FullReads

Young Rembrandt was handicapped by a full-moon face, and small gray eyes that gave no glint, and his hair was so tousled and unruly that he could not wear a hat.

So the sons of aristocrats who cracked sly jokes at the miller’s boy had their fun.

Rembrandt usually came in late, after the master had begun his little morning lecture. The lad was barefoot, having left his wooden shoon in the hallway “so as not to wear out the floor.” He would bow awkwardly to the professor, fall over a chair or two that had been slyly pushed in his way, and taking his seat chew the butt end of a brush.

“Why are you always late?” asked the master one day.

“Oh, I was working at home and forgot the time.”

“And what are you working at?”

“Me? I’m–I’m drawing a little,” and he colored vermilion to the back of his neck.

“Well, bring your work here so we can profit by it,” exclaimed a joker, and the class guffawed.

The next morning the lad brought his picture–a woman’s face–a picture of a face, homely, wrinkled, weather-beaten, but with a look of love and patience and loyalty beaming out of the quiet eyes.

“Who did this?” demanded the teacher.

Rembrandt hesitated, stuttered, stammered, and then confessed that he did it himself–he could not tell a lie.

He was sure the picture would be criticized and ridiculed, but he had decided to face it out. It was a picture of his mother, and he had sketched her just as she looked. He would let them laugh, and then at noon he would wait outside the door and smash the boy who laughed loudest over the head with a wooden shoe–and let it go at that.

But the scholars did not laugh, for Jacob van Swanenburch took the boy by the hand and leading him out before the class told those young men to look upon their master.

From that time forth Rembrandt was regarded by the little art world of Leyden as a prodigy.

Like William Cullen Bryant, who wrote “Thanatopsis” when scarcely eighteen, and writing for sixty years thereafter never equaled it, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who wrote “The Blessed Damozel” at the same age, Rembrandt sprang into life full-armed.

It is probably true that he could not then have produced an elaborate composition, but his faces were Rembrandtesque from the very first.

Rembrandt is the king of light and shade. You never mistake his work. As the years passed, around him clustered a goodly company of pupils, hundreds in all, who diligently worked to catch the trick, but Rembrandt stands alone. “He is the only artist who could ever paint a wrinkle,” says Ruskin. All his portraits have the warts on. And the thought has often come to me that only a Rembrandt–the only Rembrandt–could have portrayed the face of Lincoln. Plain, homely, awkward, eyes not mates, sunken cheeks, leathery skin, moles, uncombed hair, neckcloth askew; but over and above and beyond all a look of power–and the soul! that look of haunting sorrow and the great, gentle, compassionate soul within!

And so there is a picture of Rembrandt’s mother which this son painted that must ever stand out as one of the world’s masterpieces. Let who will, declare that the portrait by Richter in the Gallery at Cologne, of Queen Louise, is the handsomest portrait ever painted; yet the depth of feeling, the dignity and love in the homely old mother’s face, pale not in comparison, but are things to which the proud and beautiful Queen herself paid homage.

Rembrandt painted nearly a hundred pictures of his mother that we can trace. In most of them she holds in her hands a little Bible, and thus did the son pay tribute to her devoted piety. She was a model of which he never tired. He painted her in court dress, and various other fantastic garbs, that she surely never wore. He painted her as a nun, as a queen, a court beauty, a plain peasant, a musician; and in various large pictures her face and form are introduced. And most of these pictures of his mother are plainly signed with his monogram. He also painted his sister as the Madonna, and this is signed; but although he doubtless painted his father’s face, yet he did not sign such pictures, so their authenticity is a hazard. This fact gives a clue to his affections which each can work out for himself.