Jews' quarter at Amsterdam, he saw an old, tired, wistful Hebrew sitting in
the door of his shop, engaged him in conversation, persuaded him to sit for
his portrait, and lo! the nameless Amsterdam Jew became immortal.

[Illustration: AN OLD MAN WITH A LONG WHITE BEARD, SEATED, WEARING A WIDE
CAP, HIS HANDS FOLDED

1654. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

His father might also have told him (perhaps he did) that the artist,
wherever he goes, sometimes hardly aware of his preoccupation, is always
selecting subjects to paint, and brooding over the method of treatment;
that one day Rembrandt noted with amusement a man in the street shaking his
fist at the skull-capped head of an older man bobbing angrily from a
window. Rembrandt chuckled, remembered the incident, painted it, and
called it, for a picture must have a title, _Samson threatening his
Father-in-law_; that one day Rembrandt saw a fair-haired, chubby boy
learning his lessons at his mother's knee. The composition appealed to his
artist eye, he painted it, and the result is that beautiful and touching
picture in the Hermitage Gallery at St. Petersburg called _Hannah teaching
Samuel his Lessons_.

To a child, the portrait of a painter by himself has a human interest apart
altogether from its claim to be a work of art. Rembrandt's portrait of
himself at the National Gallery, painted when he was thirty-two, is not one
of his remarkable achievements. It is a little timid in the handling, but
that it is an excellent likeness none can doubt. This bold-eyed, quietly
observant, jolly-looking man was not quite the presentment of Rembrandt
that the child had imagined; but Rembrandt at this period was something of
a sumptuous dandy, proud of his brave looks and his fur-trimmed mantle.