1606-1669 • Dutch • Painter • Baroque
"Rembrandt's style seems to have communicated itself to those who write about him. In the literature on Rembrandt, the artist soaks up all the light ... while all the other people in his life are shadows in the background
of whom we are told nothing more than their name and function." - Gary Schwartz, 1985
Unanswered questions about Rembrandt are mountainously troublesome because his reputation is simultaneously so lofty and so controversial. While that makes thinking about Rembrandt exciting for art historians, it makes writing about him treacherous, as Schwartz, who is quoted above, suggests.
Schwartz himself brought the artist into focus by looking at the social dynamics of the world in which he operated, examining records of his dealers, friends, students, and customers and even searching for evidence that was missing: "no one ever asked Rembrandt to be the godfather of their child or even to witness a document for them," Schwartz writes. He concluded that Rembrandt failed to attract important commissions and patrons due to his nasty personality: "bitter, vindictive, attacking the adversary with all means, fair and foul…underhanded and untrustworthy even to his friends ... arrogant to those who admired him." Schwartz is apologetic for thus characterizing an artist who is famous for the insights with which he painted men and women, a sensitivity that naturally leads his admirers to assume he must have been of good character."It would hurt me if the reader thought that I was painting too black a picture of Rembrandt, leaving out evidence of his humanity," Schwartz writes. "Believe me, this is not so. If anything I have spared him of even worse, such as the testimony that he stole some of the savings of his daughter, Cornelia, half of which belong to [his son] Titus's widow."
Complicating doubts about the artist ' s integrity is the work of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), a team of Dutch art scholars that has been examining the entire known body of his work since 1968. The constantly expanding
and contracting number of paintings attributed to him once reached nearly 1,000. Informed estimates now put the number closer to 300. Even one of "his" best-loved paintings, the Polish Rider (1655), was thrown into doubt for several years (see DROST). While such information is bound to disappoint those who romanticize his art as the work of a single, inspired genius, it is not disconcerting to the scholar Svetlana Alpers. She believes that Rembrandt succeeded in his goals, which were "mastery in the studio and the establishment of value in the marketplace." Students worked with him throughout his career; names of more than 50 were recorded. He wished to be free from catering to individual patrons and chose to sell the works from his large studio on the open market. His art became, mutatis mutandis, a commodity-a concept that troubles some historians even more than does de-attribution. Regardless of his motives or success, Rembrandt, who
spent lavishly on his house as well as his collections of art and other objects, fell deeply in debt, especially with creditors to whom he owed paintings. At one point, he had to declare bankruptcy. However fluctuating Rembrandt's reputation, the characteristics of "a Rembrandt" are unmistakable. Conventions of the BAROQUE are recognizable: significant contrasts of light and shadow, movement and drama; not the energetic drama of his contemporary RUBENS, but a more introspective, silent drama. In fact theatrics was a particular interest; Rembrandt was a great collector of costumes and other paraphernalia, from gold chains to brass helmets that he used as props in his paintings.His use of his medium was also theatrical-Rembrandt applied paint thickly, so that it embodied texture (sometimes it was even sculptural) and imparted meaning in and of itself. His use of the medium to expressive effect was increased by the perpetual reworking of his paintings and ETCHINGS. Best known among his etchings is the Hundred Guilder Print (c. 1648), the subject of which is Christ healing the sick. The title alludes to the high price allegedly paid soon after the work was made. It exemplifies Rembrandt's magisterial handling of light and shadow, awe and spirituality, even in black and white.
His wide-ranging subjects include lively group portraits (Syndics of the Clothmakers' Guild, 1662; see GAZE), moving biblical subjects (Prodigal Son, c.1665), pictures of his family (Titus at His Desk, 1655), and an extraordinary
sequence of self-portraits, in a variety of costumes, that map his physiognomy and record his various self-images, orrole-playing. Though surviving documents recorded his business, located in Amsterdam, there is little in his own words to describe his ideas; however, one of his students did write down one of Rembrandt's answers to a pupil who was asking too many questions: "Take it as a rule to use properly what you already know; then you will come to learn soon enough the hidden things about which you ask."