Rembrandt’s art reveals a unique reverence and appetite for life which originated in an entirely different attitude and vision from the extrovert thirst for sensual excitement animating the tavern scenes by Jan Steen and other Dutch painters. Rather he evinced an insatiable curiosity about reality, about matter informed by spirit, and if he depicted genre scenes they indicated a pervasive intangible quality beyond the facts of their immediate physical appearance. The acuteness of his observation enabled him to translate the most complicated forms and structures—struggling children, wild beasts, carriages—into drawings where their particular essentials are seized with an inimitable assurance and spontaneity: a single calligraphic curve defines the receding plane of an upturned nose, a bold prolonged oval stroke the thrust and fulness of an abdomen. Like Constable he was an intuitive rather than a scientific draughtsman: that his results are objectively convincing is a triumph of optical and manual coordination.

However, it is not mere technical virtuosity which provides the key to his perennial fascination. His oeuvre represents a continual and gradual elimination of superfluities in an unending quest for visual equivalents of the fundamental mystery which lies at the heart of all human experience. Contrary to the usual pattern of responsiveness, his sense of wonder increased with age, and compassionate wonder became the ultimate theme of his art, culminating in the painting of the ‘Prodigal Son’ with its universal and personal hope of Divine mercy.