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Looking at Rembrandt: A portrait of the Dutch Master at 400 (Algis Valiunas - The Standard)
December 22, 2006 11:52 AM
Copyright The Standard
12/25/2006, Volume 012, Issue 15
Nothing else pumps up th municipal pride of once- glorious cities, now moribund, like the pertinent anniversaries of their artistic native sons long dead.
Amsterdam may have capitulated to the whoremongers, real and metaphorical, years ago, but the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth evokes the Dutch Golden Age, when piety and prosperity honored each other, and when artistic excellence served them both. This year, at several removes from gold, Amsterdam department store façades sported outsized Rembrandt reproductions; Rembrandt Square featured a Night Watch consisting of 22 life-size bronze figures, in the midst of which the admirer can stand and be photographed; and Rembrandt the Musical regaled the theatergoer with the dirt on “‘the master of light’ whose life had very shady sides to it,” in the words of the publicity agent’s all-too-resistible come-on.
It is hard to blame the Dutch for trading on a homegrown brand name that everyone else has been cashing in on for ages. Alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, Rembrandt is one of the three most famous artists ever, with whom the public is on a first-name basis; and the name Rembrandt has lent the cachet of greatness and the grace of familiarity to sell everything from kitchen countertops to whitening toothpaste to fancy hotels in Bangkok and Knightsbridge. No work of Rembrandt’s has attained the iconic status of the David or the Mona Lisa; yet Rembrandt seems to rank with the greatest of the great. The 400th provides a fine occasion to consider why that should be so.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s lineage was almost as honorably homespun as a 19th-century American president’s: His father was a miller, his mother a baker’s daughter. The ninth of ten children, with his shining intelligence, Rembrandt embodied his parents’ hope for better things, and they sent him first to the Latin School in Leiden, then to Leiden University, the Dutch Oxford. Like many another born artist, Rembrandt soon realized the university route was not for him, and he signed on as apprentice to the painter Jacob van Swanenburgh, who went in for ever-popular (and lucrative) history and architectural painting, though his most famous work shows a fiendish set of jaws macerating sinners in the depths of hell.
Rembrandt never did paint any infernal landscapes, but his three-year stint with Swanenburgh served him well; his progress so heartened his father that he sent Rembrandt to Amsterdam for six months to learn what he could from the eminent Pieter Lastman. Upon his return to Leiden in 1625, Rembrandt established himself in a master’s studio of his own, and took to cranking out history paintings—the Bible being his principal historical source, as in The Stoning of Saint Stephen, The Apostle Paul, Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver—which were always in hot demand and which secured his early reputation. The impression he made on the connoisseur Constantijn Huygens, secretary to Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, gained him some choice princely commissions; and the prospect of incalculable triumph lured him to Amsterdam in 1632.
The capital city did not disappoint him, and there he certainly lived up to his own vision of himself. He continued with history painting, added portraiture—notably self-portraiture—and the occasional landscape to his repertoire, and taught many able students. Riches and high esteem were his reward, and Rembrandt evidently thought well enough of himself to take after Leonardo and Michelangelo in signing his works with his first name alone. He took after Peter Paul Rubens more directly, investing clinically precise realism with dashing brilliance.
Marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of an art dealer who helped set him up in business, not only brought him personal happiness but provided him with a nonpareil artist’s model. In perhaps their most famous collaboration, Rembrandt sits as well as paints: Self-Portrait with Saskia on His Lap (The Prodigal Son in the Tavern) presents him as a laughing, hard-drinking rascal, holding aloft a lass flute of ale long as a telescope. His wife is cast as that evening’s pick-up, disdainfully peering over her shoulder at the viewer, who probably wishes he could order some of what the Prodigal is having. This spirited roistering in the Frans Hals manner efies homebound Dutch respectability, and in this strangely joyous image that seems to celebrate renegade sexuality within marriage, love declares that it lives strictly on its own terms, glowingly.
However, the glow would tragically fade, or rather become the hectic flush of tuberculosis on Saskia’s cheeks: In 1642 she died at the age of 30, and was buried in the plain cloth shroud prescribed by Calvinist law. In 1639 Rembrandt had produced a prescient etching that showed a newly married couple paying their obeisance to Death: To the skeleton arising from the grave, the bride holds out a flower, an offering to tide Death over until He can claim her beauteous self. No sacrifice—not even the three infants who preceded Saskia to the grave—could propitiate the Reaper. He took what He wanted when He wanted it.
Work and love—or at any rate, work and sex—remained Rembrandt’s way of holding off the darkness. Saskia was not long gone when her surviving son’s nurse, Geertje Dircx, took her place in Rembrandt’s bed. During the years of their affair, Rembrandt turned out sexual etchings so frank and coarse as hardly to be considered erotic: a faceless monk in a cornfield plowing some faceless woman whose clenched feet and straining legs are all one sees of her; a cavalier whose plumed headgear dangles from the bedpost servicing a lady who demonstrates no particular thrill at the privilege.
In 1649 the arrival in Rembrandt’s household of a younger and much prettier servant, Hendrickje Stoffels, announced a new romantic dispensation, and Geertje was not pleased to be sent packing. No doubt this is the stuff that has Rembrandt the Musical salaciously wailing the blues: Geertje’s charging Rembrandt with breach of promise and his publicly denying her claims that she was his mistress; the pregnant Hendrickje’s being hounded before an ecclesiastical court and officially proclaimed Rembrandt’s whore, while Rembrandt, who had left the Reformed Church, skates by without reprimand; Rembrandt’s getting his own back against Geertje and then some, by contriving to have her declared mentally incompetent and confined to a virtual dungeon for five years.
The sexual scandal was topped off by financial ruin as dissatisfied customers for grand commissions, and the artist’s own insatiable taste for the finer things in life, plunged Rembrandt into bankruptcy. When death came at last, in 1669, it may not have seemed entirely unwelcome.
Few lives have known the tempestuous ethical and emotional amplitude of Rembrandt’s, and in his work one sees the sun-graced uplands and the pits of degradation, sometimes at once. His Bathsheba (1654), for which Hendrickje was likely the model, shows the nude Hebrew beauty having her feet washed by a gray-visaged servingwoman; in Bathsheba’s hand is the letter from King David commanding her to come to him, for he has fallen in love at the sight of her, though she is the wife of Uriah.
Rich adornments—an earring, a necklace, a bracelet—bespeak her familiarity with luxury, and Bathsheba’s sensuality is palpable, her lush body radiant where the light falls on her breasts and belly. But her lower body is in shadow, as the darkness of David’s longing and her own—David shall arrange Uriah’s death, and David and Bathsheba’s infant son shall die—falls across her purity like advancing night. And it is with a strange melting ache that Bathsheba looks at her servant, who in turn is utterly absorbed in the job at hand. Importunate longing is in the mistress’s look, and one cannot but think that she is wishing she were not Bathsheba anymore but could be this lowly servant instead.
It is, of course, but a pang of misgiving Bathsheba feels, not a moral compulsion strong enough to overcome the king’s lust, or her own. Rembrandt captures the moment of trial for a woman whose taste for finery, even for grandeur, and whose regard for her own beauty, already proclaim her lost. The artist understands what it means to want the thing you want most,even though it might cost you your decency and self-respect and the life of someone you once claimed to love…
…Although the current academic industry is out to make the chief interest of Rembrandt’s painting “the way he applies his paint” (in the words of one fashionable art historian), the ordinary cultivated viewer can always hope to find in him the traditional artistic virtue inherent in the word vision: a species of wisdom, connected in representational art with insight into human, inhuman, and divine nature, as acquired by the most attentive observation, a working knowledge of great literary texts, and some sharp-elbowed acquaintance with philosophizing.
Rembrandt thinks in paint, and it is the quality of the thinking that makes for the greatness of the painting. Eye and hand do their genial part, but it is principally the mind of Rembrandt that we still remember today, and that will be remembered 400 years from now.
is a writer in Florida.
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