So long as Rembrandt painted portraits

So long as Rembrandt painted portraits like those of the Pellicornes and their offspring—the two pictures at Hertford House—or a plain straightforward group like Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson(though in this he was already getting away from convention), he was
 tolerated. And it was not so much his freedom in living and his extravagant notions of the pleasures of life that brought about his downfall, as his failure to realize that when he took the money subscribed for the group of Captain Banning Cocq's Company, the subscribers expected something else for their money than a picture (The Night Watch) which might be a masterpiece according to the painter's notions, but was certainly not a portrait group of the subscribers. Single Piece Paintigns

Here, then, for the first time in the history of painting, we find an artist definitely at issue with the public. I do not say that this was the first time that an artist had failed to please the public, but it is the first occasion on which it was decided that if a painter was to undertake commissions, he must consider the wishes of the patron, or starve. It was something new for a painter of Rembrandt's repute to be told that not he, but the persons who commissioned the work, were to be the judges of whether or not it was satisfactory. oil paintings for sale

The consequences were important. For Rembrandt, instead of taking the matter as a man of business, devoted the rest of his life to being an artist, and leaving the business of painting to men like Backer, Helst, and others, betook himself seriously to developing his art irrespective of what the public might or might not think of it. As a result, we have in the later work of Rembrandt something that the world—I mean the artistic part of it—would be very sorry to do without. Now the meaning of this is, not that Rembrandt was ill-advised in deserting his patrons, or in suffering them to desert him,oil paintings for sale cheap, but that for the first time in the history of painting an artist had the personality—I will not say the conscious determination—to realize that his art was something quite

apart from the affairs of this world, and that what he could express on canvas was not merely a representation of natural objects designed to please his contemporaries, but something more than human, something that would appeal to humanity for all time. That many before him had felt that of their art, to a lesser or greater degree, is unquestionable—but none of them had ever realised it. Dürer, certainly, may be cited as an exception, especially when contrasted with his phlegmatic and business-like compatriot Holbein. But then Dürer, a century before, and in totally different circumstances, was never assured of regular patronage as was Rembrandt. original oil paintings wholesale