Van Dyck : His Original Etchings and His Iconography (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Van Dyck: His Original Etchings and His Iconography

H caring, we feel that Rembrandt renders the complexi ties of human nature with the greatest subtlety of expression, and to attain his end he used a method of close shading almost too subtle for the medium of etch ing. He may have seen even more in his sitters than their own friends realized, and perhaps failed to con centrate on the more striking external characteristics which would constitute the whole man to the world of his acquaintance. Moreover he was capable of thinking less of immediate faithfulness to the lineaments of his model than of some more strictly artistic aim, just as in his later pictures portraiture pure and simple becomes subservient to the development of his ideas of chiar oscuro. It was thus that his famous Night Watch heralded the decline of his popularity with the fashionable world of sitters who wished first of all to be admired, or at least recognized.

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