He is the symbol of the Dutch golden age, considered the greatest Dutch artist of all time. Rembrandt van Rijn is to the Netherlands what Shakespeare is to England: the embodiment of his country's spirit.
For the last 17 years of his life Rembrandt was dogged by financial ruin and personal tragedy. He was forced to auction his precious art and natural-history collection, then lost his house too. The city of Amsterdam rejected his monumental painting The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis because it was considered too earthy. The painter slashed the canvas in frustration.
Rembrandt had to sell the grave of his first wife, Saskia. Geertje Dircks, the nurse he hired to raise his son Titus, and who became Rembrandt’s mistress, pawned Saskia’s jewellery and sued Rembrandt for allegedly breaking a promise to marry her. The painter then outlived his second, common-law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels, as well as Titus.
0 of 4
Despite these sorrows – miraculously, one might say – Rembrandt produced his finest work during the years from 1652 until his death, at the age of 63, in 1669. Surprisingly, no museum has previously dedicated an exhibition to the period of Rembrandt’s greatest technical innovation and most profound portrayals of human emotion.
That oversight has been corrected by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in the Late Rembrandt exhibition, which runs until May 17th. The same exhibition was shown at the National Gallery in London from October 2014 until January 2015, but the Rijksmuseum has added four major paintings not seen in London: The Family Portrait, Self-Portrait as Zeuxis, Portrait of Jan Six and Jacob With the Angel.
The broad, loose brush strokes of Rembrandt’s later years, his liberal use of impasto – he is believed to have been the first artist to sculpt paint on canvas – his determination to paint “from life” and the intense realism that prevented him idealising his subjects projected the Dutch master centuries ahead of his time. Rembrandt shunned the neoclassical taste for smooth, invisible brush strokes. He believed so strongly in his art, and had so little regard for convention, that he was labelled the “first heretic of painting” 12 years after his death.
Rembrandt rejected the idea that there were “worthy” and “unworthy” subjects. He painted the dark side of the golden age with journalistic accuracy. In 1664 he walked to Amsterdam’s gallows field to sketch the corpse of Elsje Christiaens, an 18-year-old Danish woman who had killed her landlady in a dispute over rent. Elsje was first strangled, then hung from a gibbet as a lesson to potential criminals. The hatchet with which she hit her landlady hangs beside her.
Rembrandt also depicted beggars and cripples. His 1656 painting The Anatomy Lesson shows the gruesome corpse of the executed criminal "Black John", with gaping abdominal cavity and dissected brain. The body is foreshortened, Italian Renaissance-style, so that the filthy soles of the cadaver's feet are the first things to confront the viewer.
Rembrandt uses the minimum amount of visual information required to tell a story. In his later years he practised abbreviation and omission so successfully that one sometimes imagines elements of the painting that aren't there. In the beautifully blurred Self-Portrait With Two Circles, for example, one thinks one sees Rembrandt's hand holding the palette and brushes. The circles on the wall behind Rembrandt are a mystery but may allude to a Renaissance theory that the ability to draw a perfect circle freehand was the mark of a great artist.
In the Portrait of Jan Six Rembrandt merely suggests the gold braid on his subject's riding coat with quick, horizontal brush strokes. The portrait shows Rembrandt's friend and patron in a nonchalant mood, pulling on his gloves as he's about to go out. Six owned at least five copies of the Renaissance author Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, in which Castiglione explained the concept of sprezzatura – the art of performing difficult tasks with apparent ease, while masking the effort involved. X-rays of Rembrandt's works show they were far from effortless: he constantly changed, adjusted and reworked images.
Six is believed to have taught Rembrandt about sprezzatura, which Rembrandt exemplified in his portrait of Six. But Six abandoned Rembrandt after the Dutch Reformed Church denounced Stoffels's "whoredom".
That same year of 1654 Rembrandt made the simple ink drawing A Young Woman Sleeping, believed to be of Stoffels. Drawn with brush alone, as if by a Japanese calligrapher, it is one of the greatest treasures of the print room of the British Museum.
Above all it was Rembrandt's intuitive grasp of human emotion that made his genius. Although they look out at us over more than four centuries the men and women in his paintings exude timeless, universal feelings: the sense of mischief in Catrina Hooghsaet, a portrait of a Mennonite lady who preferred the company of her parrot, included in the picture, to that of her second husband; the pretentiousness of the wealthy businessman Frederik Riehl in Rembrandt's only equestrian portrait; the paternal pride so evident in Rembrandt's portrait Titus at His Desk; the inner torment of Bathsheba, torn between fidelity to her husband and desire for the king, whose letter she holds in her hand.
In his later years Rembrandt preferred to paint the aftermath of biblical events, moments of contemplation or reconcilation, rather than high drama. He often portrayed a solitary figure locked in inner conflict, struggling to take a decision. In this he captures the essence of human experience.
There could be no more powerful rendering of physical and mental suffering than The Suicide of Lucretia, Rembrandt's portrait of a young woman who was raped in Roman times, then took her own life out of shame. Blood seeps through Lucretia's gauzy white dress. Her lips quiver and her eyes brim with tears. Her right hand holds the dagger with which she has just stabbed herself; her left hand clutches the bell chain, to raise the alarm.
The large, rectangular splotches of paint that comprise the sleeve of Lucretia's dress, scratched in places by the wooden end of Rembrandt's brush, are a revolution in painting. The artist sculpted paint in the same way on the golden sleeve of the bridegroom posing as Isaac, and on the red dress of Rebecca, in The Jewish Bride.
The house that Rembrandt and Saskia bought in 1639 was in what was becoming Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter. Rembrandt often asked Jewish neighbours to pose for his biblical paintings and engravings.
The Jewish Bride is possibly Rembrandt's best-loved painting. The bridegroom places one hand around the bride's shoulder and the other over her heart. She raises a hand to meet his, and their loving, tender gesture is the physical and emotional centre of the painting. The fabric of their vaguely oriental costumes is richly textured. The gold, pearls and precious stones of the bride's jewellery look so real one could pull them off the canvas.
When he first saw The Jewish Bride, in 1885, Vincent Van Gogh said he would happily sacrifice 10 years of his life to be able to sit in front of the canvas for 10 days with only a crust of dry bread to eat. "What an intimate, what an infinitely sympathetic painting", he wrote to his brother Theo.
Rembrandt painted some 80 self-portraits, about a tenth of his total production. His was, to paraphrase Socrates, a life examined. He did so with total honesty, showing himself as the dapper, ambitious young painter he was in his youth, then faithfully recording the onslaught of age. There is no filter between Rembrandt and the viewer.
In his last self-portrait, painted in the year of his death, Rembrandt’s face is puffy, his chin saggy and his eyes deeply circled. A single brush stroke captures the pouch beneath his right eye. His face speaks of the sad wisdom found on those of many of the old people he painted.
The exhibition ends with Rembrandt's very last, and unfinished, painting, Simeon With the Infant Christ in the Temple. Unlike other painters, who showed the old man gazing heavenward, Rembrandt shows Simeon's eyes cast downward, his mouth open as if in amazement. The child is balanced on his forearms; Simeon projects his hands forward, as if afraid to touch the Messiah. It is the precursor, in paint, to TS Eliot's haunting Song for Simeon, and it speaks, even to the nonbeliever, of salvation.
