The Mentor: Rembrandt, Vol. 4, Num. 20, Serial No. 120, December 1, 1916

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Dyke John Charles Van. The Mentor: Rembrandt, Vol. 4, Num. 20, Serial No. 120, December 1, 1916

Christmas Giving

REMBRANDT. Early Years

REMBRANDT. The Master Painter

REMBRANDT. Last Years

REMBRANDT. The Real Man

REMBRANDT. Saskia van Ulenburg

REMBRANDT. His Etchings

REMBRANDT

Rembrandt and Raphael

Rembrandt as a Leader

His Biblical Pictures

Rembrandt as a Portrait Painter

His Technical Method

The Night Watch

Rembrandt’s Styles

The Master’s Life

Many Pictures Attributed to Him

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

THE OPEN LETTER

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Sometimes it is difficult to learn the truth about a great man. This is particularly so in the case of one who lived three centuries ago; for in those days people were not as careful to keep records as they are today. For years the great painter Rembrandt was regarded as having been ignorant, boorish, and avaricious. Fables making him out to be such a character sprang up without any foundation. It is only within the last fifty years that we have come to know the true Rembrandt, and to realize that he had profound sympathy, a powerful imagination, and originality of mind, and that he was a poet as well as a painter, an idealist and also a realist. He has justly been called “the Shakespeare of Holland.”

Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn – for that is his full name – was born at Leyden, a town near Amsterdam, in Holland, on July 15, 1605. Leyden is famous in history as the birthplace of many great artists and other men of renown. Rembrandt’s home overlooked the river Rhine. He was the son of a well-to-do miller, and his parents were ambitious that Rembrandt enter the law, for his older brothers had been sent into trade.

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Fortune smiled upon him. At one bound he leaped into the position of the leading portrait painter of Amsterdam. Numerous commissions for portraits flowed in upon him, and during the first few years of his residence there he painted at least forty. When he was only twenty-six years old, in 1632, he painted the “Anatomy Lesson,” a picture that made an enormous sensation, and holds its place today as one of Rembrandt’s masterpieces.

The year 1634 was one of the happiest in Rembrandt’s life. He was then at the beginning of a successful artistic career, and it was at that time that he married Saskia van Ulenburg, a beautiful Frisian maiden. Saskia brought him love and wealth. Eight years of prosperity and sunshine followed their union.

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