There are only two "Portraits of Himself" dated 1635, and one of "Saskia," but there are two others attributed to about that time, and, in addition, two large and highly finished pictures, supposed to represent "Rembrandt and Saskia," both signed Rembrandt, and believed to have been painted in or near that year. The one at Dresden [No. 1559], contains, without doubt, portraits of the painter and his wife (_see_ illustration, p. 24). The other, at Buckingham Palace, long known as "The Burgomaster Pancras and his Wife," is less certain.
[Illustration: [_National Gallery, London_
[Illustration: [_National Gallery, London_
Apart from these, there are nine dated portraits, and five subject-pictures, together with six portraits and one subject of about the date. Only two of the portraits bearing dates are in public galleries, one "A Rabbi," at Hampton Court [No. 381], and one "A Man," in the National Gallery [No. 350], while two others of about the date are the "Portrait of Himself," in the Pitti [No. 60], and "A Young Woman," at Cassel [No. 216]. In subjects the artist on two occasions went out of his way to court failure in attempting to represent classical subjects, with the spirit of which he was utterly out of sympathy. The homely truthfulness of his art, though it may occasionally result in details somewhat shocking to the reverent mind, was, nevertheless, well adapted to set forth the humanising side of Scripture incidents. His Christ is always more the Son of Man than the God Incarnate. His Virgin Mary has none of the delicate beauty conceived for her by Italian painters, but she is first of all, and beyond all, the type of motherhood. His apostles have none of the heroic dignity of Michael Angelo's, yet they are without question devout, devoted fishers of men. But this lack of wish or power to idealise, this persistence in the search for the true and neglect of the beautiful, is entirely at variance with the classical tradition. There are no great fundamental ideas beneath the story of "Actæon, Diana, and Callisto," or "The Rape of Ganymede," for the artist to bring home to us, and the representation of the former as coarse, ungainly peasants, as in the picture belonging to Prince Salm-Salm of Anholt, or of the latter as a fat and extremely hideous baby boy blubbering in terror as he is howked upwards--no more dignified phrase will express it--by his shirt-tail in the claws of an eagle, as in the picture at Dresden [No. 1558], serve only to reveal the limitations of the artist's imagination without disguise or compensation.