|
EXHIBITION
THEMES
Introduction
Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) had
a gift of visual invention that spawned his productive and successful
career. A master across three media, he radically redefined the
technique of etching by bringing to it the freedom and spontaneity
of painting and drawing.
Rembrandt’s Journey explores the dynamic evolution of
the artist’s extensive and richly varied work in printmaking
within the context of his paintings and drawings. In the exhibition,
the three media are alternately presented as intertwined or parallel
developments. Following a broad chronological arc, the installation
presents certain themes to which Rembrandt repeatedly returned with
fresh insights and interpretations: biblical illustration, portraiture
and self-portraiture, daily life, landscape, and the nude. His choice
of subject matter was unusually wide, and his work demonstrates
a Shakespearean mixture of moods ranging from earthy comedy to somber
tragedy.
In certain cases, objects from different decades are juxtaposed
to highlight changes in Rembrandt’s artistic thinking. These
developments are so dramatic that it almost seems the Rembrandt
of the 1630s—with his emphasis on robust physical action, calligraphic
line, and undulant Baroque rhythms—was a wholly different artist
from the Rembrandt of the 1650s, with his more serene and meditative
moods, controlled and economical use of line, and stable, almost
architectural structures. Regardless, the artist remained a master
storyteller whose literary inventiveness equaled his visual talent.
The works on view display a constant interchange between direct
observation of reality and vivid imagination.
back to top
Early Self-Portraits,
c. 1628–30
Rembrandt drew, etched, and painted his own likeness
throughout his career with greater variety, imagination, and psychological
intensity than any other seventeenth-century Dutch artist. As he
looked into the mirror, Rembrandt cast himself in various roles—dandy,
courtier, bohemian. He used the mirror as a means of studying the
many ways emotions are expressed by the human face. The
Artist in His Studio pictures a young Rembrandt at work
in Leiden, the town in which he was born and spent the early years
of his career. The artist’s tentative bearing and placement
in the shaded background of the composition contrast with the poise
and self-confidence with which Rembrandt later presented himself
in the etching Self-Portrait
Leaning on a Stone Sill, executed after he relocated to
Amsterdam (c. 1631) where he enjoyed success and prosperity during
the first decade after his move.
back to top
Head Studies and
Fantasy Portraits c. 1630–40
There was a lively market in Rembrandt’s time for
painted and etched studies of venerable models in exotic garb (called
tronies), such as Old
Man with a Gorget and Black Cap, which were intended
to represent rulers, seasoned military commanders, and biblical
wise men and patriarchs. Rembrandt both transformed his own features
and also utilized aged models with powerfully defined, weathered
features as suitable subjects for these anonymous fantasy portraits
and character heads.
back to top
Saskia, 1634–38
Around 1633 Rembrandt met Saskia, a cousin of art dealer
Hendrik van Uylenburgh, Rembrandt’s business associate. They
married in 1634, and she became one of the artist’s favorite
models. An early etching, Self-Portrait
with Saskia, depicts the artist with his new wife.
Their love is testified by the many images he made of her before
her untimely death in June of 1642.
back to top
Scenes from Everyday
Life, 1635–51
Rembrandt’s keen observation of the world included
the life of the street and seasonal activities. His vision of humanity
was refreshingly robust and vital, rather than sentimental. The
artist’s characteristic practice of contrasting heavily worked
passages with lightly sketched or blank ones often enlivened such
images. In the late 1630s and early 1640s, Rembrandt made numerous
sketches of women and children. Unabashedly depicting of all sides
of life, he later underscored the failings of his fellow man in
works that are alternately cynical, humorous, or tender. In the
etching The Flute Player,
the genteel literary and artistic tradition of pastoral love gives
way to a franker view of the simple life, as a lusty rogue eyes
a shepherd girl.
back to top
Early
Landscapes, c. 1635–50
Beginning in the late 1630s,
Rembrandt made excursions beyond the city walls of Amsterdam in
order to draw fields, dikes, farmhouses, and distant views of the
city. By 1641 he had also begun to etch landscapes. Rembrandt's
landscapes range from quick, abbreviated sketches to elaborate commentaries
on nature and man's relationship to his environment. The
Landscape with the Three Trees is one of his finest.
back to top
The
Life of Christ
Among the numerous paintings
and prints of Christ’s infancy, The
Holy Family with Angels combines Rembrandt’s realistic
domestic, imagery with a distinctive passage more closely aligned
with the Italian high baroque: a train of worshipful angels descending
on a beam of mystic light. The
Hundred Guilder Print, executed around three years
later (c. 1648), is named for the extraordinarily high price paid
for an impression in Rembrandt’s lifetime. This etching, also
known as Christ Preaching, is a self-conscious masterpiece that
combines various themes from Christ’s earthly ministry. Light
and dark tones and varying degrees of finish are fluidly interwoven
as Christ shines like a radiant beacon. One of the first images
that Rembrandt regularly printed on the exotic, warm-toned, silken-textured
Japanese paper that the Dutch had recently imported, the print is
one of only nine impressions known of the first state. Later impressions
of it can be seen in Rembrandt’s Studio, Gallery 142, through
April 18. Rembrandt made startling revisions to the print known
as The Three Crosses
as he rethought the image. Constructed with great firmness but executed
with remarkable spontaneity and freedom, the print is a pure drypoint
of unprecedented size in which the artist scratched the lines directly
into the copper, sometimes with the assistance of a straightedge.
back to top
Late
Landscapes, 1650–530
Rembrandt’s last group
of landscape drawings and etchings range from naturalistic panoramas
of Holland’s flat farmlands to more synthetic, invented landscapes
that combine local details with imagined cliffs and mountains. One
such scene, Farmstead
Beside a Canal, is typically enlivened by a vignette
of human activity that is not immediately apparent. Unlike his earlier
landscapes, where the activity is in the foreground, his late landscapes
focus on the distant background.
back to top
The
Female Nude, 1658–62
From 1658 to 1661, the female
nude was a major theme in Rembrandt’s prints. His etched and
drawn figures range from unadorned to tantalizing fantasies, but
all were initially based on direct observation of the model. The
glowing warmth and sensuality of these works have led to comparisons
with nudes by the sixteenth-century master Titian, yet Rembrandt’s
women, such as those depicted in Female
Nude Seated on a Stool, and The
Woman with the Arrow, are more touching and vulnerable
in their candid realism.
back to top
Late
Paintings
The boldly drawn, allegorical image, An
Allegory: The Phoenix, eludes precise interpretation.
It may represent Rembrandt’s optimistic intention to surmount
his bankruptcy and other personal difficulties that plagued him
in the late 1650s. The mythical phoenix, which was reborn from the
ashes of its own funeral pyre, was traditionally shown as a mature,
handsome, well-plumaged bird. Rembrandt, with characteristic realism,
portrays it as an awkward young fledgling.
Rembrandt’s bright, rather Titian-like image of the goddess
Flora fuses aspects
of painted portraits of his deceased wife, Saskia, with overtones
of his companion of later years, Hendrickje Stoffels. Characteristic
of Rembrandt’s late work, idealism and classical simplicity
combine with realism, most visible in the figure’s sturdy hands.
The thick, sculptural application of paint with a palette knife
and brush is also typical of Rembrandt’s work in this period.
In the elegantly restrained Self-Portrait
now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. ( painted when
he was fifty-three), Rembrandt’s experienced face records a
long and tumultuous life with remarkable confidence. The core of
this candid self-presentation is the steady, dignified gaze of his
large, deep-set eyes.
back to top
Above: The Holy Family with Angels, 1645. Oil on canvas.
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
|
|
