Rembrandt

The student of art is always impressed in his early student days by the great output of pictures put down to such men as Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt. Wandering in European galleries and continually confronted by these names upon picture-frames, he asks himself again and again bow they were physically able to cover so much canvas in their brief span of years. The answer to his query is that they were not able - that they did not do a quarter of the pictures placed under their names. But that answer does not occur to him. He is young and too much overawed by gallery authority to entertain doubts.

It will be asked at the start: How many pictures are there in the Rembrandt output? The Klassiker der Kunst volume contains 643 illustrations of pictures painted by Rembrandt. This is supposed to be a more or less critical list based upon Doctor Bode's work, but it does not give all the attributed Rembrandts. A general list would run well over a thousand, but for the purpose of argument a thousand or less will answer us.

There were some talented pupils who, after leaving the Rembrandt studio, finally developed individual ways of seeing and painting, and produced pictures that could not be confused with those of the master. These pupils have the largest number of pictures on my lists. For examples, Bol has about eighty-seven; Maes aboxit seventy-seven; Flinck, sixtythree; Eeckhout, fifty-five; Lievens, forty-seven; De Gelder, thirty-six; Victors, thirty-four; Koninck, twenty-eight; Bernaert Fabritius, twenty-five; Poorter and Santvoord, twenty each. The nearer the pupil's work to that of the master, and the easier its possible appropriation to the master, the fewer the canvases left standing under the pupil's name. This carries on until finally we come to those who worked closely in the Rembrandt manner, and find that such excellent painters as Backer and Carel Fabritius have only fifteen pictures apiece (counting in even the questionable ones); that Hoogstraten, pupil and close friend of the master, has only eleven; that other pupils, who may have helped Rembrandt as assistants in his shop, have even less who have nothing at all left to their account.

Only in his early years did he follow Rembrandt, and even then his method was smooth and timid. The bulk of his work could never seriously pass as that of Rembrandt, because too small, and trifling. It never was allocated to Rembrandt except in a few instances. The peculiar lack of adaptability of Dou's pictures as Rembrandts results in there being to-day over two hundred of them standing in Dou's own name. Some of them are undoubtedly by Dou's pupils, for he in his way became a small lodestone, drawing pictures to himself after the manner of Rembrandt.