3-021-293 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Portrait of an Old Woman, by Rembrandt, in the National Gallery [in London], 1868. Engraving of a painting, (Portrait of Aechje Claesdr.). '...it is the earliest picture by six years we have from the master's hand: dated, as it is, 1634, it must have been painted when Rembrandt was only about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Bearing this fact in mind, our astonishment at the painter's genius must be considerably heightened. Extraordinary as it will appear, this portrait presents at least as much evidence of matured, practised power as any of the later works. Magical chiaroscuro, matchless truth to nature, certainty of hand, which seems something almost more than human, and all that pre-eminently distinguishes the Dutch master, are here in perfection...Here is this bust of a very plain, bilious old lady of eighty-three, as the inscription tells us ("AE. S YE. 83"), in her hideous cap and ruffle, wife or widow of some old Burgomaster, just as she looked, rather puzzled and morose, at the painter more than two centuries ago. Yet she is certainly destined to an immortality of admiration after all our fashionable Book of Beauty portraits have vanished in limbo'. From "Illustrated London News", 1868.