The first and most obvious element of imaginative effect in Rembrandt's work is, of course, his chiaroscuro, or management of light and dark. The appearances of objects which interested him more than any other were those which indicate their solidity, their relief and projection in space; and as these appearances are made up of shadow and light, so the problems of shadow and light are the great problems of his art.

one else. Thus, he more than once made | gifts and instincts. We shall the better drawings, of his swift and vehement kind, understand his future career if at this point after the "Last Supper" of Leonardo da we allow ourselves to anticipate still fur Vinci ; but Rembrandt could not see human ther, and try to realize for good and all beings as Leonardo saw them, and his hand what those gifts and instincts were. In has instinctively transformed the accom- what manner, then, was Rembrandt desplished ideal characters of the Italian into tined to assert himself as a man of unequal Dutchmen of the bluntest type, the most but searching and profound experiment humble feature and aspect (we speak par- among men of even, contented, but unex-| ticularly of the example in the King's citing achievement as an artist accusLibrary at Dresden). Again, Rembrandt tomed impetuously to feel and imagine once follows a motive of that master of the among artists only accustomed placidly to austere and strenuous ideal style, Man- see and paint-in a word, as a poet among tegna, in showing a Mary seated and bowing men of prose? her head and body sideways over her child to nestle her face passionately against his. But in giving the Virgin of his little etching the attitude of Mantegna's great engraving, he utterly discards Mantegna's special element of style. He changes the sentiment from the key of high devotional pathos to the key of cottage humility and pitifulness; he places the figures in a cottage interior, perfectly realistic in spite of the symbolic serpent that we see beneath the Virgin's foot, and outside the window Early art, especially in Italy, had scarcehe stations a forlorn, plebeian Joseph wist-ly occupied itself with such problems at all. fully looking in and wondering. Or again, and from a model nearer home, from the work of Hans Sebald Beham, a German line-engraver on a miniature scale, whose style had been derived in about equal parts from Dürer and from Marcantonio, Rembrandt borrowed the notion of engraving a couple of fellows of whom one shouts, "'Tis very cold," to the other, who answers back, "That's no matter." But these slight pieces are in no sense copied," as Mr. Haden calls them, from those of Beham. Rembrandt changes the fieldlaborers of the earlier master into ragged, snarling beggars; he gives them quite other looks and gestures, and his whole touch and treatment are unlike those of Beham with an unlikeness not at all to be explained by the mere natural difference between the burin and the work of the etching-needle. And so in all similar cases.*

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Early artists had seen the world, so to speak, not solid, but flat; the appearances of things which they had aimed at representing had been their linear contours and local colors; so long as they got these true and fair, they had been content with a very partial indication of the relations of light and shadow which express the relief of objects in space. It was not till the full Renaissance in Italy that Leonardo da Vinci first of all, and then Correggio, began to occupy themselves with effects of chiaroscuro; Leonardo with the object of pursuing to the end, and carrying into the third dimension, as they had never been carried before, the refinements of expressive draughtsmanship; Correggio in the desire of completing his new effects of flesh modelling, and realizing the full roundness and softness of angelic tissues against clouds and gulfs of distance. Since the days of these two, the problems of chiaroscuro had played a great part in painting. It had been found that to lower the general lighting of a picture, and to bring out the points of chief interest in sharp illumination, was an easy way of producing a striking effect. Certain masters had gained a great reputation by what were called night pieces, of which the object was to strike by a representation of the effects of firelight or twilight in a dark room. Others, without choosing subjects naturally requiring strong chiaroscuro, had nevertheless adopted that method of paint

ing in which chiaroscuro is everything. come confused, as often with Turner, in One artist who, in pictures of an almost miniature scale and delicacy, adopted the dark key, was Adam Elsheimer, a German who worked and had many followers in Rome in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. Another who painted in the same key, not with delicacy but with a coarse and lurid power, and on a large scale, was Caravaggio; and he too had a great following. A Dutch artist, fifteen years older than Rembrandt, Gerard Honthorst, painted scarcely anything else but torchlight and twilight pieces, and was famous under the name of Gerard of the Night. Among masters in closer relation to Rembrandt himself, Jan Pinas, and his own teacher Lastman, were accustomed to work, though not exclusively, in the same manner. And to that manner, to the dark or swart manner as it was called, Rembrandt, since it suited his own powers and instincts, from the first attached himself.

In his hands, however, the swart manner became something quite different from anything which it had been in the hands of others. It became a mode of idealizing the objects of life and nature in their appearances of light and dark, as potently and as subtly as the old Italians had idealized them in their appearances of color and line. Rembrandt's achievement in chiaroscuro was to show how, by the adoption of a special scale of light and shadow, painting might express, caress, force home, with a power and animation altogether new, a certain class of the aspects of masses in space, their living and breathing aspects of substance, of surface, of come-and-go. The full scale of nature's own relations of light and shadow is, we must remember, beyond the power of painting to imitate. The maximum of light which painting can obtain upon the canvas is something much below the pitch of full natural daylight. Hence every effect of light and dark in a picture is a compromise, and every painter has to decide for himself what particular form of compromise he will adopt. That usually adopted consists in compressing the entire scale of light and dark, so that slight differences in these qualities in a picture correspond to and stand for much greater differences in nature. Others will not accept this form of compromise; but will either, beginning at the lower end of the scale, get the relations between their shadows exactly equivalent to the same relations in nature, in which case their means are exhausted before they get to the upper end, and the light parts of their work be

an indiscriminate blaze; or else, beginning at the upper end of the scale, they will get the relations between their lights exactly equivalent to the same relations in nature, and in that case their means will be exhausted before they reach the lower end, so that the dark parts of their work are swamped in a general obscurity. Both Mr. Ruskin and M. Taine have pointed to this last form of the compromise as being characteristic of Rembrandt. But this is not yet a complete account of the matter. If we say that Rembrandt enshrouds in gloom all those parts of his picture which in nature would be seen in shadow varying from half-shadow downwards, because he wants the whole available scale between pictorial light and pictorial dark to express the full range of transition, and full subtlety of relation, among those things which in nature would be seen in light varying from halflight upwards, we define a part of Rembrandt's practice in the matter, but only a part. Thus, he loves to employ the highest powers of his scale in the rendering of objects which in nature are very conspicuous for lustre as armor, jewels, feathers and to realize this lustre, he paints with unheard-of devices of impasto, of relief, of glazing, till the substance of the work itself stands up in gleaming facets. Then he renders, as nearly as possible in their true relations with these, and with an inexhaustible subtlety of gradation, the qualities of subordinately illuminated things

as the gloss, softness, and life of the hair, the glow, substance, and modelling of the human tissue in head and hands, their retreating and advancing planes and masses. By this time he has got low down in his scale, and comparative obscurity ab sorbs the rest-the dark background, which ordinary portrait painting employs as a screen to relieve the figure, being with Rembrandt not only this, but a natu ral descent from the point to which he has already pursued the expression of relief in light and shade.

But Rembrandt does not keep his paint ing, except occasionally, in any such uniform or calculable relation with nature as this. Rather, having this for his general principle, he further proceeds to deal with the phenomena of light and shade as their master; altering, concentrating, scattering, rearranging them as suits his imaginative purpose. A picture of doctors listening to the lecture of an anatomical professor shall seem illuminated by an arbitrary concen tration of pale light upon the corpse; so shall the pale body of Christ seem self

luminous in an "Elevation of the Cross," or in a "Deposition;" in "Jacob's Dream," in the "Message to the Shepherds," and in the "Resurrection," the phosphorescence of a hovering angel shall startle the night with mystery; alike in groups and single portraits, in Scripture scenes, in landscape, the light shall be collected and flung in sheaves wherever it is wanted, and wherever it is not wanted shall be obliterated and swamped. Rembrandt's most ambitious portrait group, the "Sortie of the Company of Banning Kock," is so forced out of all regular relation to nature, its obscurity is so freakishly illuminated in the figures of a buff lieutenant, and a phantom child all gleaming blue and gold, that whole generations of men have asked themselves in vain what season of the day or night it represents.

ow with an infinity of counterchange and gradation. Reaching the lower part of his range quickly, he cannot, as we have said, in that range give objects any longer their true relations. But the objects are there notwithstanding; the gloom is mysterious and eventful with the presence of forms, faces, and objects hard to decipher, but yet making themselves felt. The background, as you search it, proves never to be slurred or empty, but always peopled and worked out; you can look into and make discoveries in it to the last. It is not till a day of sunshine that you discern, at Dresden, all the faces of Philistines at the marriage feast in Timnath, who grin and make merry while Samson turns to expound his riddle, and his bride sits white-vestured, radiant, victoriously smiling in the midst; nor that you can tell, in the other great picture near it, what fills the vague blackness into which the angel takes his flight, while Manoah and his wife kneel beside the sacrifice, their humble, awe-struck countenances making a strange contrast with the splendor of their scarlet and purple apparel. And so, at Brunswick, of the dark wood in front of which the pale Magdalen half trails, half lifts herself in loving humility at the feet of Christ; so, at Munich, of the roof above the "Nativity," where fowls roost among the dim rafters against the scarcely discernible blue of the night, and again of the women in the

To Rembrandt's habit of thus interpreting scenes of natural daylight according to a scale which sacrifices the lower gradations of light in order to obtain fuller truth in the upper, and to his further habit of arbitrarily concentrating and disturbing light according to the interest of the scene, has also to be added a third habit, that of choosing, very often, scenes not of natural daylight at all, but of such dim or artificial light as it is within the power of painting to interpret with comparatively little compromise. Especially in order to give poetry and mystery to his homely versions of Old and New Testament history, Rem-" Resurrection," who have drawn near the brandt would now and again follow the example of the professed painters of night pieces, and choose an indoor or outdoor scene to be illuminated with the flicker of flambeaux or firelight. Such scenes he would treat not crudely, not harshly, like his predecessors, but with the subtlest art. He would diffuse his artificial light from a concealed focus-a hearth with figures darkly relieved in front-a rushlight screened by the hand of Joseph beside the mangera lamp swung behind the col umn of a temple- and would follow out to its last issue the struggle of this light amid the surrounding gloom, from its full glare near the focus to its expiring, almost indistinguishable gleam upon the rafter of a roof or the litter of a distant corner.

This, in truth, is the great difference between Rembrandt and other followers of the dark manner that his transitions are never crude or abrupt, and his darkness is never opaque or dull. In the midst of gloom, he never lets the light perish, but is as careful of its remotest glimmer as of its central coruscation. He breaks his shadow with light and his light with shad

tomb in the darkness, and one of whom drops her jar of spices at the angelic apparition that fills the air; so of the figures that people the dim temple aisles in the "Woman taken in Adultery" of the National Gallery; so, in a word, of almost all the backgrounds and distances of Rembrandt's painting.

Add that all this play and interest of light and shadow takes account of figures and objects, not as peopling mere space, but as peopling space occupied with atmosphere; an atmosphere which has a life, an activity, a transfiguring power of its own, now rarer, now denser, now obstructing light, and now transmitting it, enveloping and investing the surfaces of things with its own halo and vibration, and constituting, as M. Taine puts it, a universal presence and most significant actor in the scene. M. Taine, no doubt, would have us believe too much when he ascribes all the qualities of Rembrandt's light and shade to the impression naturally received by visual organs of exceptional sensitiveness in the dense atmosphere of Holland. But it is in a passage rarely equalled for

that which may be called the rhetoric of | Deepening, paling, it is nevertheless concriticism that M. Taine discusses the stant to itself, and never tends to become part played by this element in the art of white or colorless in the lights, and black Rembrandt: or neutral in the darks. It is precisely to these changes, absorptions, degradations, that the local tints of painters not belonging to the color group do tend. Such changes are conspicuous in the work of Rembrandt. As light and dark are what he cares for more than anything else, so his extremes of light and dark devour his local colors, absorbing them and destroying their identity. In a scale of light short of full illumination, Rembrandt will produce effects of color as rich, as jew elled, as constant to their own nature, as those of Tintoret himself; especially in certain favorite tints of deep red, as for example the scarlet and purple of Manoah and his wife, at Dresden, the crimson vel. vet of the Cambridge "Portrait of an Officer," the color between scarlet and

He exhibited all the swarming and mysterious life of the atmosphere, the interposed atmosphere, colored and tremulous, in which living things are plunged like fishes in the sea. He lit it with the light of his country, a feeble and yellowish gleam like that of a lamp in a cellar; he entered into the painful struggle of that light against darkness, the fainting of the thinner rays which straggle expiring amid the gloom, the tremulousness of the glim mering reflections which cling for a moment upon slippery walls and vanish, and all the life of that vague multitude of half-lights which people the kingdom of the dark, and which, invisible to common eyes, seem in his prints and pictures like the creatures of some submarine world beheld dimly athwart gulfs of sea. For his eyes, emerging from this obscurity, the full light of day had the effect of a dazzling rain; he felt it like a burst of light-crimson of the famous portrait of his wife ning, like a miraculous illumination or the explosion of a sheaf of missiles. So that in this inanimate world, the world of light and shade, he found the most complete and most expressive drama for the painter, all contrasts, all conflicts, all that is most mortally dismal in the light, all that is most fugitive and melancholy in uncertain shadow, all that is most violent and irresistible in the irruption of the day.

This is the writing of a very accomplished man of letters, who allows himself to be led by his own eloquence somewhat, we think, beyond the true soberness, and aside from the true bearings, of the facts. With such a passage it would be instructive to compare, if we had space for further quotation, the passage in which M. Fromentin, writing as a practical painter, defines the character of Rembrandt in another great aspect of his practice, his character as a colorist. Rembrandt has been praised with extravagance as one of the great colorists of the world. M. Fromentin, on the other hand, shows, with a perfect relevancy and cogency, that Rembrandt, though he produced most powerful effects of color, is not entitled to be called a colorist at all, in the sense in which that name is given to painters who care for color more than for anything else, and use color as their special means of idealizing the world. Such painters, the colorists properly so called -- and their number includes men working according to ideals so diverse as Titian, Tintoret, Veronese, Velasquez, Rubens such painters all agree in this, that in their work a local tint preserves its identity, its individual quality, through all transitions of light and dark.

at Cassel, the red, sombre but still rich, of the man loading his gun in the "NightWatch," the red, running to dusky orange and gold, of the centurion Cornelius in the picture belonging to Sir Richard Wallace, the blaze of crimson, brick-red, and orange, laid on in loaded touches without fusion or blending, which looks so strange and violent at a close inspection, but falls into such perfect relations as you retire, in the family group at Brunswick. And the heads and hands of his principal personages he generally keeps within those degrees of the scale of light at which he can paint them with full local truth and richness of flesh color. But whatever else in the picture is in higher illumination than this, has to sacrifice its specific quality as color in order to attain its required quality as light. The lustrous objects of the scene, surrendering their individual tints, appear not, indeed, as colorless, but as gleaming in some nameless hue made up of all the other hues in the picture so blended and broken up in light as to be indistinguishable. See, for instance, the pearls and jewels, the armlets and necklaces, the feathers and gauze scarf of Saskia, in the same striking and highly wrought portrait at Cassel which we have already mentioned. And as it is with col ors at the upper end of the scale of light, so it is at the lower. They undergo a sim ilar loss of identity: the figures and objects which reveal themselves in that transparent and suggestive darkness, which we have described as filling the chief part of Rembrandt's canvases, reveal them selves not in the individual hues of nature,

but in variations of umbered, golden, | crisis. We have it in his own words, bronze, or greenish neutral tint, in which, written in reference to work upon which as in the high light, all the other hues of he had spent special pains, that the exthe picture, instead of being separately pression of life and movement "the continued, are blended, transformed, and most and the most natural movement " drowned. Look, for instance, at the faces was the point on which his mind was bent of the armed companions that fill the above all others. A preoccupation of this background of the " 'Night-Watch," at kind has its drawbacks as well as its adthose of the Philistines in the aforesaid vantages. Take the work of Rembrandt banquet at Timnath, at those of the la- in his portraits and portrait groups. At borers whispering their discontent over their best, these have the vitality, the their wages, in the "Parable of the Vine- serious force and grasp of realization, the yard," at Frankfort, at those of the shep sense of solid and breathing presence, herds peering into the stable, or of the which was common to many masters of Maries swooning beneath the cross, in a his age and school, qualities enhanced in score of "Nativities" and Crucifixions." his case by the peculiar force and refineAll these are faces painted not in the ment of his flesh modelling, the peculiar colors of humanity, but in a monochrome splendor of his illumination and suggestdetermined by the general harmony of the iveness of his backgrounds. But he is not picture. Or again, as a crucial instance, at all times quiet enough for portrait, take the peacock on the table in the picture or content enough to be governed by the at Dresden, of Rembrandt seated laughing facts before him. In these undertakings, with his wife on his knee. A painter who his love of movement, of bustle, of comebelonged to the colorists might have kept and-go, of the poetry of light and shadow, this accessory object ever so subordinate all those strivings of his spirit after an in value, but would have preserved its ideal world of its own, sometimes get the proper peacock colors. Rembrandt paints better of him and give the result, for all it, to suit his harmony, in a dull, broken its grasp of character, an air of something monochrome between brown, grey, and phantasmagoric and unreal. Such an air green. unquestionably belongs to the famous group of the "Night-Watch," and makes of it a work more exciting, it may be, to comtemplate, but less masterly, appropriate, and sufficient than other works in the same vein by Frans Hals, or even by a colder craftsman like Van der Helst.

The colorist, then, we recognize as being in Rembrandt, though powerful and original, yet quite subordinate to the master in light and shadow. It might almost be added that both color and chiaroscuro were subordinate in his work to another and more vital element still, the element of human emotion and expression. Only in truth these elements are not separable from one another. The true way of putting it is to say, that chiaroscuro in the first degree, and color in the second, were this painter's means for making humanity live in pictures. And his view of humanity was the most original and the most penetrating. We have said that he had little eye for physical beauty or distinction. But he had a much rarer gift, an eye for the moral beauty which may accompany physical degradation; an instinct of compassionate penetration, which enabled him to seize and put on record those unconscious aspects of their life by which the abject, the coarse, the forsaken, appeal mutely to the human heart within us. This was, indeed, only a part, although the most interesting part, of the gift, surely without rival among painters, which Rembrandt possessed for the observation of character, and of all outward signs, looks, gestures whatsoever, that either record past experiences or express a present

It is in subjects of dramatic interest that Rembrandt finds scope at once for his grasp of character, and for his love of life, movement, bustle. And in subjects of dramatic interest he is inexhaustible. He knows all the life and all the types of his quarter, the comfortable burgess, the physician, the preacher, the trader of outlandish garb and mien, the swarms of street and wharf, the vices, the humors, the picturesqueness of the populace, the deformities of the lazar-house, the riot of the tavern and squalor of the garret; he has watched and drawn every look and action of railing beggar or bawling chapman, of chaffering goodwife or wheedling Jew, of pursy official and starveling vagabond. All these things he knows and has recorded a thousand times; using, without the least regard to style, whatever means were the readiest to follow and fix the object and the moment of interest. A few hasty sweeps of a brush loaded with bistre upon the paper, a few significant scramblings of the needle upon the copper, perpetuate, with an astonishing insight and