From youth to age, with art delightful and supreme, Rembrandt expressed himself in Etching. One of his first prints--the subject known to many by Wilson’s title of it, ‘Head of a Woman lightly etched’--is the earliest of his known portraits of his mother; and that shows already mastery of character and mastery of line, as the lady, with the pardonable vanity of the handsome, the pardonable self-appreciation of one who was scarcely less a woman of the world because she was _bourgeoise_ by station, smiles her sagacious, kindly, genial smile, and lives with Whistler’s ‘Portrait of his Mother,’ with Holbein’s ‘Erasmus,’ with Latour’s pastels that glow sober yet vivid on the walls of the Museum of Saint-Quentin. It is a sketch, and consummate. His very last print--so it is generally accepted--is that ‘Woman with the Arrow’ which, unless the place be given to the print often called ‘_Négresse couchée_,’ is the most tolerable of his nudities. It is not faultless in draughtsmanship; or, if it is faultless in draughtsmanship, then how deficient was the model in perfection of form! But, in a fine impression--and in Etching, if the impression be not fine, the work does not exist--how alive is the figure! The flesh, how supple! The pose--the grace of the faulty. The light, how glowing, and the shade, how velvety! You forgive--it may be rather that you scarcely notice--the inexplicable mixture of realism with the classic. The side of a bed, the young thing sitting on it: Degas might have conceived the figure thus. But it is not pure realism, for she holds an arrow--suggests some light allegory, as much, save for her imperfections, as some nudity of Titian’s or Tintoret’s--just that touch of the Classic, that one remove from the actual, Rembrandt’s tribute to an art inspired by higher thought, by fancy more elegant, than any that it was the privilege, generally, of the art of Amsterdam to show.