렘브란트 네덜란드화가. The Book of Rembrandt, by Josef Israels

INTRODUCTION
While the world pays respectful tribute to Rembrandt the
artist, it has been compelled to wait until comparatively
recent years for some small measure of reliable information
concerning Rembrandt the man. The sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries seem to have been very little
concerned with personalities. A man was judged by his work
which appealed, if it were good enough, to an ever？increasing circle. There were no newspapers to record his
doings and, if he chanced to be an artist, it was nobody's
business to set down the details of his life. Sometimes a
diarist chanced to pass by and to jot down a little gossip,
quite unconscious of the fact that it would serve to stimulate
generations yet unborn, but, for the most part, artists who
did great work in a retiring fashion and were not honoured
by courts and princes as Rubens was, passed from the
scene of their labours with all the details of their sojourn
unrecorded.
Rembrandt was fated to suffer more than mere neglect, for
he seems to have been a light- hearted, headstrong,
extravagant man, with no capacity for business. He had not
even the supreme quality, associated in doggerel with
Dutchmen, of giving too little and asking too much.
Consequently, when he died poor and enfeebled, in years
when his collection of works of fine art had been sold at
public auction for a fraction of its value, when his pictures
had been seized for debt, and wife, mistress, children, and
many friends had passed, little was said about him.