The next year among his many superb portraits are three of his mother:
one in Vienna, painted a year before her death, in a furred cloak,
resting her folded hands on a staff; another with a red shawl on her
head; and still another seated, with her hands joined;--both the latter
in the Hermitage. He also finished "The Entombment" and "The
Resurrection," begun three years before. He said, "These two pieces are
now finished with much of study and of zeal, ... because it is in these
that I have taken care to express the utmost of naturalness and action;
and this is the principal reason why I have been occupied so long on
them." He urged that they be hung in a strong light, for he said, "A
picture is not made to be smelt of. The odor of the colors is
unhealthy."
He etched "The Death of the Virgin," "The Presentation," "Youth
surprised by Death," and others.
The next year, 1640, a baby's voice was again heard in the handsome
Rembrandt home, a little daughter named, for the second time, Cornelia,
but in a few short months the household was again stricken by death.
Rembrandt's activity was now marvellous. In the next two years he
painted "Le Doreur," a portrait of his artist friend Domer, which was
sold in 1865 for over thirty thousand dollars; it is also called "The
Gilder," and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the
portrait of an aged woman, purchased in 1868 for the Narishkine
Collection, for eleven thousand dollars; "Woman with the Fan," of
Buckingham Palace; the mysterious "Witch of Endor," Schönborn Gallery in
1867, for five thousand dollars; "The Carpenter's Household," now in the
Louvre, representing Joseph at work, with the tender mother nursing her
child; "The Salutation," in the Grosvenor Gallery; "Susannah at the
Bath;" "The Offering of Manoah," at the Dresden Museum, showing Manoah
and his wife prostrate before the altar, from which an angel crowned
with flowers is ascending; a magnificent portrait of himself at thirty,
in the National Gallery, in a black cap and fur robe, his arms crossed
on a window-sill; sixteen fine etchings, among them three lion-hunts,
the preacher Anslo and his wife seated at a book-laden table; several
exquisite portraits of ladies, and two of the beloved Saskia: one is
full of life and health, with the sweetest expression, and carefully
finished; the other, in 1642, is richly dressed, but the face is
delicate and dreamy, like that of one who may have received a message
from the unseen world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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