It seems as though this singular, strange, attractive and almost enigmatic personality was slow in developing, or at least in attaining its complete expansion. That Rembrandt early showed talent and an original vision of the world would be sufficiently proved by his youthful etchings and his first self-portraits of about 1630. In painting, however, he did not at once find the method of which he had need to express the still uncomprehended things he had to say, the audacious, broad and personal method which we admire in the masterpieces of his maturity and old age, but which, in spite of its subtlety, was adjudged brutal and certainly contributed to alienate his public. He first adopted a polished style very similar to the manner of the "Little Masters" of his country which ended by degenerating into those tours de force of vain minutiae which made the reputation of Gerard Dou. If Rembrandt had only left us the large full-length formal portraits which brought him success among the rich burgesses of Amster dam, or even celebrated and much admired pictures like The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp (1632), he would count without any doubt among the excellent painters, but he would not be the man in whom we salute a brother to be pitied, a solitary spirit infinitely surpassing us, a kind of sibyllic prophet charged with misery as well as blessings, creator of a new tongue for the translation of human sorrow, mercy, goodness and all the contra dictions and anxieties of the human spirit.
From the time of his beginnings and of his success 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 the interior life. It already revealed to him the poetry of human physiognomy when he painted the Philosopher in meditation or that Holy Family, so deliciously absorbed in its modest intimacy that it was formerly called the Carpenter's Family, or the Angel Raphael leaving Tobias (both of the year 1637). But soon he asked for something more. The Night Watch (1642) marks at once the apotheosis of his reputation and the beginning of his fall from favour. Those important personages, the officers of the Civic Guard, in ordering this large canvas from him, gave him to understand that they regarded him as capable of rivalling the famous civic groups of Frans Hals. Rembrandt believed that he had henceforth enough authority to disregard the rules of this type of work. He painted the portraits and made them richer in profound humanity than the vivacious but super ficial effigies of Frans Hals. For the rest, he used imagination and fantasy to relieve a theme he considered too prosaic. Inde pendent of enigmatic figures like that of the little girl with the cock, or at least to which he gave an enigmatic appearance—for the little girl who looks like an apparition is only carrying the prize of the shooting competition to which the soldiers go—he had a genial inspiration which was misunderstood. He applied here
fully for the first time his instinct for transfiguring in his own peculiar way even the most banal subject. As Fromentin (who, in his Maitres d' autrefois, analysed more successfully than anyone else the essence of Rembrandt's genius and his means of expres sion) has said, the invention here consists in "illuminating an actual scene by a light which was not so, i.e., in giving to a fact the ideal character of a vision." Henceforth Rembrandt knew what he could do. He did not ever attempt to paint light for its own sake as did later the im pressionists. He used it as an instrument of projection and of expression of the invisible and the imponderable. He cared, not for material things, nor for light even, but for humanity, feeble, tortured, miserable but upon which a ray sometimes fell from above, an ineffable pity, a mysterious consolation. A figure at once divine and human appeared to those who had the eyes to see and concerned itself with the vicissitudes of the life of the humble, the figure of Christ bending over the wounds of soul and body, curing and pardoning, who says, "Remember that I am gentle and humble of heart. . . ." It is greatly to Rem brandt's honour that, more than any other painter perhaps, he could evoke not the least of the Saviour's characteristics, His infinite goodness and gentle mercy. It is no exaggeration to say that, after the Primitives, Rembrandt is, with Greco, and per haps more than the exclusively mystic Greco, the most religious of the painters. He was religious and human at once. His soul was ennobled by misfortune and his spirit continued to grow more powerful, more inventive, more touching.
No, he did not love light for its own sake and shadow did not seem to him less precious nor less rich in mysteries. Here again we cannot do better in characterising his method than to turn to Fromentin : "All is immersed in a bath of shadow, into which the light itself is plunged, save what is left outside to make it appear more distant, more radiant, turning the dark waves round lighted centres, shading them, crossing them, thickening them, rendering nevertheless the darkness transparent, the half-darks easy to pierce, giving finally even to the strongest colours a sort of permeability which prevents them from being black." Every thing in his work is personal invention, but only for his own usage. He had however carefully studied the Italians—Correggio and the Venetians in particular. But what he drew from them did not resemble them at all, and resembled nothing but himself.