e ruined castle is the most
impressive, but neither compares favorably with the dainty perfection of
the landscape etchings.

If we add to these examples the studies of old men's heads and the
delightful portrait of the artist's sister holding a pink in her hand,
we realize that the group as a whole covers many phases of Rembrandt's
constantly changing inspiration. He betrayed in his later works the
impatience of those to whom few years are left in which to complete
their accomplishment, but he kept the sensitiveness of his youth well
into his brief prime, although he transferred it from the field of form
to that of light. It betrays itself in the quality of that light which
absorbs all that is ugly, coarse, or ultra real in its poetizing
glamour. From the tender explicit craftsmanship of the wonderful Saskia
to the golden mist enveloping the figure of Nicholas Bruyningh, is a
long step, but not longer than many a painter has taken in his progress
from youth to maturity. The special comment upon Rembrandt's character
as a painter which we are able to gather from the Cassel pictures is
that in casting off the trammels of particularity he did not become less
receptive to poetic influences. He grew more and more a dreamer, and in
losing the clear objective manner of his early portraits he substituted
not the idle carelessness which in the work of a painter's later years
is apt to be condoned as freedom, but the generalization that excludes
vulgarities of execution and makes necessary increased mastery of the
difficult craft of painting.

FANTIN-LATOUR

VIII

FANTIN-LATOUR

Fantin-Latour was born in 1836, was the son of a painter, and was
educated at Paris under his father's guidance and that of Lecoq and
Boisbaudeau, professor at a little art school connected with the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts. One of the most interesting painters of the little group
in France whose work began to come before the public about the middle of
the nineteenth century, a close friend of Whistler, a passionate admirer
of Delacroix, and an inspired student of the old masters, he managed to
preserve intact an individuality that has a singular richness and
simplicity seen against the many-colored tapestry of nineteenth-century
art. Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Nicolaas Maas, Pieter
de Hooch and Vermeer of Delft, Watteau and Chardin, Van Dyck, Titian,
Tintoret, and Veronese were his true masters and his copies of their