ed with more or less skill. For Rembrandt there
seems no place among them all--he must stand somewhere alone; and there
is no standard by which to judge his perfections and imperfections
except the man himself.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Rembrandt and any other painter
is that he never seems to have tried to please the public, but only
painted to please himself. It is for this reason, no doubt, that he was
never popular with the public, and is never likely to be; but just as
Beethoven is only understandable by the really musical soul, so
Rembrandt's appeal is to those who have the feeling for something in
painting beyond the mere representation of familiar or heroic scenes and
persons on canvas. For the public it is enough that one of his
landscapes should be sold for L100,000, and they all flock to see it;
but put a fine Rembrandt portrait in a shop-window without a name to it,
and there would be little fear of the pavement being blocked.

This failure of Rembrandt to please the public of his own day brings out
the truth that the practice of painting had up to then subsisted only so
long as it supplied a popular demand; and when we come to consider what
that demand was, we find that it is for nothing else but a pleasing
representation of natural objects, which may or may not embody some
sentimental or historical association, but must first and foremost be a
fair representation of more or less familiar things.

The oldest story about pictures is that of Zeuxis and the bunch of
grapes, which relates that he painted the fruit so like nature that the
birds came and pecked at the painting--some versions, I believe, adding
that the fruit itself was there but they preferred the painting. Similar
stories with innumerable variations are told of later artists. Rembrandt
himself is said to have been deceived by his pupils who, knowing he was
careful about collecting money in small quantities, however extravagant
he might be in spending it, painted coins on the floor of the studio,
and enjoyed the joke of seeing him stoop to pick them up. We have heard,
too, of flies painted with surprising skill in conspicuous places to
deceive the unwary. But apart from these little pleasantries, one has
only to remember how the earlier writers on painting have expressed
themselves to see how much importance, consciously or unconsciously, was
attached to life-like resemblance to the object painted. Vasari is
constantly using phra