I pace the length of a white wall, and a tiny portrait catches my eye:
A first impression
A youthful face emerges from the swirls
and hatch marks
It stares out from aged paper and under glass
Renaissance hat perched on the head
(he wants you to think he is a man of letters)
eyes wide, lips forming a silent ooohhh!
like inspiration had just pierced him through.

Rembrandt used a mirror to draw his face
over and over
A series of lines, swirls and shadings
To capture an expression
He must have asked himself each time,
What curves exemplify character
and not caricature?
He sketched the same figure of a portly man with a cane
hundreds of times
before he ever lifted a needle to etch it
into wax or to scratch it onto a naked copper plate
And then he made an impression

He produced hundreds of prints from his press—for his own amusement—
fine-lines flowing as hair on a maid
dense hatches for shadows along a beggar's nose,
lines upon lines upon lines representing the darkness
out of which
the figures of Joseph and Mary emerge riding a donkey—
But friends and even members of the nobility loved his pressings
How much would he charge?
He learned that first pressings fetched more guilder
so once made he might as well remake the plate
and he went deeper
He layered on more wax
refilling the ridges
and re-etching a slightly different scene—
a smaller effort than building a new plate—
He created a new state
from which he made a new "first" impression
which sold well
He could do it in his sleep
and so his hobby helped finance his painting

As Rembrandt impressed paper, so he tried to impress people:
He spent all of his rich wife's money on
expensive rugs and drapes and wine and the most exquisite food stuffs
to keep that Renaissance feel
He held parties and rabble-roused—he was much admired!
But then his investments turned sour
And when Louis XIV offered to buy them
for pennies on the guilder,
He sold them all—
His exquisite light-bathed paintings
And even his most precious prints,
The ones he had kept back for himself
Louis stamped them with his seal—
the initials B. R. under a heavy crown—
And hung the works in a vast empty hall—
The "Biblioteca Royale"—
While Rembrandt died a pauper
His wife, then mistress and son already gone.

Yet first impressions prevail:
the image of "Renaissance" Rembrandt
are printed on post cards
and promotional posters for the Denver Museum of Art,
They are reproduced in high quality gloss for coffee table books—
And they somehow still capture the
Startlement—
the instant of knowing,
the moment of change—
when he knew what he could do
and would do
and would become
It's etched on his face!
I see it clear as day on my own post card—
purchased at the museum gift shop—
and it has not changed for almost four hundred years

That instant of knowing...something...
At certain working moments I feel it, too
like looking in a mirror
and seeing that wide-eyed astonishment
Hearing a half-whispered oohh!
Feeling that still sharp scratch of inspiration passing through
to me
and to the next person
and to the next
as we reshape our words
re-angle our brush strokes
or play with the reach of our pencil lines
Before it disappears
(then seeking it, always seeking it!)
And in the background
Rembrandt still works his press
making his "first" impressions
through the painter on the mall
the graphic artist in her garret
the poet sitting staring out her window.

—Ellen A. Wilkin