Two other landscapes I should wish to name as at least the equals of this one, and both of them, it may be, are easier to receive, easier for the little-trained eye to enjoy promptly. One is the ‘Large Landscape with a Cottage and Dutch Hay-barn’; the other is the ‘Landscape with a Ruined Tower.’ The first is a record of sunshine; the second, of the more dramatic weather that threatens storm. The first is the more intricate. Little in keeping with the fashions of our moment, in the art of landscape, is it to present within the limits of a single composition a view so varied and so elaborately wrought. But Rembrandt, even more than Turner, could achieve without any loss of unity of impression the presentation or suggestion of every fact of the scene; and the piece remains ‘modern,’ though a Classic. The ‘Landscape with a Ruined Tower’--broad, decisive, concentrated--is, in a sense, an anticipation of the method of Constable: the interest lying less in formal elegance of line or placid light than in the strong realisation of the forces of Nature--a vivid broad illumination and an ominous shadow, and the expression of these exalting somehow the features of an everyday land, as emotion transfigures a face. The ‘tower,’ the close observer may inform me--thinking of the title--is not ‘ruined’; for here is its domed roof. Yes, but the domed roof is in the First State only, and that is so rare that it is doubtful if it had ever been examined by the cataloguer who bestowed upon the etching the name by which it is still known. Although the etched Landscape of Rembrandt, in its singular union of simplicity and learning, in the close, uncustomary alliance of Style with personal impression, stands well-nigh alone, and suffices as the basis of a reputation as great as Titian’s, Claude’s, or Poussin’s--and one which now, with only slight and temporary declension, has endured for two hundred years--we have yet to give consideration to his triumph in that branch of Art with which, in the mind of the average educated person, he is more generally identified--I mean Portraiture: which means to some the taking of superficial likeness, and to some the revelation of character.