As we compare this picture with the etching of Christ Preaching, we get a better idea of Rembrandt's aim in representing Christ. He did not try to make his face beautiful with regular classical features, after the manner of the old Italian painters. He did not even think it necessary to make his figure grand and imposing. Something still better Rembrandt sought to put into his picture, and this was a gentle expression of love. X PORTRAIT OF SASKIA We should have but a very imperfect idea of Rembrandt's work if we did not learn something about the portraits he painted. It was for these that he was most esteemed in his own day, being the fashionable portrait painter of Amsterdam at a time when every person of means wished to have his likeness painted. A collection of his works of this kind would almost bring back again the citizens of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, so life-like are these wonderful canvases. Among them we should find the various members of his family, his father and mother, his sister, his servant, his son, and most interesting of all, his beloved wife, Saskia. Saskia was born in Friesland, one of nine children of a wealthy patrician family. Her father, Rombertus van Uylenborch, was a distinguished lawyer, who had had several important political missions intrusted to him. At one time he was sent as a messenger to William of Orange, and was sitting at table with that prince just before his assassination. He died in 1624, leaving Saskia an orphan, as she had lost her mother five years before. The little girl of twelve now began to live in turn with her married sisters. At the age of twenty she came to Amsterdam to live for a while with her cousin, the wife of a minister, Jan Cornelis Sylvius, whose face we know from one of Rembrandt's etchings. Saskia had also another cousin living in Amsterdam, Hendrick van Uylenborch, a man of artistic tastes, who had not succeeded as a painter, and had become a dealer in bric-à-brac and engravings. He was an old friend of Rembrandt; and when the young painter came to seek his fortune in the great city in 1631, he had made his home for a while with the art dealer. It was doubtless Hendrick who introduced Rembrandt to Saskia. Probably the beginning of their acquaintance was through Rembrandt's painting Saskia's portrait in 1632. The relation between them soon grew quite friendly, for in the same year the young girl sat two or three times again to the painter. The friendship presently ended in courtship, and when Rembrandt pressed his suit the marriage seemed a very proper one. Saskia was of a fine family and had a sufficient dowry.