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Updated: May 23, 2025
He will teach other men to draw, his pictures will command fabulous prices, and his name shall be honored everywhere! Yes, my boy shall draw pictures! This day will I take him to Mynheer Jacob van Swanenburch, who was a pupil of the great Rubens, and who has scholars even from Antwerpen.
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.
His pupils spread his praise, and so many new ones came that he took the old quarters of Swanenburch. In Sixteen Hundred Thirty-one, there came to him a young man who was to build a deathless name for himself Gerard Dou. Then to complete the circle came Joris van Vliet, whose reputation as an engraver must ever take a first rank.
Rembrandt remained with Swanenburch for three years, and the master proved his faithful friend. He gave him an introduction into the aristocratic art world which otherwise might have barred its doors against so profound a genius, as aristocracy has done time and again. The best artists are not necessarily the best teachers.
Better than his books he loved the engravings of Swanenburch, better still, the pictures of Lucas van Leyden, which he could look at to his heart's content on gala days, when the Town Hall, where they hung, was thrown open to the public.
But admiration did not spoil Rembrandt. His temperature was too low for ebullition he took it all quite as a matter of course. His work was done with such ease that he was not aware it was extraordinary in quality; and when Swanenburch sold several of his sketches at goodly prices and put the silver in the lad's hand, he asked who the blockheads were who had invested.
Keep your eye on the subject we are not yet through with it. Swanenburch offered to give Rembrandt a room in his own house, but he preferred the old mill, and a wheat-bin was fitted up for a private studio. The fittings of the studio must have cost fully two dollars, according to all accounts; there were a three-legged stool, an easel, a wooden chest, and a straw bed in the corner.
Certainly, by the time he was fifteen, so strong were the proofs of his indifference to the classics and his love for art, that his father, sacrificing his own ambitions, allowed Rembrandt to leave the university for the studio of Van Swanenburch. From this day forth, his life's history is told in the single word work; his indeed was the genius of industry.
Swanenburch had given a public exhibition of the work of his pupils, at which young Rembrandt had been pushed forward as an example of what right methods in pedagogics could do. "Well, why can not all your scholars draw like that, then?" asked a broad-beamed Dutchman. "They certainly could, if they would follow the principles I lay down," answered the master severely.
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