Moore, George: Reminiscences of the Impressionist painters (Dublin: Maunsel, 1906)

emotion that this picture awakens is almost a
physical emotion. It gets at you like music,
like a sudden breath of perfume. When one
approaches the eyes fade into brown shadow,
and when one withdraws they begin to tell
their story, and the story they tell is of a
woman’s soul. She seems conscious of her
weakness, of her sex, and the burden of her
own special lot—she is Rembrandt’s wife, a
servant, a satellite, a watcher. The mouth is
no more than a little shadow, but what wistful
tenderness there is in it, and the colour of the
face is white, faintly tinted with bitumen, and
in the cheeks some rose madder comes through
the yellow. She wears a fur jacket, but the
fur was no trouble to Rembrandt, he did not
strive for realism. It is fur, that is sufficient.
Grey pearls hang in her ears, there is a brooch
upon her breast, and a hand at the bottom of
the picture passing out of the frame, and that
hand reminds one as the chin does, of the old
story that God took a little clay and made
man out of it. That chin and that hand and
arm are moulded without display of knowledge
as Nature moulds. The picture seems as if
it had been breathed upon the canvas. Did
not a great poet once say that God breathed
into Adam ? The other pictures seem dry
and insignificant, the “Mona Liza” celebrated
in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems
factitious when compared with this portrait ;
that smile, so often described as mysterious,
that hesitating smile which held my youth in
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