Plate 4. The New Town-Hall in Amsterdam, about 1660. The square building on the right is the public Weighing-House, where Rembrandt sketched the ruins of the old town-hall (see preceding illustration). After an etching by J. van der Ulft, 1656. [Plate 5. The Bridge Called “Grimnessesluis” in Amsterdam.] Plate 5. The Bridge Called “Grimnessesluis” in Amsterdam. After the drawing by Rembrandt in the Louvre, Paris. Reproduced, by permission, from a copyright photograph by Messrs. Braun and Co., Dornach. What we know of Rembrandt in connection with Amsterdam’s town-hall supports the above theory: he seems to have liked the old building, a Late-Gothic structure, as he sketched it twice, once after its fire in 1652. On the other hand, when in 1662 he executes a large decoration for the new town-hall, his work does not agree with the taste of his contemporaries and is returned to him (_The Plot of Claudius Civilis_, now much cut down, in the Museum at Stockholm). Considering Rembrandt’s style of expressing himself in his work, we find many instances to convince us of his preference for the architectural forms of an earlier period and of his lack of sympathy for those which were introduced during the later part of his life. Is it to be wondered at that he, the warm-feeling artist, offspring of a school which affected richness and baroque, was no friend of a new tendency, the stateliness and broadness of which were bound to degenerate into coldness and stiffness? Looking through his drawings and etchings (his pictures leave us no town-views taken from nature), we occasionally meet views of town-gates, old houses alone or crowded together, mills, all obviously sketched on account of a charm akin to Rembrandt’s nature but foreign to the greatest part of the lay population of Amsterdam. Some illustrations will show the master’s preferences: a view on a little old bridge between compact houses, a spot called _Grimnessesluis_, still forming nowadays, notwithstanding many later alterations, one of the most typical views of old Amsterdam (_plate 5_). We must here resist the temptation of reproducing some of Rembrandt’s drawings of picturesque towngates (like those in the Louvre, Rÿksmuseum at Amsterdam, the collections of M. Bonnat, the Duke of Devonshire, and Teyler at Haarlem),(2) because these appear to have been done on an excursion through the Netherlands, and cannot be identified with former gates of Amsterdam; there is, however, another drawing, more closely connected with landscape, giving a view of St. Anthony’s Gate, quite near Rembrandt’s house, at the end of the street where he lived, taken from the north outside the bulwark (_plate 6_). On the opposite side of the town Rembrandt did that delightful sketch with the many mills in the foreground (_plate 7_). In the city he again sketched a former fortification-tower, called Montelbaenstoren (_plate 9_), showing to its right a perspective of