ed face and slightly
uncertain mouth, are familiar to all students of Rembrandt's art. In
1631 Rembrandt was still in his father's house and one gains some notion
of the old miller's amiability from the frequency with which he appeared
in etchings and paintings and the variety of the poses which he took on
behalf of his ardent son, adjusting his expression to his assumed
character with no little dramatic skill. Never in his later years did
Rembrandt so delicately render the patience and discipline of age. In
this alert, unprepossessing yet kindly face we can read a not too
fanciful history of the temperament of the sitter. We see, at all
events, the mark of a sympathetic mind.

The next picture in the collection to mark a special period and one of
brilliant achievement in Rembrandt's career is the so-called
"Woodcutter's Family," belonging to the decade between 1640 and 1650.
After an old fashion the Holy Family is represented as seen in a
painting before which a curtain is partly drawn. The mother sits by the
side of a cradle from which she has lifted the child who clings to her
neck while she presses him to her in a close embrace. In the farther
corner of the room is the figure of the father in his carpenter's apron,
and in the center a cat is crouching near some dishes on the floor. The
room is filled with a mild sunlight that filters through the air and
falls across the figures of the mother and child and across the broad
expanse of floor. The simplicity and poetic feeling in lighting and
gesture are worthy of Rembrandt's prime, and there is no trace of the
extreme drama that marks the religious compositions at Munich. The color
is beautiful and the tone mysterious. Nevertheless one misses the
precious quality of the earlier craftmanship as it shines in such lovely
paintings as the "Saskia" and the "Portrait of a Young Woman." In these
the painter shows that he was still young, that he had arrived at a
skill of hand that permitted him to use his medium with ease and
certainty, but that he had not yet ceased to attempt what lay just
beyond his powers. His brush still sought out subtle refinements of
modeling with the patience that allied him to the earlier Dutch and
Flemish masters. He had, no doubt, the instinctive feeling of ardent
youth, the assumption of time ahead for the carrying out of all
projects, and his brilliant manipulations of his pigment showed neither
haste, nor as yet the complete confidence that lea