Here was Rembrandt the seer, the man who had suffered.  Saskia was dead, his popularity gone; but the effect of these things was but to fill his heart with a world sympathy, with pity for all who sorrow.  Again and again he treated the Christ at Emmaus, The Good Samaritan, and The Prodigal Son themes.  “Some strange presentment of his own fate,” says M. Michel, “seems to have haunted the artist, making him keenly susceptible to the story of The Good Samaritan.  He too was destined to be stripped and wounded by Life’s wayside, while many passed him by unheeding.”

The Christ at Emmaus is a small picture, and small the figures appear in that vast, dimly lighted chamber where the three are seated at table.  The spiritual significance of Christ is suggested by most simple means.  Light, and intensity of emotion, are the only aids.  Rembrandt disdains all other effects.  Intense feeling pervades the picture, even in the bare feet of Christ, even in the astonished hand of the disciple resting upon the chair; even in the back of the other disciple who gazes, with clasped hands, transfixed with amazement and love at the face of his Master, who has just broken bread and thus revealed Himself.

[Illustration:  RECONCILIATION BETWEEN DAVID AND ABSALOM

1642.  The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

Of all Rembrandt’s pictures, this was the one that made the profoundest impression upon the child when he had become a man.  Other works, such as The Shipbuilder and his Wife at Buckingham Palace, The Syndics of the Drapers at Amsterdam, that ripe expression of Rembrandt’s ripest powers, convinced him of the master’s genius.  He was deeply impressed by the range of portraits and subject-pictures at the Hermitage Gallery, many of which, by the art of Mr. Mortimer Menpes, have been brought to the fireside of the untravelled; but the Christ at Emmaus revealed to him the heart of Rembrandt, and showed him, once and for all, to what heights a painter may attain when intense feeling is allied with superb craftsmanship.

He found this intensity of emotion again in the Portrait of his Mother at Vienna.  The light falls upon her battered, wrinkled face, the lips are parted as in extreme age, the hands, so magnificently painted, are folded upon her stick.  When we look at Rembrandt’s portrait of An Old Woman at the Hermitage Gallery, with that touch of red so artfully and fittingly peeping out from between the folds of her white scarf, we feel that he can say nothing more about old age, sad, quiescent, but not unhappy; when we look at the portrait of An Old Lady in the National Gallery (No. 1675) we feel that he can tell us no more about old age that still retains something that is petty and eager; but in the portrait of his mother at Vienna, Rembrandt, soaring, gives us quite another view of old age.  It is the ancient face of a mother painted by a son who loved her, who had studied that face a thousand times, every line, and light, and aspect of the features, and who stated all his love and knowledge upon a canvas.