Books: Short Notices: Jul. 21, 1961

REMBRANDT, by Gladys Schmitt (657 pp.; Random House; $5.95), is a fictional retelling of the relatively few known facts about Rembrandt van Rijn's life. Novelist Schmitt (David the King, The Gates of Aulis) scraped every document, household inventory, drawing, etching and painting for underlying drama—and added countless tableaux of her own, which unfortunately look more like the sentimental Dante Gabriel Rossetti than Rembrandt.

The hero is first seen as a hotheaded and rather surly 17-year-old who is already the favorite apprentice of the local master painter in Leyden and is conceited enough to blurt: "Either I am a second Michelangelo or I'm...

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