before her marriage to Rembrandt, known as _Flora with a Flower-trimmed
Crook_, standing at the opening of a grotto, with a wreath of flowers upon
her head, and the light falling upon her face and gay attire; _The Holy
Family_, the father working at his daily task in the background, and the
Virgin, who has laid down her book, drawing aside the curtain from the cot
to gaze upon the Child. He explained that Rembrandt, in placing this scene
in a humble Dutch cottage, knew that he could express the Biblical story
better that way than if he had painted an imaginary scene after the manner
of the Italians.

"This great Dutch master" (he quoted from Mr. Colvin) "succeeded in making
as wonderful pictures out of spiritual abjectness and physical gloom as the
Italians out of spiritual exaltation and shadowless day."

[Illustration: FLORA WITH A FLOWER-TRIMMED CROOK

1634. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

At this point of his discourse he began to feel more confidence, and he
proceeded to focus his remarks upon four periods in Rembrandt's
life--epochs that lend themselves to separate treatment, each epoch marked
by the production of a masterpiece, and one remarkable portrait that has a
particular and pathetic interest. Those four pictures are _The Anatomy
Lesson_, painted in 1632, when he was twenty-six; the _Sortie of a Company
of Amsterdam Musketeers_, known as _The Night Watch_, painted in 1642, when
he was thirty-six; _The Syndics of the Cloth Hall_, painted in 1662, when
he was fifty-six; and his own portrait, painted in 1667, two years before
his death. "His _Anatomy Lesson_," says M. Michel, "was the glorification
of Science itself; in his _Sortie of a Company of Amsterdam Musketeers_ he
embodied that civic heroism which had lately compassed Dutch independence;