me effort and attended him to this decisive
point. It made him a painter more peculiar and a master less sure. It
heated and divided men of taste according to the heat of their blood, or
the stiffness of their reason. In short, it was regarded as an
absolutely new but dangerous adventure which brought him applause and
some blame, and which at heart did not convince anybody. If you know the
judgment expressed on this subject by Rembrandt's contemporaries, his
friends and his pupils, you know that opinion has not sensibly varied
for two centuries, and that we repeat almost the same thing that this
great daring man might have heard during his lifetime....

Save one or two frank colours, two reds and a deep violet, except one or
two flashes of blue, you cannot perceive anything in this colourless and
violent canvas to recall the palette and ordinary method of any of the
known colourists. The heads have the appearance rather than the
colouring proper to life. They are red, purple, or pale, without for all
that having the true paleness Velasquez gives to his faces, or those
sanguine, yellowish, greyish, or purplish shades that Frans Hals renders
with such skill when he desires to specify the temperaments of his
personages. In the clothes and hair and various parts of the
accoutrements, the colour is no more exact nor expressive than is, as I
have said, the form itself. When a red appears, it is not of a delicate
nature and it indistinctly expresses silk, cloth, or satin. The guard
loading his musket is clothed in red from head to foot, from his hat to
his boots. Do you perceive that Rembrandt has occupied himself for a
moment with the varied physiognomy of this red, its nature or substance,
as a true colourist would not have failed to do?...

I defy any one to tell me how the lieutenant is dressed and in what
colour. Is it white tinged with yellow? Is it yellow faded to white? The
truth is that this personage having to express the central light of the
picture, Rembrandt has clothed him with light, very ably with regard to
brilliance and very negligently with regard to colour.

Now, and it is here that Rembrandt begins to show himself, for a
colourist there is no light in the abstract. Light of itself is nothing:
it is the result of colours diversely illumined and diversely radiating
in accordance with the nature of the ray that they transmit or absorb.
One very deep tint may be extraordinarily luminous; another very light
o