Chardin delighted him, and
Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy.
He knew now quite positively that there had been no painting of landscape before Monet; and he felt a real thrill when he stood in front of Rembrandt's Disciples at Emmaus or Velasquez' Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose.
She showed him the Rembrandts, and she said many appropriate things about them.
Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music,
Rembrandt's works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and Oolong.
It would have made a fine picture, worthy of
Rembrandt, the gloomy winding stairs illuminated by the reddish glare of the cresset of Gryphus, with his scowling jailer's countenance at the top, the melancholy figure of Cornelius bending over the banister to look down upon the sweet face of Rosa, standing, as it were, in the bright frame of the door of her chamber, with embarrassed mien at being thus seen by a stranger.
If ever a Holland Dutchman stepped out of a
Rembrandt frame, Captain Van Horn was that one, despite the fact that he was New York born, as had been his knickerbocker ancestors before him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but New Amsterdam.
Oily brown shadows of faces with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant
Rembrandt. Buxom ladies and dropiscal infants, Rubens, and Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a tomato-colored splash in the middle, which might be the sun or a bouy, a sailor's shirt or a king's robe, as the spectator pleased.
In this humour of passive resistance, and with his garment collected beneath him to keep his limbs from the wet pavement, Isaac sat in a corner of his dungeon, where his folded hands, his dishevelled hair and beard, his furred cloak and high cap, seen by the wiry and broken light, would have afforded a study for
Rembrandt, had that celebrated painter existed at the period.
Not the one with the green back--that contains my
Rembrandt etchings, Mr.
Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty.
Some men have a knack at making
Rembrandts, others have a turn for Raphaels, Titians, Cuyps, Watteaus, and the rest of them.
And experts there have said even Dutch master
Rembrandt would have seen the genius in the Beano's famous characters.