To a child, the portrait of a painter by himself has a human interest apart altogether from its claim to be a work of art. Rembrandt's portrait of himself at the National Gallery, painted when he was thirty-two, is not one of his remarkable achievements. It is a little timid in the handling, but that it is an excellent likeness none can doubt. This bold-eyed, quietly observant, jolly-looking man was not quite the presentment of Rembrandt that the child had imagined; but Rembrandt at this period was something of a sumptuous dandy, proud of his brave looks and his fur-trimmed mantle. Life was his province. No subject was vulgar to him so long as it presented problems of light and construction and drawing. Rembrandt, like Montaigne, was never didactic. He looked at life through his eyes and through his imagination, and related his adventures. One day it was a flayed ox hanging outside a butcher's shop, which he saw through his eyes; another day it was Christ healing the sick, which he saw through his imagination. You can imagine the healthy, full-blooded Rembrandt of this portrait painting the _Carcase of a Bullock_ at the Louvre, or that prank called _The Rape of Ganymede_, or that delightful, laughing picture of his wife sitting upon his knee at Dresden, which Ruskin disliked.
The other portrait of Rembrandt by himself at the National Gallery shows that he was not a vain man, and that he was just as honest with himself as with his other sitters. It was painted when he was old and ailing and time-marked, five years before his death. His hands are clasped, and he seems to be saying--"Look at me! That is what I am like now, an old, much bothered man, bankrupt, without a home, but happy enough so long as I have some sort of a roof above me under which I can paint. I am he of whom it was said that he was famous when he was beardless. Observe me now! What care I so that I can still see the world and the men and women about me--'When I want rest for my mind, it is not honours I crave, but liberty.'"
[Illustration: REMBRANDT LEANING ON A STONE SILL
Twenty-eight seemed a great age to the child; but he thought it wonderful that the portrait of an _Old Lady_ at the National Gallery should have been painted when Rembrandt was but twenty-eight. She was too strong and determined for his liking, and he wondered why some of Rembrandt's pictures, like _The Woman taken in Adultery_, should be so mysterious and poetical, and others like this old lady so lifelike and straightforward. He was too young to understand that the composition of the fortuitous concourse of atoms called Rembrandt, included not only the power that Velasquez possessed in so supreme a degree of painting just what his eyes saw, exemplified by this portrait of _An Old Lady_, aged 83, and by the portrait of _Elizabeth Bas_ at Amsterdam, but that it also included the great gift of creative imagination, exemplified by the _Christ at Emmaus_, and _The Good Samaritan_ of the Louvre, and in a way by the _Portrait of a Slav Prince_ at the Hermitage, where a man in the alembic of Rembrandt's imagination has become a type. Also in _The Reconciliation of David and Absalom_ at the Hermitage, where behind the sham trappings of the figures shine the eternal motives of reconciliation and forgiveness.