the Temple_, though the human types, as always, are taken from the world around the artist, the landscape is drawn from his imagination, or borrowed from others. In the _St. Jerome_ (B. 104) the background is no doubt taken from a Venetian drawing. Such methods were, indeed, inevitable, since one cannot go on weaving designs of human forms and landscape material where the typical form of this last is little more than a straight line, or a series of straight lines, across the field of sight.

One may wonder, perhaps with regret, why Rembrandt did not for once etch a landscape of his inner vision, like those paintings at Cassel and at Brunswick. It may be that he felt that for such tone-effects etching was not the appropriate medium. Had he lived in a later day, he might have used mezzotint, as Turner did in his _Liber Studiorum_; and certainly that process should in his hands have yielded marvelous results.

But we may well be content with these landscape etchings which he has left us. They express the genius of the Dutch country, the “virtue” of it, as Pater would have said, as no other of his countrymen has expressed it. The series of plates in which Legros has expressed the genius of the country of Northern France, with its poplar-bordered streams and sunny pastures, has something of the same native quality. Each of these masters seems to have seized an essence which no one not born of the soil, however enamoured of a land’s beauty, can quite possess and make his own.

What is it that gives these landscapes their enduring charm, and why do we rank them so high? Many a later etcher has had equal skill with needle and acid; some have had even greater. Whistler is more delicate, perhaps, more exquisite, more unexpected in his gift of spacing. Yet neither Whistler nor any other master of etching has the secret power of Rembrandt. I say “secret,” because we cannot argue about it or explain it. It lay in what Rembrandt was: in the depth and greatness of his humanity. When we have wondered at the sensitive instrument of his eyesight, when we have exalted his magical draughtsmanship, when we have admired his instinctive fidelity to the capacity and limitations of the medium used, when we have recognized the profound integrity of his art, there is still something left over, beyond analysis, and that the rarest thing of all.

How it is we cannot say, but there has passed into these little works an intangible presence, of which we cannot choose but be conscious, though it was not consciously expressed,--the spirit of one of the fullest, deepest natures that ever breathed. Whatever Rembrandt does, however slight, something of that spirit escapes him, some tinge of his experience,--of those thoughts, “too deep for tears,” which things meaner than the meanest flowers could stir in him.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI

(1720-1778)