Universitätsbibliothek HeidelbergUniversitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
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Jameson, Anna
Companion to the most celebrated private galleries of art in London: containing accurate catalogues, arranged alphabetically, for immediate reference, each preceded by an historical & critical introduction, with a prefactory essay on art, artists, collectors & connoisseurs — London: Saunders and Otley, 1844

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https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61252#0052

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8

THE QUEEN’S GALLERY.

we therefore be insensible to the delicious rural feeling of
Hobbema, or the breezy freshness of Vander Velde? This
were pitiable. It is good, as I have said before, to culti-
vate as far as possible a catholic taste in the fine arts;
though the individual temperament must necessarily deter-
mine our preferences, and the amount of pleasure enjoyed
through our sympathies.
In the foregoing remarks on the Dutch painters, I have
said nothing of Rembrandt, because he stands alone as the
creator of a style apart. Some of his finest works adorn
the Queen's Gallery, and give us an excellent opportunity
of studying “ this mysterious and extraordinary being,”
for such he truly was, and undoubtedly a genius of the first
class, in whatever is not immediately related to form or
taste; “for, in spite of the most portentous deformity and
vulgarity, and without considering the spell of his chiaro-
scuro, such were his powers of nature, such the grandeur,
pathos, and simplicity of his composition, from the most
elevated and extensive arrangement to the meanest and
homeliest, that the most untutored and most cultivated eye,
plain common sense and the most refined sensibility, dwell
on them equally enthralled.”*
“ Rembrandt’s enormous faculty of imagination is not
more remarkable than the singular and original direction
of his extraordinary powers. He is the very king of
shadows,
---Earth-born,
And sky-engendered—son of mysteries 1
a poet-painter, if ever there was one! He reminds me
of the prince-sorcerer, nurtured ‘ in the cave of Domdaniel,
under the roots of the sea.’ Such an enchanted ‘den of
darkness’ was his mill and its skylight to him; and there,
magician-like, he brooded over half-seen forms, and his

See Fuseli’s notes to Pilkington’s Lives of the Painters.
 
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