Rembrandt had pupils, disciples, imitators. Some of them had talent, for example Nicolaes Maes, Govaert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, Gerbrandt Van den Eeckhout, Aert Van Gelder, Jan Lievens. Carel Fabritius alone was an exquisite painter but, though a pupil of Rembrandt, he is nearer to Vermeer than to the author of the Pilgrims at Emmaus. But what were they beside him? When they rose nearest to him it was only to arrive at the height of his least good and least personal work. For, in the pursuit of an ideal so new and so difficult, how could he avoid partial failures? For this reason misfortune proved rather favourable to Rembrandt's genius: he was not built to work on commission. And this was why the ordinary enough portrait-painter of the great bourgeois of Amsterdam of about 1640 became the admirable and incom parable painter, unceasingly renewed in the numerous tragic self portraits of his old age such as the Rembrandt au Foulard (Louvre), and in those which he made resplendent with the goodness shining in the features of his servant and faithful friend, Hendrickje Stoffels. Then for the first time we see, as we have since seen frequently enough in modern times, a great artist who renounced the comprehension of the public or even of self-styled connoisseurs, and whose one thought was to satisfy himself, to put the whole of himself and his dreams into his painting.
Rembrandt is the first plastic genius to be a modern. He is confidential as no one ever was before in art. Under all dis guises, through the subjects which he chose in his universal curiosity and his poetic taste for the fables, legends and stories which have enchanted the imagination of humanity, it is himself whom he confesses. This led him to an accent of uncompromising truth, even of crude truth, and moreover he never separated the real from the imaginary. He never once treated one of the sub jects of real life which then formed the repertory of his Dutch contemporaries. But he painted the Flayed Ox, an almost repul sive spectacle before which nearly all specialists in still life would have recoiled. Indeed it is not a still life such as was painted by other painters, even the best like Chardin. The uncompromising realism of the Flayed Ox is of the same order, and requires the same effort of imagination, as the pathetic realism of the por traits of old age and of the ideal compositions.
He had a universal curiosity and he lived, meditated, dreamed and painted thrown back on himself. He thought of the great Venetians who breathed a noble and voluptuous liveliness, he borrowed their subjects and made of them an art out of the inner life and full of profound emotion. Mythological and reli gious subjects were treated as he treated his portraits. For, all that he took from reality and even from the works of others he transmuted instantly into his own substance. In the con
stant, indissoluble and unsought for mingling of imagination and reality we are reminded of Shakespeare, though Rembrandt's masterpieces were pure plastic creations.
After this magnificent expansion, towards the end of the 17th century the first signs of decadence set in in Holland. It was consummated in the i8th century. No soul remained, nothing but a poor ideal of detailed execution which ended in dryness or insipidity. No soul in the country of Rembrandt, among the painters who could have unceasingly before their eyes examples of the greatest painter of the soul who ever existed. By this we can measure the extent to which really great men outdistance their time and their country, and can be strangers to them, above and outside the movement of the Schools to which they are supposed to belong. They are meteors, taken from the sky. No doubt they resemble the chameleon which takes the colour of the ground on which it lies. But that changes nothing of their nature or their origin, which are otherwise.
The same years of the seventeenth century which saw so great an expansion of Flemish and Dutch painting, brought into the scheme of universal art a School which till then had remained aloof. It is only recently that scholars have begun to study the origins of painting in Spain and much obscurity still prevails.
It seems that Catalonia was the principal seat of art in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. Artists first worked there under the al most solitary influence of the French miniaturists, then this influ ence was shared by the Sienese painters and, a few years later, by the Flemings. However, till the extreme end of the 15th century, works in a gracious and delicate style like those of Jaume Huguet (whose name seems to indicate a French origin) showed that in the midst of a general production which seemed like a mere pro longation of Flemish painting there was still, at least in Barcelona, a certain air wafted from France.
The i6th century, in Spain as in Flanders, is the epoch of Ro manism. A cold and scholarly combination was created by the artists, who were theorists more than painters, between the Flem ish realism, which to some extent corresponded with the instruc tive leanings of the Spanish imagination, and the classical models of the Italian Renaissance. It is curious that the man who in the i6th century seemed to be the most authentic representative of Spain was Antonio Moro (1512-1575) who, born in Holland, called himself there Anthony Mor Van Dashorst and who, highly favoured by the courts of Brussels, London and Madrid, painted portraits of admirable truth and dignity. It was yet another foreigner who soon afterwards offered to Spain an art in which she could recognize her mystic and chivalrous spirit.