er generation had known only as meadows and vegetable gardens. The
artist must have noticed many changes even since he passed his years of
apprenticeship in Amsterdam in the studio of Pieter Lastman, returning
again to his native town Leyden during the intermediate seven or eight
years.

Until the period of Rembrandt's settling in Amsterdam, this city, although
having been long the metropolis of the Northern Netherlands, had not been
very different in aspect to other important Dutch towns; its
seventeenth-century buildings belong to the same school of architecture as
those of the other cities, like Haarlem, Alkmaar, Leyden. Its immense
prosperity and development as Europe's most important seaport since about
1600, however, originated a notable change: its aspect gradually became
more individual, until in the second part of the golden century it had
assumed the grandeur worthy of "the capital of Europe, the neighbours'
support and hope," as our greatest poet then justly called her. Important
buildings and a very logically and royally planned extension of its canals
and streets were the causes of this alteration. We do not know of any
other big town of that period so systematically laid out, with such a
preservation of its original beauty and with such an outspoken aim to
obtain in its new thoroughfares a similar attraction to the eyes. Of all
the cities of the Netherlands none possessed the means, or were forced to
undertake such big works, as Amsterdam. Consequently the best Dutch
architects of that time erected their finest and most important edifices
in Amsterdam, and very often exclusively built there; and this accounts
for her assuming that individual aspect of stateliness.

Rembrandt got acquainted in Amsterdam with two distinct architectural
periods: 1st, the one just closed on his arrival, dominated by the eminent
architect and sculptor Hendrick de Keyser (father of the celebrated
portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser); 2d, the following period, influenced
by Jacob van Campen. The first period enriched Amsterdam with a great
number of buildings, generally in red brick with decorations in clear
sandstone, of a varied and often baroque appearance; their style, although
based on early sixteenth-century Italian renaissance, may be called a
typical Dutch one, strongly personified as it was, towards the end of the
sixteenth century, by Netherlandish architects, like Cornells Floris and
Vredeman de Vries.--In the sec