Constantijn Huygens on Rembrandt

“I have deliberately reserved for last a noble pair of youths from Leiden [Huygens visited Rembrandt and Jan Lievens in 1628]. Were I to say that they alone can vie with the greatest among the superior mortals mentioned earlier, I would still be underestimating the merits of these two; were I to say that they will soon surpass them, I would merely be expressing what their astonishing beginnings have led connoisseurs to expect.”

“I maintain that it did not occur to Protogenes, Appeles or Parrhasius, nor could it occur to them were they return to earth that (I am amazed simply to report this) a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller, could bring together so much in one human figure and express what is universal. All honor to thee, my Rembrandt! To have carried Illium, indeed all Asia, to Italy is a lesser achievement than to have brought the laurels of Greece and Italy to Holland, the achievement of a Dutchman who has seldom ventured outside the walls of his native city (...)”

“Due to their parents' straitened circumstances, the youths [Rembrandt and Jan Lievens, living in Leiden, then] were compelled to take teachers whose fees were modest. Were these teachers to be confronted with their pupils today, they would feel just as abashed as those teachers who gave Virgil his first lessons in poetry, Cicero in rhetoric and Archimedes in mathematics. Let it however be said, with due respect for everyone's capacities and without detracting from anyone (for what is it to me?): these two owe nothing to their teachers but everything to their aptitude. Had they never received any tuition but been left to their own devices and suddenly been seized by the urge to paint, I am convinced that they would have risen to the same heights as they indeed have. It would be wrong to think that others have led them to this point.”

“He was seized with the desire to paint my portrait. I assured him that I should be only too pleased to grant him the opportunity if he would come to The Hague and put up at my house for a while. So ardent was his desire that he arrived within a few days, explaining that since seeing me his nights had been restless and his days so troubled that he had been unable to work. My countenance had lodged so firmly in his mind that his eagerness brooked no further delay.”

“Rembrandt surpasses Lievens in the faculty of penetrating to the heart of his subject matter and bringing out its essence, and his works come across more vividly. Lievens, in turn, surpasses him in the proud self-assurance that radiates from his compositions and their powerful forms. Because Lievens's spirit - and this is due in part to his youth - is charged with the great and the glorious, he is inclined to depict the objects and models before him not life-sized but larger than life. Rembrandt on the other hand, obsessed by the effort to translate into paint what he sees in the mind's eye, prefers smaller formats, in which he nonetheless achieves effects that you will not find in the largest works of others.”

“I stand firm: neither Protogenes, Apelles nor Parrhasius ever came up with the idea, nor, if they were to return to earth could they produce anything like this, created by a young, as yet beardless Hollander [Rembrandt, c. 1631], a miller, what he has combined in one figure and created in its entirety. It fills me with astonishment even as I say it. Congratulations Rembrandt!. ..the achievement of a Dutchman who has never ventured outside the walls of his native city.”