Excerpt from Van Dyck: His Original Etchings and His Iconography<br><br>H caring, we feel that Rembrandt renders the complexi ties of human nature with the greatest subtlety of expression, and to attain his end he used a method of close shading almost too subtle for the medium of etch ing. He may have seen even more in his sitters than their own friends realized, and perhaps failed to con centrate on the more striking external characteristics which would constitute the whole man to the world of his acquaintance. Moreover he was capable of thinking less of immediate faithfulness to the lineaments of his model than of some more strictly artistic aim, just as in his later pictures portraiture pure and simple becomes subservient to the development of his ideas of chiar oscuro. It was thus that his famous Night Watch heralded the decline of his popularity with the fashionable world of sitters who wished first of all to be admired, or at least recognized.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.