In 1642 the beloved Saskia died

In 1642 the beloved Saskia died, leaving an only child, Titus, whose features are familiar to us in the portrait at Hertford House. As though this were not affliction enough, Rembrandt had the mortification of offending his patrons over the commission to paint Captain Banning Cocq's Company. From this time onward, as the world and Rembrandt drifted farther and farther apart, his work becomes more and more wonderful. oil painting for sale

Dr Muther, in his History of Painting, observes that perhaps it is only possible to understand Rembrandt by interpreting his pictures not as paintings but as psychological documents. "A picture by Rembrandt in the Dresden Gallery," he says, "represents Samson Putting Riddles to the Philistines; and Rembrandt's entire activity, a riddle to the philistines of his time, has remained puzzling to the present day.... As no other man bore his name, so the artist, too, is something unique, mocks every historical analysis,cheap oil paintings, and remains what he was, a puzzling, intangible, Hamlet nature—Rembrandt." The author's theory of the psychological document is hardly a solution of the admitted puzzle, though it is interesting to follow him in tracing it out in Rembrandt's religious pictures, from the Samsonalready mentioned to his last dated work, in 1668, the Darmstadt Crucifixion. What distinguishes Rembrandt from all painters up to, and considerably later than his time, and in particular from those of his own school, is the mental, as compared with the physical activity that his pictures represent. Perhaps this is only another way of stating Dr Muther's theory of the psychological documents,cheap oil paintings for sale, but it enables us to test that theory by comparing his work with that of others. In technical skill Beruete claims a far higher place for Velasquez, going so far as to say that the Lesson in Anatomy is not a lesson in painting. But the difference between the two is not as great as that in technique, though infinitely wider in the mental process which led to the production of a picture. A reproduction of thePortrait of an Old Pole, at S. Petersburg, is in front of me, as it happens, as I am writing; and I see in this no inferiority in firmness and precision, in truth and vigour, to any portrait by Velasquez. paintings reproductions