Perhaps the greatest difference between Rembrandt and any other painter is that he never seems to have tried to please the public, but only painted to please himself. It is for this reason, no doubt, that he was never popular with the public, and is never likely to be; but just as Beethoven is only understandable by the really musical soul, so Rembrandt's appeal is to those who have the feeling for something in painting beyond the mere representation of familiar or heroic scenes and persons on canvas. For the public it is enough that one of his landscapes should be sold for L100,000, and they all flock to see it; but put a fine Rembrandt portrait in a shop-window without a name to it, and there would be little fear of the pavement being blocked. This failure of Rembrandt to please the public of his own day brings out the truth that the practice of painting had up to then subsisted only so long as it supplied a popular demand; and when we come to consider what that demand was, we find that it is for nothing else but a pleasing representation of natural objects, which may or may not embody some sentimental or historical association, but must first and foremost be a fair representation of more or less familiar things. The oldest story about pictures is that of Zeuxis and the bunch of grapes, which relates that he painted the fruit so like nature that the birds came and pecked at the painting--some versions, I believe, adding that the fruit itself was there but they preferred the painting. Similar stories with innumerable variations are told of later artists. Rembrandt himself is said to have been deceived by his pupils who, knowing he was careful about collecting money in small quantities, however extravagant he might be in spending it, painted coins on the floor of the studio, and enjoyed the joke of seeing him stoop to pick them up. We have heard, too, of flies painted with surprising skill in conspicuous places to deceive the unwary. But apart from these little pleasantries, one has only to remember how the earlier writers on painting have expressed themselves to see how much importance, consciously or unconsciously, was attached to life-like resemblance to the object painted. Vasari is constantly using phrases in which he extols the painter for having made a figure look like the life, as though that were the real thing to be aimed at. We remember Ben Jonson's lines under Shakespeare's portrait---- "Wherein the graver had a strife With nature to outdo the life." And though Ben Jonson was not a critic, and if he had been there was little enough art in his time in England for him to criticize, still he expresses the general feeling of the public for any work of art.