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JANUARY 2000 Rembrandt's Self-PortraitsBy Susan Fegley Osmond The debate over why Rembrandt made nearly ninety self-portraits continues, but the first exhibition devoted to these works reveals a profound forty-year exploration of what it is to be human.  he currents and crosscurrents of opinion in the field of art history are many and strong, and
sometimes there are perilous riptides. Scholars and art critics of one era will set forth views that
experts of later eras will decry, and in this ceaseless process sometimes the baby is thrown out
with the bathwater.
The art of Rembrandt van Rijn, the great seventeenth-century Dutch painter, has long been a magnet for conflicting scholarly opinion. Now the first exhibition ever devoted to his prodigious output of self-portraits--and more exactly the catalog for this exhibition--has expounded a recently prevailing outlook as to why the artist portrayed himself so many times. The show, which opened at London's National Gallery and is at the Mauritshuis in The Hague through January 9, displays sixty-six of these self-portrayals in paintings, etchings, and drawings, but the catalog itself reproduces all eighty-six works that, it says, "can reasonably be considered as self-portraits by Rembrandt." It wasn't until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when scholars studied Rembrandt's oeuvre as a whole, that it was discovered how very many times the artist had portrayed himself. The number is still a matter of contention, but it seems he depicted himself in approximately forty to fifty extant paintings, about thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. It is an output unique in history; most artists produce only a handful of self-portraits, if that. And why Rembrandt did this is one of the great mysteries of art history. Most scholars up till about twenty years ago interpreted Rembrandt's remarkable series of self-portraits as a sort of visual diary, a forty-year exercise in self-examination. In a 1961 book, art historian Manuel Gasser wrote, "Over the years, Rembrandt's self-portraits increasingly became a means for gaining self-knowledge, and in the end took the form of an interior dialogue: a lonely old man communicating with himself while he painted." Many of these traditional studies focused particularly on Rembrandt's late self-portraits, as they reveal this rigorous self-reflection most profoundly. In an influential 1948 monograph on the artist, Jacob Rosenberg wrote of the ceaseless and unsparing observation which [Rembrandt's self-portraits] reflect, showing a gradual change from outward description and characterisation to the most penetrating self-analysis and self-contemplation. ... Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man's inner life.More recent scholarship has shed additional light on Rembrandt's early self-portrayals. Quite a few, it is argued, were tronies--head-and-shoulder studies in which the model plays a role or expresses a particular emotion. In the seventeenth century there was an avid market for such studies, which were considered a separate genre (although for an artist they also served as a storehouse of facial types and expressions for figures in history paintings). Thus, for example, we have four tiny etchings from 1630 that show Rembrandt, in turn, caught in fearful surprise, glowering with anger, smiling gamefully, and appearing to snarl--each expressed in lines that themselves embody the distinct emotions. Rembrandt may have used his own face because the model was cheap, but perhaps he was killing two birds with one stone. The art-buying public--which now included people from many walks of life, not only aristocratic or clerical patrons, as in the past--went for etchings of famous people, including artists. By using himself as the model for these and other studies, Rembrandt was making himself into a recognizable celebrity at the same time that he gave the public strikingly original and expressive tronies. The wide dissemination of these and other prints was important in establishing Rembrandt's reputation as an artist. Meeting Market Demand? In the catalog for this exhibition, art historian Ernst van de Wetering sets forth a view that has gained a number of adherents over the past few decades. The "self-portraits" (there was no such term in the seventeenth century) could not have been made for the purpose of self-analysis, he claims, because the idea of self as "an independent I who lives and creates solely from within" is one that arose only in the Romantic era, after 1800. In the literature of Rembrandt's day, he contends, personality was seen primarily as being bound to certain immutable types discussed in classical sources. He cites Hans-Joachim Raupp, an early exponent of this demythologizing view: When an artist of Rembrandt's day painted a self-portrait, he "did not step into the mirror with questions and doubts, but with a carefully planned programme."
Art historians invariably reflect to a greater or lesser extent the values and outlooks of their day. As novelist Iain Pears once put it, "A sizeable chunk of art history consists of unravelling other people's errors and substituting your own." Is it mere coincidence that van der Wetering--writing in a time when commercial interests dominate the art world--ascribes to Rembrandt a solely commercial motivation for making his many self-portraits? Although it must be appreciated that part of the artist's motivation must have been to put dinner on the table, if it were all his motivation, or even the predominant one, would he not likely have succumbed to mediocrity in trying to clone his success, as do so many artists today? Rembrandt most resolutely avoided this, however. Van de Wetering's musings do not explain, and even seem to ignore, the striking originality and penetrating insight of many of these works, and that they appear to break entirely new ground in the perception of individual personality. Rembrandt's aims in making his remarkably varied self-portraits must have been manifold (and in the end can only be a matter of speculation). But the focus of van der Wetering's inquiry shows us where much art history today has wound up. For the past several decades there has been a certain cache in "demythologizing" artists, yet in the process other myths are erected. (So here we have the profoundly self-searching Rembrandt replaced by a brashly commercial one.) This tendency is partly because many scholars, weaving a latter-day thread of the Romantic tradition that they austensibly so deplore, take the artist himself and his supposed motivations--understood in the context of what is known of his times--as their subject more than his art. This is probably unavoidable, but there should be no illusions of reaching some objective truth regarding the artist, his times, or his art. What writers on art and art history offer for the most part is perceptions unique to each author (though often they ricochet off each other); each view is duly researched, yet is colored inevitably by the values the authors hold or are subconsciously influenced by. Their writings can only hope to broaden and sometimes deepen the scope of appreciation of an artist's work--itself a worthy task. For the record, some other art historians take views that would seem to undermine van de Wetering's premises. There are no primary sources from which we can ascertain Rembrandt's perception of "personality" and "self" save his portraits and self-portraits. Yet he seems to have struggled mightily against conforming to expected standards. It appears he had a highly developed sense of himself as a unique individual who had to pursue his own vision regardless of prevailing fashion and opinion. In an essay on Rembrandt's self-portraits in a 1997 book, Arthur Wheelock Jr. of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., notes: "[Rembrandt] was a singularly complex individual, who from an early age seems to have fostered the image that he was different from other men, and that neither his talent nor his success depended upon others or upon the good fortune that came his way." Wheelock later comments: "Rembrandt's earliest self-portaits are of particular interest because they demonstrate that the myth of Rembrandt as isolated genius did not first emerge in the Romantic era ... but was fostered and developed by the artist himself." And art historian Kenneth Clark wrote in 1966: It is sometimes said that the character of Rembrandt as the rebel artist is an invention of romanticism; and it is true that during the 19th century the Rembrandt legend, especially the story of his fall from popularity and social ostracism, was given more dramatic coloring. But that the young man from Leiden saw himself as a tough and rebellious character is made perfectly clear to us in a whole series of self-portraits.Clark points out in particular a 1630 etching in which Rembrandt depicts himself as a beggar snarling at the prosperous, bourgeois society that was shortly to welcome him so warmly. This angry impatience with convention was a fundamental part of Rembrandt's character, and although he managed to control it during his years of prosperity, it came out strongly in his middle life and is emphasized in the three early biographies written by men who had first-hand information about him. The Unknowable 'I' Let us now look at a few of Rembrandt's self-portraits in some detail. I will mention biographical matters as seems appropriate, but for the most part my discussion will depart from the realm of biography and art history and will be an essay of reflections upon viewing the art. Some biographical basics: Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606, the ninth child of a miller and his wife who were quite wealthy. The parents had ambitions for their son and sent him to Latin school and then to Leiden University, but he preferred a career in art, so in 1622 he began a three-year apprenticeship with a local painter who ultimately left no trace on his art. Somewhere around 1625--26 he spent at least six months in Amsterdam studying with the history painter Peter Lastman, whose work inspired many of his early compositions. Rembrandt was no art prodigy (as was, for example, Van Dyck). The earliest example of his work in the exhibition, an 1626 history piece, is quite crude considering what his art later became. The figures are stiff and awkward, the finish is smooth, the colors rather cool. One of the "bit players" in this many-figured scene has his own face. It is little more than a mask. Rembrandt portrayed himself as a minor character in about six other history paintings (though scholars disagree on the number, as any figure that looks even remotely like Rembrandt has at one time or another been declared a self-portrait). Around 1626 he set up as an independent painter in Leiden, in time sharing a studio with another former student of Lastman's, Jan Lievens. There he began attracting the attention of art lovers and collectors. Around 1628--when he was producing self-portrait etchings that empahsized facial expression--he made a painted self-portrait that is as remarkable for what it does not reveal as for what it does. A study in chiaroscuro (light and dark), which was to become the defining feature of Rembrandt's art, it presents a face mostly obscured in darkness. Set against a mutedly glowing background, the head is almost a silhouette, upon which is cast a single beam of light that illumines an earlobe and the outer surface of one cheek and glints faintly on the tip of the nose. Individual frizzy hairs catch the light as well, their curls scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush handle, exposing the lighter ground beneath. But the eyes watch us from a realm of shadow. In Rembrandt's day the eyes were known as the windows of the soul; here they reveal nothing--we can hardly see them. There is only the patient watchfulness that seems to miss nothing. It is as if, wreathed in umbra, the inescapable, eternal conscience--that human abode of the all-seeing God--observes the outer world of mortality. According to the catalog, this painting cannot be considered a self-portrait in the strict sense of the word but rather is a tronie. Yet in a way this is a self-portrait in the deepest sense. A meditation on shadow and substance both physical and metaphysical, it seems to say that ultimately "I" am a mystery, the unknowable. Others can glimpse but seemings, the outer accoutrements, while--as Hamlet said when departing this world--"the rest is silence." Even to oneself the inmost soul is a mystery.
An art historian might argue that this sort of philosophical musing and reading things into a work of art is not only irrelevant but dangerous, as it produces subjective projections on the part of the viewer that may have nothing to do with what an artist intended to convey. But is what the artist wanted to convey all there is to art? And who really knows what the artist aimed to convey, anyway? Does even he know, consciously, all he imparted to his pictures? Probably not. An artwork is not only the object that hangs on the wall; in some way it is, in addition, what the artist strove consciously and subconsiously to embody in it·--yet it is also what each individual viewer brings to it and excavates from it. Subjectivity is integral to this and is not to be belittled, for that belittles the art. A Curious Dialectic Many of the painted self-portraits Rembrandt did in the 1620s show his face half in shadow. In 1631, however, he moved to Amsterdam, and just as he came into international renown and notable prosperity, so more of his face was given over to the light--the realm of substance. Yet, as Wheelock has pointed out, contrasting self-portrayals from this period may indicate conflicting feelings about conforming to the bourgeois-artist ideal. Says Wheelock: Throughout the 1630s a curious dialectic occurs in Rembrandt's self-portraits, in which he alternatively portrays himself as an accepted member of society, elegantly dressed and honored with gold chains, and as an outsider, whose character, and hence genius, cannot be identified with the Dutch middle class. At almost the same time that he represents himself as a fashionable middle class burgher, jauntily wearing a wide-brimmed hat and an expensive cloak, he depicts himself as a beggar. ... One cannot explain this extraordinary print, as is so often the case with his small studies of his own expressions, by concluding that the model was convenient and cheap.Wheelock notes a few possible interpretations of this print: that it conveys an empathy with the poor and homeless; that it expresses a sense of alienation from society despite the artist's fame and glory; that perhaps he intended to create a shocking image that would bring attention to his disdain for artistic convention. Wheelock continues, "It seems that the inner conflict between his perception of himself as an esteemed artist and as an outsider to society reached a crisis point during the mid-1630s, at the time he married Saskia [van Uylenburgh], whose family and inheritance assured him a life of bourgeois respectability." In 1634, the year of his marriage, he represented himself in an etching as a menacing oriental brandishing a serrated saber. "The image remains an aggressive statement of his disdain for middle-class respectability," says Wheelock. There are also contrasting double portraits of him and Saskia together. A 1636 etching shows him as the sober artist at work as his loving wife and inspiration looks on. But in a painting probably of the previous year, he depicts himself as the prodigal son and Saskia as a tavern wench on his lap tempting him to waste his inheritance on riotous living. Wheelock notes, "The apparent conflicts in Rembrandt's perception of himself slowly diminish during the 1630s." And the scales seem to settle, however briefly, in favor of the artist-burgher. In striking contrast to his complaining beggar self of 1630 is a 1640 painting in which he presents himself as the accomplished man of means who can stand alongside great creators of the past. More perhaps than an examination of self, this is the projection of a persona. He has drawn the pose indirectly from Raphael's portrait of the courtier-author Baldassare Castiglione, a self-portrait by Dƒrer, and most directly a portrait by Titian that at the time was thought to be of the poet Ariosto. Wearing the rich yet quiet-toned garb of an earlier era that suitably sets him outside the mundane present and says he belongs to the ages, he presents himself as thinner and more handsome than in his other self-portraits, a man of intelligence, dignity, and almost arrogant self-composure. Yet lurking beneath that appraising gaze are niggling strains of self-doubt. The self-portrait was painted when he was at the pinnacle of his worldy success. In the previous year he had bought, fatefully, a magnificent merchant's house (which today is the newly restored Rembrandthuis museum), and in addition to being an acclaimed artist with a number of pupils, he was an art dealer and collector. But the next few decades saw a dramatic turnaround. In the 1630s Saskia had given birth to three children, but they all died within a few months. In 1641 a fourth child, Titus, was born, and he would reach manhood and become his father's mainstay. The weakened Saskia, however, died. Wheelock has noted, "With Saskia's death in 1642, the urge to depict himself in paintings and etchings seems to have diminished. When [Rembrandt] returned to self-portraiture in the later 1640s and 1650s, his portraits are sensitive, inward-looking images." But they are not more peaceful. During the interim, he had embarked on a relationship with Titus' nurse, the widow Geertje Dircx, who tried to convince him to marry her. But the terms of Saskia's will were that Rembrandt could have the usufruct of her sizable estate only if he did not remarry. After the young Hendrickje Stoffels entered Rembrandt's household as housekeeper in 1647, the artist's amorous attentions turned instead to her, and an angry Geertje, booted out of the house in 1649, sued him for breach of promise. The court decided that, although Rembrandt had slept with Geertje, he had made no promise to marry her; it nonetheless ruled that he should pay her an annuity of two hundred guilders in alimony for life. Within a year he successfully connived with her relatives to have her sentenced to a workhouse reformatory for twelve years. Over his objections, she was released after five (and she died the following year). In Calvinist Amsterdam, all this was fodder for considerable scandal. Turning Inward In the 1640s and early '50s, as tastes turned to the more elegant Flemish style of painting and to the classicism exemplified by Poussin, Rembrandt lost some of his clientele and his popularity waned, but he would not alter his artistic approach to suit the art market. In fact, his unwillingness to compromise with patrons may have been a factor in this decline. One of his earliest biographers, Filippo Baldinucci, who based his writings on the testimony of one of Rembrandt's pupils, wrote, "After it had become commonly known that whomever wanted to be portrayed by him had to sit to him for some two or three months, there were few who came forward." Another early biographer, Arnold Houbraken, recounts how, when he was almost finished painting a portrait of a couple and their children, Rembrandt's monkey (part of his increasing collection of curiosities) died, and he memorialized it by including its carcass in the family portrait. The clients could not abide this, but "the effect produced by the corpse so impressed the artist that rather than remove it to satisfy his clients he left the work unfinished." A self-portrait from 1652--the first he had painted in quite a few years (though he had etched some self-portrayals)--is markedly different from his earlier ones. Gone is the historicizing garb with fur trim he often used (though the trademark beret remains); instead he wears a plain brown robe, sketchily rendered, that was probably his working attire. Here is not the artist as a man of means and taste, as in 1640, but as the indomitable creator. He stands in a position not seen in any of his other painted self-portraits. Facing front, his arms akimbo, hands firmly on hips, he looks to the viewer (and himself in the mirror) with an intensely searching gaze. The defiance of his stance brings to mind his words, "I do not care so much for honor as I do for liberty." Yet this work, as so many of his others, has broader implications. It is as if he is eyeing down fate itself, confronting the whirlwind and asking, with deeply sorrow-laden eyes and furrowed brow, "Why?" There is no getting round him; he is a man made of dust and fire, and before the implacable forces of the universe he stands, mortal though he is, to be reckoned with. Whatever fate throws against him, he will never be defeated. Fate indeed had more to throw at him, though to some extent he lent her a helping hand. Beginning around 1653, he suffered a severe financial crisis. Due to reversals in the First Anglo-Dutch War, there was a general economic depression that led to near financial collapse in Amsterdam. Rembrandt still owed about half the price of his grand house, which according to the contract was supposed to have been fully paid for by 1645 or interest charges would ensue. Through the years, even when commissions for his works had dwindled, he had spent lavishly on an extensive collection of prints and some paintings, and also antiquities and exotic curiosities brought from the farthest reaches of the Dutch trading empire. These served as inspiration for his art and kept him on a par with the intellects of the day. But with the economic depression, previously tolerant creditors demanded he pay up. He obtained a few sizable loans and sold objects and artworks belonging to him in seven public auctions in 1655 and early 1656, but they did not yield enough to stem the tide. By July 1656, he had no choice but to apply for a cessio bonorum, a measure that spared him the stigma of bankruptcy and consequent imprisonment but required the liquidation of all his assets. The entire process took a few years, and around 1660, Rembrandt, Titus, and the ever-faithful Hendrickje moved to a rented house in an unassuming section of the city. These events were a painful blow to his independence and pride, and attached still more scandal to his name. His self-portraits at the time indicate varying responses to his situation. In one painted around 1655 (not in the exhibition) his face betrays traces of self-doubt intermingled with hurt and outwardly directed disdain. Another, from 1658, one of his most monumental and impressive self-portraits (also most unfortunately not in the exhibition), shows him sitting magisterially as if on a throne, holding a stick reminiscent of a scepter and garbed in golden cloth. It is an assertion of undeterred mastery. In his last decade, Rembrandt ceased to do self-portrait etchings but did a greater number of self-portrait paintings than before. He made several in 1659, and one of them, now owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is surely one of the most profound explorations of a human being in art. And it is accomplished through an eloquent simplicity of means. Before a graduated umber backround, the artist, dressed in soft, deeper browns, sits in a self-contained position again reminiscent of Raphael's Castiglione. The mood is quiet, contemplative, somber. All elements serve to draw attention to the subtly expressive face. Unlike in the self-portraits of his youth, where the face was half shadow and mystery, here it is lit from the above right and nearly all of it is illumined. One has the feeling that this is a personal reckoning.
While each portrait is unique and each records the lineaments of a particular person, it carries overtones which make the individual the representative of humanity. At bottom what Rembrandt portrays is the human predicament. And he saw that predicament as both tragic and watched over by a mysterious spiritual force.This work has been painted with unusually free and sketchlike brushwork, even for Rembrandt. Art connoisseurs and painters of his day (and for some time after) complained that many of his paintings looked unfinished. Some areas would be worked up in detail, while others would be left a mass of paint daubs. But it is precisely this intricate webbing of contrasting colors and exposed ground that gives the face in this 1659 painting its complexity and subtlety of expression. And though it may at first look rather slap-dash, each brush stroke counts. Houbraken, whose biography of Rembrandt was published in 1718, noted, "He was not to be dissuaded from this practice, saying in justification that a work is finished when the master has achieved his intention in it." Last Reflections In 1669, the final year of his life, Rembrandt painted three or four self-portraits. One of these (housed in the Uffizi, Florence) is in quite poor condition, so not much can be said about it. Another (Kenwood House, London), which according to the catalog is c. 1665--69, shows him standing in his studio, palette and brushes in hand. Behind him, apparently on the wall, are portions of two perfectly drawn circles. It is a monumental portrait in which the painter stands farther away from the viewer than in his other self-portrayals, so the by now familiar wrinkles and folds of skin are less noticeable. The face is worked up in detail (though he does not attempt a smooth finish), and the richly varied flesh tints merge into one another in a way that makes it appear very lifelike. The torso and its clothing, and the palette, brush, and maulstick, are demarked in a few swift, bold strokes of thin color. What strikes one is the matter-of-factness of the image. He is not subjecting himself to intense scrutiny, as in the 1659 painting and the two we have not yet discussed from this year. Here he is a master exuding quiet command and confidence in his field. The face, though lifelike, is rather inscrutable and impersonal. It's as if he were writing his public epitaph, that which records accomplishment before the view of history: "Rembrandt van Rijn--artist." Another (National Gallery, London) shows him sitting in a pose that reverses that of the 1659 painting. X rays show that the artist originally intended to show himself at work, but, as in many of his paintings, he made numerous changes to achieve the best result. He is dressed in a high-necked doublet with a little furred collar taken from portraits of fifteenth-century Flemish artists Rogier van der Weyden and Dieric Bouts--early pioneers in the art of oil painting. Thus he presents himself as a master of the past (something he did in a number of paintings). Background, hands, and torso are all subdued to draw attention to the face, where the strongest light falls onto his forehead and right cheek and produces a sort of halo behind him. The eyes are still acute, but the face is more paunchy and he doesn't appear quite as healthy as in the Kenwood House picture. Worry traces his features, yet there is a slight hint of an ironic smile. What is probably Rembrandt's final self-portrait (Mauritshuis, The Hague) is a simple head-and-shoulder composition not unlike his earliest solo self-portrait (c. 1628) discussed previously. Whereas in that work the face of the young man who had his life before him is mostly hidden in shadow, in this final one light emanates from the above left almost like a benediction, illuminating nearly all the now puffy, fragile, almost womanish face. In the early painting the artist was concerned with creating a smooth illusion with carefully delineated gradations of tone, but in the last we can see how far he has come to redefine the art of painting. The subject has become not only the sitter but the paint itself and how expressively it is applied--in thick impasto, each telling brush stroke is revealed.
His beloved Hendrickje and Titus had gone before him--though a daughter born to Hendrickje in 1654 and a wife and newborn daughter of Titus still lived. When the 63-year-old Rembrandt died on October 4, 1669, his body was buried in an unknown, rented grave in Amsterdam's Westerkerk. Why the artist portrayed himself so many times remains a mystery. Probably there was a confluence of reasons. Perhaps, knowing all too well that a single portrait can convey only certain selected aspects of a person at a particular point in his life, he wanted, as an artist, to take at least one subject through a lifetime, and the one he could explore most intimately was himself. Every painting has to have some unifying mood or theme, so in this respect Rembrandt had to approach each self-portrait with some sort of "programme," but this does not rule out self-searching and examination in the process. It only limits its scope--and that probably left the artist hankering for more. In his early years, he likely knew that using himself as a model for tronies would help his face become a household item and increase his reputation. As time went on, while a ready market remained for his self-portrayals, his internal motivation may have altered or at least broadened. At times, he used the self-portrait as a forum to broadcast a persona. At others, in showing himself playing a role such as the prodigal son, a potentate, or an artist of the past, he could by allusion make comments about aspects of his inner state or his status in the flow of history. In most of the late works, contemplation of himself as an individual and as a representative of humanity seems to have played a major part. Whatever his reasons for producing them, the nearly ninety self-portrayals of Rembrandt that remain today are eloquent testimony to the human spirit, in all its nobility, imperfection, and grandeur. Rembrandt by Himself opened at the National Gallery in London and is at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, the Netherlands, through January 9. Also in The Hague, at the Contemporary Museum through January 9, is Rembrandt 2000, an exhibition in which contemporary artists pay tribute to the great painter. The recently renovated Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam, its interior restored as far as possible to its appearance in Rembrandt's day, reopened in September. In the museum's new wing next door through January 9 is Rembrandt's Treasures, showing about a hundred works from his art collection, some alongside his own works that used similar elements, and examples of curios like those he had in his collection according to the 1656 inventory. The show demonstrates the eclecticism of Rembrandt's interests and inspirations. Thanks to the Netherlands Board of Tourism for its generous assistance in the preparation of this article. For more information on cultural events in the Netherlands, visit the board's Web site at www.goholland.com Susan Fegley Osmond is an editor for the Arts section of The World & I. |
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