On the other hand, while Rembrandt exalted the idea above the substance, he was not indifferent to form. No great artist whose domain is the world of sight can be. Indeed, the wider the acquaintance with the master goes, whether in the galleries throughout Europe, or through the examples which occasionally emerge from private collections, as in the recent extraordinary display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more one is impressed not only with Rembrandt’s feeling for form, but also with his amazing power of rendering it. Sometimes, as in the marvelously detailed _Portrait of Elizabeth Bas_ (Amsterdam), the impression he derived of the original was one which he could render only by enforcing the bulk and character and precision of form. This lady, though not of gentle birth, was, as the widow of Admiral Swartenhout, a figure in society. This much we know from the written record; the rest is recorded in the portrait. As Rembrandt saw her, she was a woman of determined personality; a narrow and rigid believer in her own importance, and a stickler for its recognition; an ingrained precisionist, as upright as her backbone and as set in formalism as her corseted figure. Yet the flesh of her face and hands has the dimpled softness and delicate contours of well-preserved old age. She is fully conscious of prerogatives, but her hardness has been made gracious by the kindly touch of time. All this, no doubt, was written in detail on her ample person, and Rembrandt, feeling the intimate value of its completeness, has detailed it in the portrait. Or take another example of the record of an impression, _The Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels_ in the Berlin Gallery. The devotion of this woman had stayed the artist in his trials, and her exuberant youth had put fresh force into his courage. He had learned to depend upon her watchful solicitude, to lean upon her abundant vitality, and to warm his imagination in the glow of her physical ardor. In the portrait he wraps her strong figure in the rich grandeur of a mantle that burns with wonderful brown lights above an under-robe of golden cream, while a flash of crimson glows in her brown hair, and a golden warmth is exhaled from the full, firm features and hovers above the ripe harvest of her bosom. The portrait is an artist’s apotheosis of the glory and the benediction of physical vitality; and, let us not forget, in the strength of this woman’s companionship Rembrandt achieved his masterpiece of austere and virile intellectuality--_The Syndics of the Cloth Workers’ Guild_.