Chapter CCXI

Rembrandt's principle was to extract from things one element among the rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects. One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their "envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate them; but then, if he ignored grace and beauty, purity of line and the delicacy of the skin, he expressed the nude body by suggestions of suppleness, roundness, elasticity, with a love of material substance, a sense of the live being, which enchant the practical painter. He resolved everything into its component parts, colour as well as light, so that, by eliminating the complicated and condensing the scattered elements from a given scene, he succeeded in drawing without outline, in painting a portrait almost without strokes that show, in colouring without colour, in concentrating the light of the solar system into a sunbeam. It would be impossible in a plastic art to carry the curiosity for the essential to an intenser pitch. For physical beauty he substitutes expression of character; for the imitation of things, their almost complete transformation; for studious scrutiny, the speculation of the psychologist; for precise observation, whether trained or natural, the visions of a seer and apparitions of such vividness that he himself is deceived by them. By virtue of this faculty of second sight, of intuitions like those of a somnambulist, he sees farther into the supernatural world than any one else whatever. The life that he perceives in dream has a certain accent of the other world, which makes real life seem pale and almost cold. Look at his "Portrait of a Woman in the Louvre," two paces from "Titian's Mistress." Compare the two women, study closely the two pictures, and you will understand the difference between the two brains. Rembrandt's ideal, sought as in a dream with closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosphorescence that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial painting, real beyond any other master's work, and able to hold its own with a Rubens, a Titian, a Veronese, a Giorgione, a Van Dyck--this is Rembrandt's aim. Has he succeeded? The testimony of the world answers for him.

_Fromentin._