Has it been 400 years already?
A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse in three parts
Surely the truth about someone who’s 400 years old depends on which biography you read, but Sylvia Hochfield of ARTnews, who has the always enigmatic job description “editor-at-large”, seems quite certain about Rembrandt in her terrific essay on the quadricentennial of the old boy’s death, which is just coming to a close.
This assurance despite the nasty testimony about him that she surveys en route to judging Rembrandt a fine fellow after all.
Witness for the prosecution #1, artist Abraham Breughel (not the proto-surrealist): Told by a collector for whom he bought paintings that the recently desceased Rembrandt was the ace of half-length portraits, and could he find a new one, please, Breughel pointed out that Rembrandt had been good for nothing other than heavily draped spectres lurking in the shadows, “save for a point of light at the tip of the nose”.
“The great painters are interested in showing a beautiful nude figure, from which one can see that they know how to draw,” wrote Brueghel, a fan of the Italians, not his fellow Dutch. “Only an uneducated person tries to clothe his figure with a clumsy dark garment, and these artists compose the surroundings in such a way that we cannot make head nor tail of them.”
Breughel hated Rembrandt’s “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer”. But what did he know, right? Well, he wasn’t alone. Though famous and popular in his own time, Rembrandt’s detractors were legion, right across the decades, until, as Hochfield puts it, “By the middle of the 18th century, the ultimate outsider was becoming the ultimate misunderstood genius.”
Witnesses for the prosecution #2 to #22, a score of liars who convinced historians that “The Night Watch” was an abject failure.
They said Rembrandt’s most famous canvas, actually titled “The Company of Captain Frans Cocq” but given its colloquial moniker by people who mistook its heavy varnish for dusk, enraged Captain Frans’ militia because they couldn’t see their faces clearly.
With The Public chortling in the wings, the troopers told Rembrandt to brighten it up a bit and he refused, so they stiffed him on the payment and hung it in a place where it would be least visible. It was a scandal that ruined Rembrandt’s career, so this cruel saga goes, and he died penniless and friendless.
In actual point of fact, Cocq’s boys were tickled pink with the picture, and so was The Public. It was a huge attraction in Amsterdam and Rembrandt’s reputation was glowingly sealed.
Witness for the prosecution #23, Rembrandt van Rijn. Already praised in his youth, the artist got cocky and started doing self-portraits that were so avant garde they were bound to make him some enemies. Rather than depicting himself as a classy craftsman, he painted a crazy-haired freak. And that was just the start.
Witness for the prosecution #24, Joachim von Sandrart, his biographer in 1675: Rembrandt was a boor; when he should have been copying the ancient masters and painting Greek goddesses, he went for “lumpy females with sagging breasts, clumsy hands and garter dents in their thighs” (Hochfield’s words). He put copulating dogs in one picture and a shitting dog in another.
Witness for the prosecution #25, Filippo Baldinucci, who profiled Rembrandt in 1686: Rembrandt was ugly and low-class and went everywhere in second-hand clothes on which he constantly wiped paint, his mouth and possibly his bum. Plus, if the king were to come by his studio (not that he ever did), Rembrandt wouldn’t even look up from his canvas.
Witness for the prosecution #26, writer and painter Arnold Houbraken: While Rembrandt was working on a family portrait, his pet monkey died, and because he had no other canvas available, he painted the dead animal into the portrait. The family freaked, but the dead monkey was staying where it was, so Rembrandt lost the commission.
And another thing: His students painted gold coins on the floor and then had a laugh as the old miser tried to pick them up. And, late in life Rembrandt accepted so many commissions that he had to work very fast, and his pictures showed it.
Houbraken compiled these and other terrific character assassinations into his treatise on 17th-century Dutch painters, and thus they became fact for many generations of art students and, in some cases, remain so to this day.
Other myths:
* He was self-taught. No, he studied with Pieter Lastman, the greatest history painter of the day.
* He never followed the rules. No, in the chicken-and-egg sense. The “rules” were only written after he’d shucked off his mortal coil. The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was founded in Paris in 1648, and the curriculum was all about noble and heroic subjects and improving upon nature. “Pictures of beggars, bordellos, taverns, tobacco smokers, musicians, dirty children on their pots” just weren’t acceptable anymore.
“Tis vinnich kout!” a peasant whinges in a 1634 etching – “It’s f%@k&# cold!”
There are two interesting things about the way Rembrandt was dragged off his lofty perch to toil in art’s sewers for a while and then found himself once more on the pedestal.
First of all, his restoration was fuelled by the very myths that had brought him down in the first place, and secondly and only very recently, science has scraped all the myth-generating soot off his paintings and discovered that he wasn’t such a mugwump after all.
As early as 1699, the French artist, writer and diplomat with the funny name Roger de Piles wrote a biography of Rembrandt that acknowledged his genius as a colourist with a backhanded compliment: Too bad he was born in Holland, with its “sluggish nature”; if he’d been French he might have really gone someplace.
In the 18th century the French tried to rectify that by making him an honorary Frenchman, not just copying his style (the fakes market adored him so there were beaucoup francs to be made) but turning “Rembrandt with all his faults” into a poster boy for the looming revolution. While Delacroix was deeming him “as great a painter as Raphael”, the Romantics cooed over his (alleged) non-conformism, his empty pockets and his embrace of the common man.
Rembrandt’s version of “Danae” (detail here) remains locked in her bedroom at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Titian and Correggio had already had their way with the daughter of the King of Argos, wishing to fulfil the prophecy that her son would kill her dad. Only Zeus managed, of course, and Perseus was the result. What a story!
A personality cult emerged around Rembrandt the Social Outcast Who had been Misunderstood in his Own Time. There was a stage play in Paris in 1898 depicting him as a tormented genius who was blind by the end of his life, as well as ignored and poverty-stricken, and meanwhile the Dutch made him a matter of national pride, complete with an 1852 monument in Amsterdam.
An aesthetic surge of the spirit? Not entirely. In the dirty little war between Europe’s pecuniary printmakers and the hoity-toity engravers favoured by the establishment, the former found a massively lucrative resource in Rembrandt’s juicy street vignettes and gnarly portraits. Compared to the royalty romping through Jacques Callot’s engravings, Rembrandt was a commodity you could sell in buckets to society’s great unwashed.
The age of Rembrandt “connoisseurship” that followed saw his output wax and wane in number as experts bickered over which prints and paintings were truly his, which were not, which were by his students and which were the students’ collaborations with the master.
To figure out what was whose, people started chiselling away the sheen of age and dirty varnish on the paintings that had until then been regarded as their most appealing aspect. Suddenly a lot of Rembrandts turned out to be fakes, all slathered with varnish in imitation, well-intentioned or otherwise.
Most famously, one of these cleanings revealed “The Night Watch” to be a daytime scene. In many of Rembrandt’s established works, different colours and perspectives emerged, and with them, new ways of looking at Rembrandt.
When “The Mill” was given a good scrubbing in 1977, all the dark brooding that had been attributed to his depression over bankruptcy evaporated and a blue sky appeared that hadn’t been seen in 200 years. The frame was removed and it was discovered that the canvas was tilted – Rembrandt had originally rendered its key components off-kilter – and it had been squared off from a rectangle that no doubt had attested to Rembrandt’s customary play of shadow against light.
The process hasn’t nearly ended, Hochfield writes. Our perception of Rembrandt will continue to evolve as more is uncovered in print and on canvas. Surely the old bugger can only improve.
Meanwhile, a closer look at his life, times and hauntings is coming up in Part 2.
