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Updated: May 11, 2025
He had the thin lips that you see in Rembrandt's or Metsu's portraits of alchemists and shrunken old men, and a nose so sharp at the tip that it put you in mind of a gimlet. His voice was so low; he always spoke suavely; he never flew into a passion.
He remained insensible to the melody of purely feminine lines; and the only reason why his transcripts from the female form are not gross like those of Flemish painters, repulsive like Rembrandt's, fleshly like Rubens's, disagreeable like the drawings made by criminals in prisons, is that they have little womanly about them.
High place, it would seem, did not always conduce to an appreciation of high art. Here is the opinion of Sir Charles Eastlake, F.R.I.B.A., also keeper of the National Gallery, published in 1883, on one of Rembrandt's pictures in the Louvre:
I had a queer fancy, as I stood there, that it was really a picture into which I was gazing one of Rembrandt's for, gradually, one detail after another emerged from the darkness, vague shadows took on shape and meaning, but farther back there was always more shadow, and farther back still more ...
The large plates inspired him with reverence and profound admiration for Rembrandt's genius as an etcher, but it was the smaller etchings that won his love and held it.
There are millionaires' residences in New York that might have been transplanted not only from the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, but from Touraine itself; while when I made my pilgrimage to Mr. Widener's, just outside Philadelphia, I found Rembrandt's "Mill," and Manet's dead bull-fighter, and a Vermeer, and a little meadow painted divinely by Corot, and El Greco's family group, and Donatello's St.
The forehead is formless and boneless, the nose is entirely wanting in that play of line and surface which an old man's nose affords; no one ever yet drew or painted a nose absolutely as nature has made it, but he who compares carefully drawn noses, as that in Rembrandt's younger portrait of himself, in his old woman, in the three Van Eycks, in the Andrea Solario, in the Loredano Loredani by Bellini, all in our gallery, with the nose of Raffaelle's S. Nicholas will not be long in finding out how slovenly Raffaelle's treatment in reality is.
In his early years he painted pictures of middle-class life, in which each figure is truthfully depicted, as were the early heads in Rembrandt's 'Anatomy. Like Rembrandt in his youth, he looked at each head separately and painted it as faithfully as he could.
The Cassel version is nevertheless a work of great distinction, the grave and beautiful face and shining armor looking out of a luminous atmosphere that has more of the Rembrandtesque quality than many authenticated works of Rembrandt's riper period. The work is engaging, personal, striking, and if not entirely great certainly possessed of many of the qualities of greatness.
The fluctuation in fame which Romney has suffered has, of course, fallen to the fate of many of his professional brethren. We read, for instance, that Sir Godfrey Kneller sometimes received in payment for a portrait a considerable sum in hard cash, with a couple of Rembrandt's thrown in by way of makeweight. Yet now a single specimen of Rembrandt exceeds in value a whole gallery of Knellers.
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