When she came into his bedroom to see that he was safely tucked up for the night, this child asked his mother why Rembrandt's pictures were so different from the pictures of other painters.
She explained that Rembrandt was a great master of _chiaroscuro_, making a valiant attempt to pronounce the uncomfortable word.
"What does that mean?" asked the little boy.
"It--er--means--One moment, dear; I think I hear your father calling."
She ran downstairs and consulted the dictionary.
"A _chiaroscurist_," she told her little boy when she returned to the bedroom, "is a painter who cares for and studies light and shade rather than colour. Now go to sleep. You're too young to bother about such things."
This child's mother was an ardent Ruskinian. Observing that her husband, the citizen and golfer, was asleep in his chair when she returned from her son's bedroom, she stepped into the library, picked _Modern Painters_ from the shelf, and read the following passages, gravely shaking her head occasionally as she read.
"... Rembrandt always chooses to represent the exact force with which the light on the most illumined part of an object is opposed to its obscurer portions. In order to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth, he sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of his picture; and the expression of every character of objects which depends on tenderness of shape or tint. But he obtains his single truth, and what picturesque and forcible expression is dependent upon it, with magnificent skill and subtlety.
"... His love of darkness led also to a loss of the spiritual element, and was itself the reflection of a sombre mind....
"... I cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of his darkness and the dulness of his light. Glorious or inglorious, the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he could see--by rushlight...."
Had Ruskin, one wonders, ever seen _The Syndics_ at Amsterdam, or the _Portrait of his Mother_, and the _Singing Boy_ at Vienna, or _The Old Woman_ at St. Petersburg, or the _Christ at Emmaus_ at the Louvre, or any of the etchings?