Rembrandt was sufficient unto himself. There are moods when one is sure
that he stands at the head of the painting hierarchy. In spite of his
greatness, we feel that he is very near to our comprehension. What a
picture of the old painter towards the end of his life that saying of
Baldinucci presents. We are told that near the close of his career,
absorbed in his art, indifferent to the world, "when he was painting at his
easel he had come to wipe his brushes on the hinder portions of his dress."

Rembrandt looms out like some amorphous boulder, stationary,
lichen-stained, gathering time unto itself. He travelled so little that it
can be said he was untravelled. The works of other painters affected him
not at all. We are without proof that he was even interested in the work of
his contemporaries or predecessors. Life was his passion. One model was as
good as another. He looked at life, and life fired his imaginations. He
painted himself fifty times; he painted his friends, his relations, and the
people he met while prowling about the streets. His pencil was never idle.
Imagination, which confuses the judgment of so many, aided him, for his
imagination was not nourished by vanity, or the desire to produce an
effect, but flowed from the greatness of his brooding heart. He stood alone
during his life, an absorbed man, uninfluenced by any school; he stands
alone to-day. The world about him, and his thoughts and reflections, were
his only influences. He read few books, and the chief among them was the
Bible. Mr. Berenson has written an exhaustive and learned work on Lorenzo
Lotto, analysing his pictures year by year, and exhuming the various
painters who influenced Lotto at the different periods of his life. Mr.
Berenson's book extends to nearly three hundred pages. The influences of
the painting fraternity upon Rembrandt would not provide material for the
first paragraph of the first page of such a book.