Rembrandt
His use of chiaroscuro (values of light and shade) is peculiarly his. By it he produces the feeling of form, and of more than form; in the faces he has recorded we perceive more than features copied in color. We get a glimpse into the real being beneath the flesh and blood. “The heads are enveloped in darkness, out of which emerge the features, the eyes especially arresting the attention. Through the depth and poignancy of their gaze one seems to look into the very soul of the subject.”
The greatest art is never merely photographic. Genius sees a plain street of ordinary houses with one crooked chimney, perhaps, reaching toward the stars, and paints the scene so that this is the .road to El Dorado, and coming and going along it are beautiful fancies that touch us with golden finger-tips in passing.
This separate eye of genius is one of the world’s most precious possessions. Rembrandt was always conscious of his own secret vision. He had the clear insight of the artists of Holland into the beauty of everyday things and people, and if he had been just a Dutch master and not a world genius, he would have found an infinite satisfaction in painting faithfully scenes from his native land. As it was, the perfection which was the goal of the Dutch artists was his starting-point. He took for granted the things everyone else saw, and concerned himself with what they did not see his secret.
In the same way Michelangelo took the perfection of the human form for granted, and built up his own world of men and women as he saw them - humanity invested with something of the largeness and strangeness of divinity.
Rembrandt Harmensz Van Rijn could not conceive of working in any other way than his own. From the first he was very sure of his ability, and at eighteen - an age when most artists were still at the apprentice stage - he took a studio of his own and announced himself an artist. His father, a miller, had sent the boy, while he was still young, to a Latin school, to prepare for Leyden University. After a year of schooling there Rembrandt showed so plainly that art, and not letters, was his calling that his parents apprenticed him to a Leyden painter called Swanenborch.
There for three years Rembrandt studied drawing and painting; after that he went to Amsterdam to work with Last- man, a Dutch artist who had studied in Italy and was much influenced by Caravaggio, the realist. For six months the youth worked with this painter; then quite suddenly he threw down his brush and went home, saying he was going to work in his own way.
THE TIRELESS GENIUS WHO MADE NINE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES
This faith in himself was justified. In 1631, after three years of private study, Rembrandt, then about twenty-five years old, went to Amsterdam and there began a career of most amazing industry. He painted portraits and pictures for the wealthy, and made etchings for his poorer patrons. Apart from those which have been lost, and his earlier studies which he himself destroyed, this marvelous artist executed six hundred pictures and three hundred etchings. He seems never to have had an idle moment; in the earlier years of his profession he must have lived with an etcher’s needle in his hand and a copperplate before him; and to this passion for the engraved line, and Rembrandt’s determination to be himself and express that which he saw in his own way, the artist owes his place as the greatest etcher and one of the greatest painters the world has known. At the age of twenty-four he had “left himself no room for improvement” in the art of etching.
HOW REMBRANDT LEARNED TO PAINT THE THOUGHT BEHIND THE SMILE
In the course of his life Rembrandt painted and drew a variety of subjects, but all his interests really focused on the human face. His own eye was sensitive to the faintest shadow of change passing over a man’s countenance.
Knowing so much and seeing so much, he made haste to record it. His father and mother, who must have been patient souls, allowed themselves to be drawn a great many times in all the moods and tempers which either the accident of the moment or their son’s despotic will dictated. Or he would use himself as a model, sitting before his copperplate, needle in one hand, mirror in the other.
Thus he drew his own face repeatedly, serious or smiling, “the artist with frightened eyes,” “the artist with a scarf round his neck” and “the artist” in many other varieties of costume.
There were two far-reaching effects of this tireless industry: one was Rembrandt’s ability to render easily every conceivable expression of the face, the other was a supreme mastery of technique.
THE WONDERFUL ETCHING OF THE 1ST RAISING OF LAZARUS
If we look at his large etching The Raising of Lazarus we shall see there surprise, consternation and other natural emotions drawn on men’s faces in a way that is unrivaled in the story of art. It is not an easy or manufactured emotion that the artist shows: each man seems amazed or horrified in his own peculiar way, as his character dictates. We can almost follow the men home and hear them talk about the miracle to their friends.
A similar interest is attached to what is perhaps the most famous etching in the world - Christ Healing the Sick, known as The Hundred Guilder Piece. The artist never quite finished this etching, but as it stands it is a study we should not weary of looking at. On each of the faces Rembrandt has stamped the individual soul. The draftsmanship is superb; not a line is wasted. When, not long since, there came to light an old collection including a number of Rembrandt etchings, three of these, a fine impression of The Hundred Guilder Piece and two others, were sold at nearly $6,000 each.
THE MASTER’S TOUCH THAT MAKES A PICTURE SEEM TO LIVE
Rembrandt’s technique was a separate gift. At first his line was a little tight and hard, as in the early etching of himself about the age of twenty-one. Presently it became loose and vibrating, very gentle and very strong at the same time, as in the incomparable etchings of his mother. As his line loosened, his brush work loosened also; at times he has the freedom of Velasquez, that supreme genius of technique.
Technique in drawing and painting, as we know, is the craft of art; that is to say, a person without any vision of beautiful things may be able to draw a perfect line. With some artists technique is the beginning and end of their peculiar gift. Very often too much attention to the technique will kill the freedom and spontaneity of the artist’s thought. Technique is concerned mainly with two problems: outline and shade masses. An outline is really false to nature; faces can no more be truly represented by an outline than an orange can be represented by a circle.
The only true rendering of solid objects is in modeling or sculpture. But there are degrees by which the outline can attain to the qualities of sculpture. That is to say, a great master can, by a single outline, give the illusion of a rounded form. Generally speaking, the tighter a line is, the farther it is from representing a solid object. Michelangelo’s cartoons or sketches, Goya’s drawings and Rembrandt’s etchings will show us what. a loose, vibrating line is.
THE GREAT GIFT AND DEEPEST SECRET OF REMBRANDT
The dealing with masses, showing light and shade, is another and stouter problem. If you look at a person’s face, particularly in lamp-light or candle-light, you will see that part of the features, the nose or the cheek bones or the chin, are very clearly in high light; other parts of the face are very clearly in shadow. If a face were made like a solid cube there would be an end of the matter. Anyone who can draw at all can draw or paint the high lights or the strong shadows on a face; that which artists spend years in trying to render is the part where high light slips into dark shadow; the tiny planes on the rounded flesh that join up the two extremes of white and black.
Here Rembrandt’s technique was superb. A few lines, a little work of the brush, and he was across that terrible no man’s land which many artists never cover at all. Leonardo da Vinci was another genius who had mastered this most difficult problem in portraiture.
But when we think of Rembrandt’s art from the point of view of characterization, great as it is, or of its marvelous technique, we have not touched his outstanding genius. Rembrandt got into his work a luminosity - very different from actual light-and-shade treatment - which has never been found either in etchings or paintings before or since. In etching “no other master ever made white paper radiate as he did.” This luminous atmosphere in his etching and in his painting—was Rembrandt’s secret, his genius, his gift to the world.
Anyone can make light, light and darkness dark. Rembrandt made his darks glow with light, his lights hold a peculiar soft gloom. “He surrounded centres of light with waves of darkness. The darkness itself in his pictures is transparent; you can peer into it and discover half- concealed forms; everything provokes curiosity; there is mystery; and it acts upon the mind so that the real and the imaginary become mingled. It is at once a reality and a dream!’ A secret that can be told is no longer a secret. To attempt to explain Rembrandt’s supreme genius is as difficult as it is to copy it. In some moods he seems to have tried to use light as actual material with which to build form; he seems to have composed in light.
The Venetians got light into their pictures, and often a gentle suavity; but they were painters willfully making beautiful things a little more beautiful painters dealing with subjects of religious or classic story that were already full of ‘interest in men’s minds and only needed to be painted to become adored.
HOW REMBRANDT LOVED TO PAINT THE PEOPLE OF HOLLAND
When Rembrandt painted a religious subject he often gave it a genre feeling. For instance, in a Holy Family, now in Munich, he represents the father and mother in a Dutch home, bending over a familiar Dutch cradle in which lies the Babe. And instead of gods and princes, queens and nymphs, this artist chose for the figures in most of his pictures humbler folk, sometimes the ragged and poor. Yet there is nothing commonplace in these creatures, for the man who put them on canvas or paper saw human beings in a broad, sympathetic way, and gave character and dignity to their forms and faces when he drew or painted them. A gesture or a turn of the head might have the force of presenting some universal truth.
Not only the number of Rembrandt’s works but the wide variety of subjects and kinds is astonishing. Of them all, as we have said, the portraits are of most importance and interest. True as likenesses, expressing the characteristics of each individual, they are interesting as pictures, too. Some of his portraits of old women are unequaled in the way they embody the calm dignity and courage of age, and record the traces of experience - the fruit of living. Stiffness and firmness may still be there, but sharpness has been smoothed away by the touch of time. Into just the folded, quiet hands of an old woman Rembrandt could put such beauty and meaning that the sight of them almost brings tears of tenderness. A transparent delicacy or a sturdy capableness gives them distinction and suggests what part they have played in a long lifetime. No other has been so sympathetic a painter of old age. It is the impression made upon the painter himself that comes to us through the picture he made. We see his beloved young wife Saskia, or his good friend Jan Six, or his son Titus, as he saw them.
REMBRANDT AND HALS AS PORTRAIT- PAINTERS COMPARED
If Hals and Rembrandt are put side by side as portrait-painters, certain differences can be clearly noted. Hals is like one who can tell a tale quickly and brilliantly. His easy strokes play over the surfaces with ready skill, which can be understood and followed. Rembrandt’s portraits, on the other hand, are built up, “constructed” with solid strength, giving evidence of bone and muscle beneath the surfaces. His is an art that cannot be expressed in a formula and imitated.
Yet when these two artists were engaged to make large group pictures for corporations, the method of Hals gave the greater satisfaction to the patrons. In his groups each solid citizen was unmistakably represented by an excellent portrait, whereas in Rembrandt’s the portrait quality might be made second to the picture composition. This is particularly true of the Sortie of the Banning Cock Company, in Amsterdam, where the figures emerge from such deep shadow that the picture was long called, by mistake, The Night Watch. One whole figure and a few heads furnish “some focal spots of brilliance,” but most of the personages are indistinguishable in the shadowy gloom, which has grown deeper with time. Instead of being ranged in neat rows, the members of the company are shown rushing out of their club-house - coming forward from the dim background. The Banning Cock Company were disappointed, but their picture stands as a record of Rembrandt’s struggle between the impulse to give a detailed representation of outside appearances and the desire to express inner impressions of his own mind.
An early group picture, The Lesson in Anatomy, however, had made Rembrandt famous because of its clear characterization. And The Syndics of the Clothworkers’ Guild, in the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, painted near the end of his life, brings together at last the two efforts in a most successful result. It is “a work of imagination and yet of real life.”
HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY FOLLOWED BY DARKER YEARS
For ten years after he painted The Lesson in Anatomy, Rembrandt lived in prosperity and comfort, busy with pupils and at work on the portraits of patrons. At this time he was happy in his home life with his wife, Saskia van Uylenborch, whose portrait he painted many times. Reveling in the beauty of sumptuous materials, he bought freely and lived generously. In these years of vigor and youth Rembrandt dipped his brush into many colors; as he grew older his tone was quieter, his color more restrained.
In 1642 Saskia died, and in the same year his Banning Cock Company picture gave dissatisfaction, injuring his popularity. The rest of his life was darkened by money troubles, although he painted with extraordinary industry and was faithfully helped by his son Titus and by Hendrickje Stoffels, a devoted servant, until she died, in 1656. There is a fine portrait of Hendrickje in Berlin.
As in the case of Michelangelo, Rembrandt’s last years were lonely and sorrowful, though there was in his temperament none of the moroseness and sourness which kept from the great Florentine the joys of friendship. Rembrandt’s failing, rather, was that he had been spendthrift - too generous, too trusting and too sure of the world’s kindliness. But he would have been the last person to think his case over-sad. The thing that mattered most to him was his work, and this he had brought, in evil report and good, to a triumphant end. Born about 1606, he died in the year 1669.
While London, Paris, Dresden, Berlin, Petrograd and other European cities have notable paintings by the Dutch master, the great mass of his work is in Amsterdam and The Hague. In America, New York is especially rich in paintings by Rembrandt, and there are examples of his work in Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities of the United States.
