lptor, to execute the sculptures
in the town-hall, thus emphasizing their preference for the school of
Rubens and Van Dyck above the one of Hals and Rembrandt. This tendency
occasioned a preference for foreign theories and forms, and so we see
between 1648 and 1660 a town-hall built, ten times bigger than the former
one and costing, according to our money, about twenty million guilders,
resulting in a work of art, imposing but not essentially Dutch (plates
_2_, _3_, _4_).

[Plate 3. The Ruins of the Old Town Hall in Amsterdam, after the Fire in
1652.]

Plate 3. The Ruins of the Old Town Hall in Amsterdam, after the Fire in
1652. After the drawing by Rembrandt, formerly in the Heseltine
Collection, now in the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam.

[Plate 4. The New Town-Hall in Amsterdam, about 1660.]

Plate 4. The New Town-Hall in Amsterdam, about 1660. The square building
on the right is the public Weighing-House, where Rembrandt sketched the
ruins of the old town-hall (see preceding illustration). After an etching
by J. van der Ulft, 1656.

[Plate 5. The Bridge Called "Grimnessesluis" in Amsterdam.]

Plate 5. The Bridge Called "Grimnessesluis" in Amsterdam. After the
drawing by Rembrandt in the Louvre, Paris. Reproduced, by permission,
from a copyright photograph by Messrs. Braun and Co., Dornach.

What we know of Rembrandt in connection with Amsterdam's town-hall
supports the above theory: he seems to have liked the old building, a
Late-Gothic structure, as he sketched it twice, once after its fire in
1652. On the other hand, when in 1662 he executes a large decoration for
the new town-hall, his work does not agree with the taste of his
contemporaries and is returned to him (_The Plot of Claudius Civilis_, now
much cut down, in the Museum at Stockholm). Considering Rembrandt's style
of expressing himself in his work, we find many instances to convince us
of his preference for the architectural forms of an earlier period and of
his lack of sympathy for those which were introduced during the later part
of his life. Is it to be wondered at that he, the warm-feeling artist,
offspring of a school which affected richness and baroque, was no friend
of a new tendency, the stateliness and broadness of which were bound to
degenerate into coldness and stiffness? Looking through his drawings and
etchings (his pic