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    Rembrandt
    Rembrandt
    Rembrandt
    Ebook89 pages2 hours

    Rembrandt

    By Emil Ludwig

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    About this ebook

    “She christened him Rembrandt; and as his father, in that desolating age of the world, had made a home for himself, they were now the founders of a little race, had taken the first step towards citizenship—and so this son could be given a real surname, and figure as Rembrandt Harmenzoon van Rijn.
    When this boy in his turn grew up, and showed himself intelligent and willing to learn, the old people thought: ‘He shall be raised above our humble station; he shall go to the grammar-school, and perhaps become a doctor at our famous Academy here in his native town of Leyden, and be the star of the family.’ And so he did. While his brothers and sisters hammered and filed and sewed, this son for seven years went every morning to the grammar-school, learnt to read the classics, to deliver speeches, to write letters (and in a good hand); he even knew something about theology; and finally he passed his examination.
    So it was probably the proudest day of the father’s life when he went to town with his fourteen-yeared son, into the lofty imposing edifice which was the University, and watched him write his name in unknown letters in the big book: ‘Rembrandtus Harmanni Leydensis, May 20, 1620. Student. Domiciled with his parents.’
    But the student did not want to stay at the University. Was the spirit in those halls too puritanical, hostile to learning? In the library he was more attracted by the pictures than by the books; he would stand transfixed before the portraits, and was fond of going to the Guard-House to see others. At his rich comrades’ home he would pore over etchings and engravings; but best of all he loved to linger before the great Judgment of Lucas in the Guildhall. Rembrandt wanted to be a painter.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherClassica Libris
    Release dateMay 21, 2020
    ISBN9788835832515
    Rembrandt

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      Book preview

      Rembrandt - Emil Ludwig

      Mayne

      Copyright

      First published in 1930

      Copyright © 2020 Classica Libris

      Original title

      Rembrandt

      Dedication

      Colours are the deeds and sufferings of Light.

      —Goethe

      Chronology

      1606 July 15th born in Leyden.

      1620 Student.

      1624–27 Studies under Swanenburgh.

      1627 In Amsterdam.

      1628 (circa) First etching.

      1629 First self-portrait.

      1630–40 Self-portraits and Saskia.

      1631 Death of his father.

      1632–69 Lives in Amsterdam.

      1632 First Anatomy (The Hague).

      1634 Marries Saskia von Ulenburgh.

      1635 Self-portrait (London).

      1635 Self-portrait with Saskia (Dresden).

      1636 Danaë (Petersburg).

      1640 Death of his mother.

      1641 Birth of his son Titus.

      1642 Death of Saskia. Night Watch (Amsterdam).

      1643 Three Trees (Etching).

      1649–62 Lives with and marries Hendrikje Stoffels.

      1649 (circa) A hundred gulden for a sketch.

      1654 Birth of his daughter Cornelia. Portrait of Jan Six (Amsterdam).

      1656 Bankruptcy. Second Anatomy. Jacob’s Blessing.

      1658 Auction.

      1661 Last etchings. Business-partnership of wife and son.

      1662 Death of Hendrikje Stoffels.

      1665 (circa) Saul and David.

      1668 Death of his son Titus.

      1668 (circa) Return of the Prodigal Son.

      1669 Last self-portrait.

      1669 October 8th Rembrandt dies in Amsterdam.

      1673 Birth of Cornelia’s son, Rembrandt.

      Chapter I

      THE SON OF THE MILL

      What a shuddering and pulsing—how the mill trembles!

      As a child he had hardly noticed it. Here he was born, here he used to play, and knew that nobody was ever allowed to do that in front of the mill, where the sails went round and round—a little hedge kept children away from there. But inside, upstairs and down, they might clamber, chase each other, play hide-and-seek.

      Now, at a different sort of hide-and-seek, a fifteen-year old boy sits in the loft and peers through the flickering light of this agitated abode of his. How intently he gazes into the shimmering gloom, his back always turned to the little scrap of a window, hoping to surprise the secret of the magical tremulous light that is born of the relentless shaking! For on his knee he holds a board, colours are at hand, and he is earnestly trying to make a picture of this half-lit room.

      Now he is tired of the business, puts his things away, goes to the loophole. Absently, unseeingly, his eyes look out over the landscape. He knows it well; he is not impressed by the fact that from here to the edge of the town, and from the rampart outwards, land and river stretch for many miles under the unbroken light. That is all so obvious; and he does not care for the tranquil, pale plain with its trees bent crooked by the winds from the sea; and the two rivers that flow, broad and languid, alongside the rampart and then find each other and turn into one river. That is the Rhine, after long wandering drawing near to its goal, soon to lose itself in the wide ocean.

      Up there in the Alps, when the river was young and leaped over boulders and wore down stones as it went, it must surely have been more amusing to look at. Wonderingly, with a dumb unconscious envy, the boy muses on the pleasures of youth that he has read about at school, and he feels a heavy heart beat at its enclosing walls and feels that he is as old as the Rhine.

      In truth, he comes of a stolid race. Laboriously, austerely, like the Rhine, flow the two parent-streams. Toil—that had been the meaning of life for his forebears on both sides. To earn their daily bread they ground the corn; the tireless wooden windmill is old—Grandmother transplanted it hither from the North, where it never had anything but corn to eat. Now it stands upon the rampart and has taken the name of the surrounding region. They call it simply Rijn, after the great river; but they make it grind their meal for them, for Leyden is a thriving town and people need a lot of beer to help them through these evil days.

      Where the family at the mill may come from is pure hearsay, for people with no houses of their own have no records, no portraits, such as the rich citizens in the town preserve. They have not even any names and call themselves merely sons of their fathers—so the boy’s father is known as Harmen Gerritszoon. But because the mill is by the Rhine and is called by the name of the Rhine, he adds in important documents, the words: van Rijn.

      He had, as befits a miller, married a baker’s daughter; Cornelia—she had no surname either, and was known as Willemsdochter. On his marriage he had bought half the mill from her mother on a promissory note for 1,800 gulden—and the south side of the mill-dwelling as well. Then, both earning their bread in the sweat of the brows and living economically and quietly, they had grown better off year by year, and eventually inherited a little house near by. He was elected to the leading position in his district, and when his wife went to church, she wore a handsome lace trimmed apron and gold earrings.

      In seventeen years she had borne eight children, most of whom survived. Three sons had been early taught their trades and were already established as shoemakers and bakers when the aging woman, worn out with child-bearing and toil, gave birth to a fourth boy. No one knew what was in her mind when, amid the monotony of the daily round, she gave her youngest child a peculiar name.

      She christened him Rembrandt; and as his father, in that desolating age of the world, had made a home for himself, they were now the founders of a little race, had taken the first step towards citizenship—and so this son could be given a real surname, and figure as Rembrandt Harmenzoon van Rijn.

      When this boy in his turn grew up, and showed himself intelligent and willing to learn, the old people thought: "He shall be raised above our humble station; he shall go to the grammar-school, and perhaps become a doctor at our famous Academy here in his native town of Leyden, and be the star of the family." And so he did. While his brothers and sisters hammered and filed and sewed, this son for seven years went every morning to the grammar-school, learnt to read the classics, to deliver speeches, to write letters (and in a good hand); he even knew something about theology; and finally he passed his examination.

      So it was probably the proudest day of the father’s life when he went to town with his fourteen-year old son, into the lofty imposing edifice which was the University, and watched him write his name in unknown letters in the big book: Rembrandtus Harmanni Leydensis, May 20, 1620. Student. Domiciled with his parents.

      But the student did not want to stay at the University. Was the spirit in those halls too puritanical, hostile to learning? In the library he was more attracted by the pictures than by the books; he would stand transfixed before the portraits and was fond of going to the Guard-House to see others. At his rich comrades’ home he would pore over etchings and engravings; but best of all he loved to linger before the great Judgment of

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