ination. Rembrandt, the maker of
pictures, had become a vivid personality, a master whom he reverenced; but
Rembrandt the etcher was unknown to him.

There are authorities who assert that in etching Rembrandt's art found its
amplest and most exquisite expression. None will deny that his is the
greatest name in etching. If all Rembrandt's pictures were destroyed, if
every record of them by photograph or copy was blotted out, the etchings
alone would form so ample a testimony to his genius that the name of
Rembrandt would still remain among the foremost artists of the world.

Rembrandt enjoyed a period of popularity with his pictures, followed by
years of decline and neglect, when lesser and more accommodating men ousted
him from popular favour. But from first to last the products of his needle
were appreciated by his contemporaries, even if he himself did not set
great store by them. He began to etch early in life: he ceased only when
his eyesight failed. He found in etching a congenial and natural means of
self-expression. His artistic fecundity threw them off in regal profusion.
The mood seized him: he would take a prepared plate, and sometimes, having
swiftly spent his emotion, he did not trouble to do more than indicate the
secondary incidents in a composition. Often he gave them away to friends
and fellow-artists, or tossed them, when they had answered their purpose in
his art life, so continuously experimental, into one of the sixty
portfolios of leather recorded in the inventory of his property.

The history of _Christ Healing the Sick_, known as _The Hundred Guilder
Print_, now the most prized of all the etchings, shows that he did not
attach much value, either artistic or monetary, to this plate. He did not
even receive a hundred guilders (under L9) for it, but gave the etching to
his friend Jan Zoomer in exchange for _The Pest_, by M. Anthony. At the
Holford sale, as has already been noted, L1750 was given for the _Hundred
Guilder Print_.

It is supposed that only two of the etchings were made expressly for
publication--the _Descent from the Cross_, and the _Ecce Homo_; but
Rembrandt may have benefited from the sale of them through the partnership
that was formed in 1660 between his son Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels.

[Illustration: MINERVA

1655. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

In the eighteenth century certain connoisseurs had already made collections
of his etchings. Catalogues began to be published,