Forty years after his death, Gerard de Lairesse, a popular painter, now forgotten, wrote of Rembrandt--"In his efforts to attain a yellow manner, Rembrandt merely achieved an effect of rottenness....

The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only ones he was capable of noting." Poor Gerard de Lairesse! To-day not a turn or a twist of his life, not a facet of his temperament, not an individual of his family, friends, or acquaintances, not the slightest scrap of paper bearing the mark of his hand, but has been peered into, scrutinised, tracked to its source, and written about voluminously.
The bibliography of Rembrandt would fill a library.

Several lengthy and learned catalogues of his works have been published in volumes so large that a child could not lift one of them.

His 450 pictures, his multitudinous drawings, his 270 etchings, their authenticity, their history, their dates, the identification of his models, have been the subjects of innumerable books and essays.

Why, it would have taken our golfer three months just to read what has been written about one of Rembrandt's pictures--that known as _The Night Watch_.