effect, and I thought it worth my while to give it in the picture.
There was a gorgeous effect of light and shade; but there was a delicacy
as well as depth in the chiaroscuro which I was bound to follow into its
dim and scarce perceptible variety of tone and shadow. Then I had to
make the transition from a strong light to as dark a shade, preserving
the masses, but gradually softening off the intermediate parts. It was
so in nature; the difficulty was to make it so in the copy. I tried,
and failed again and again; I strove harder, and succeeded as I thought.
The wrinkles in Rembrandt were not hard lines, but broken and
irregular. I saw the same appearance in nature, and strained every
nerve to give it. If I could hit off this edgy appearance, and insert
the reflected light in the furrows of old age in half a morning, I did
not think I had lost a day. Beneath the shrivelled yellow parchment
look of the skin, there was here and there a streak of the blood-colour
tinging the face; this I made a point of conveying, and did not cease to
compare what I saw with what I did (with jealous, lynx-eyed
watchfulness) till I succeeded to the best of my ability and judgment.
How many revisions were there! How many attempts to catch an expression
which I had seen the day before! How often did we try to get the old
position, and wait for the return of the same light! There was a
puckering up of the lips, a cautious introversion of the eye under the
shadow of the bonnet, indicative of the feebleness and suspicion of old
age, which at last we managed, after many trials and some quarrels, to a
tolerable nicety. The picture was never finished, and I might have gone
on with it to the present hour.[2] I used to sit it on the ground when
my day's work was done, and saw revealed to me with swimming eyes the
birth of new hopes and of a new world of objects. The painter thus
learns to look at Nature with different eyes. He before saw her 'as in
a glass darkly, but now face to face.' He understands the texture and
meaning of the visible universe, and 'sees into the life of things,' not