Rembrandt returns to Hartford
Rembrandt can eviscerate with a glance.
It can filet you, this stare, alternately seductive and contemptuous, withering and wily. But there are moments, as in the mesmerizing 1656 portrait now on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum, when it can make you feel all these things at once.
And it may be that, above all else, that makes Rembrandt a genius.
Seven Rembrandts are on exhibit in the Wadsworth’s “Rembrandt’s People,” and seven are not enough. If “Rembrandt’s People” does anything it intoxicates in its incompleteness. But seven will have to do, particularly because these are the first Rembrandts to be in Connecticut since the 1940s, and they are more than enough to bewitch and celebrate, even if they leave viewers not quite sated.
Rembrandt (1606-1669), the son of a miller who set Amsterdam afire in the 1630s, did all manner of painting – Biblical, portraits, landscapes, historical subjects genre scenes—and he did them all brilliantly. Yet the Wadsworth has gathered only portraits – all loaned—and only a handful at that. But the destabilizing force of the portraits alone is enough to knock a viewer off his feet. In an age when museum curators lament the decreasing amount of time viewers spend with single paintings, a Rembrandt portrait can mesmerize and confound you for others.
That’s because Rembrandt was the Montaigne of portraits. Reproduction was banal and hagiography was beneath him. Rembrandt seems to signal as such, leaving backgrounds onyx and unfinished, but writing entire narratives on the face. Like Montaigne, he appreciates that not only can mood shift, but mien and temperament, too. Life leaves marks and — take that cosmeticians – it is those marks that define us. The perfect face, like the immaculate heart, is uninteresting and vapid. It’s the tilt of the face, the sneer, the scowl, petulance, conceit, lust, swagger and defeat, which differentiates and ennobles.
The chunky young girl with the unblemished, alabaster face, “Young Woman at her Toilet, 1632-33,” is clearly an overfed, spoiled brat. Scholars believe she may be one of the seductive Old Testament women – Esther, Bathsheba, Judith, take your pick – preparing for her suitor. Whoever she is, she has a humdinger of a dressmaker. Her cranberry velvet cloak is embroidered in gold leaf. The shimmering embroidered silk underneath glitters in the light. The hand she holds over her heart is suggestive of modesty or imminent betrothal. But she is no innocent.
Rembrandt manages to suggest virtue, with the alabaster skin and high forehead, but there is something shrewd, even coy about her expression. Either she knows she is about to be set up – or she is laying a trap for another.
That’s what made Rembrandt the toast of Amsterdam – however fleetingly. At that point in the Dutch Republic, the place was crawling with expert painters – those who could flatter, and those who could reproduce. But Rembrandt could do all of that and more – he could add character — largely because he started with himself.
Rembrandt painted upwards of 60 self-portraits alone, and in them he is alternately cocky and foppish, august and blithe. He tried on personalities like others tried on clothes – a dangerous weakness for the improvident Rembrandt, who would come to glory and grief in short order. The self-portrait the Wadsworth brought from the National Gallery of Art, is perhaps the best, if not the best known. It was painted in 1659 and welcomes viewers from afar as they enter the exhibition space.
And from a distance, Rembrandt’s stare is riveting and disdainful. He has costumed himself in an old-fashioned artists smock and beret, and his look suggests that he is an artist fully aware of his expansive powers. But draw closer. The face is overworked and blotchy. The brow is furrowed and deep jaundiced folds limn the wet, brown eyes. The closer you get, the more vulnerable Rembrandt becomes.
“It is,” art historian has written, “the palpable tactility of the paint, manipulated like modeling clay by the brushes, that makes indelibly visible the stresses and strains of a life compounded of creative triumphs and personal and financial reverses.”
Rembrandt was, at this time, deeply wounded. In 1633, full of hope and conceit, he had moved to a grand, fashionable home in Amsterdam with his beloved wife, Saskia. But between 1635 and 1641, Saskia bore four children; only one, Titus, lived. When Saskia herself died in 1642, Rembrandt fell into despondency – and debt. By 1656, he was forced to declare bankruptcy; in 1660, he had to leave the house. An auction held to sell off Rembrandt’s glitzy array of art and antiques was a disappointment.
All of this had to affect Rembrandt’s painting – and id did. It made him better.
By the time he paints “The Apostle James the Major,” (1661), he understands that overwrought settings and ornate costumes only detract from the essence of the subject. Having established that he is eminently capable of depicting even the wealthiest burgher’s jewels and flummery, Rembrandt begins to erase them.
His later work, like “Portrait of a Lady with a Lap Dog,” is executed with a looser, Titian-like brush stroke. The wealthy woman, outfitted in an off-the shoulder persimmon gown with a silk drape, is long-faced and pensive. Her nose is crocked; her chin is weak. Her eyes bulge. Yet her shoulders and stature suggest a young woman of wealth, wreathed in pearls before her betrothal.
She has none of the fussiness of “Young Woman at her Toilet.” Where Rembrandt once toiled over glittering ornamentation, he now gives himself over to the woman’s countenance. This is a woman lost in thought, leery and even a touch melancholic. For scholars, the work suggests that Rembrandt was at least winning portrait commissions as late as 1662-65.
In spite of his affection for portraits, what Rembrandt painted most were religious subjects, like this one. This is St. James the Apostle, a famished-looking, withered man, with russet pilgrim’s cap and the patched, coffee-colored cloak of the impoverished. St. James, brother of John, is believed to have preached throughout Spain and is buried at Santiago de Compostela. He is pictured here with his staff, legendarily given to him by Jesus. Rembrandt suffuses the background in an ochre chiaroscuro, drawing attention to the long, rough hands gently tented in prayer and the saint’s gaunt, creased brow. The figure seems to burn from within. His eyes shut, his auburn brows raised he surrenders to an ecstatic serenity. His hands, as Peter Sutton has written, “offer the external embodiment of all the electrifying passion of his interior devotion.”
This austere-but-powerful image of an ascetic, by the way, recently sold at auction for $25.8 million.
In 1647, Rembrandt hired a servant, Hendrickje Stoffels, whose warm, contrite looking portrait has been compared to a repentant Magdalene or Sorrowing Virgin. Either way, Rembrandt exquisitely portrays the warmth and contrition of the sitter.
Not long after coming into his household, Rembrandt took Hendrickje as his mistress, never marrying her, lest he lose the income from Saskia’s estate. It couldn’t have been easy for Hendrickje. In June of 1654, leaders of her Calvinist church called her before their council, castigating her for the sin of being pregnant with Rembrandt’s child. A sense of her shame, as well as her sensuality, is evident in this evocative, discomfiting portrait.
For years, the Wadsworth was believed to have two Rembrandt portraits, which are also on display here. They seem obvious fakes, despite their fine quality. Curator Eric Zafran was wise to include them, as he was to include two copies of Rembrandt self-portraits, one by Asher B. Durand. Only by setting them in such proximity can viewers understand the real measure of Rembrandt’s brilliance. The master just blows them all away.
c. Republican-American