REMBRANDT’S FIRST TEACHER WAS JACOB ISAACSZ VAN SWANENBURG, who came from a well-known Leiden family of public administrators, merchants and artisans. Jacob was the eldest son of Isaac, the city’s omnipresent painter, who was known as Master Nicolai. The paterfamilias himself had been trained by his uncle, Pieter Cornelisz Kunst, and Aertgen van Leyden. His later teacher was Frans Floris, the most important painter in Antwerp.
In 1569, Master Nicolai had married the daughter of a prosperous cloth merchant, Marytge Dedel, who was ten years his junior. Two years later, immediately after the birth of their eldest son, Jacob, he purchased a building overlooking the New Rhine, on the site of what is now number 45. It stood between the mansions of the fabulously wealthy brewer Van Heemskerck, on the corner of the alley, and that of a surgeon. A little farther down the road lived Petrus Scriverius, a close family friend.
After Leiden had joined the side of the Dutch Revolt in 1572, several new appointments were made in the city council. Van Heemskerck, a prominent Calvinist, became one of the new burgomasters, as did Joost Willemsz Dedel, Master Nicolai’s father-in-law.
Master Nicolai was evidently viewed as an unimpeachable adherent of the new doctrine. Even so, like the Catholic glippers who had slipped out of the city and forfeited their houses and property as a result, since they were viewed as traitors, he had stayed away from the city during the siege of Leiden. He spent that period in Hamburg.
Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg, Self-portrait, 1568.
As son-in-law of the well-known cloth merchant, Master Nicolai may possibly have acted as a kind of agent for him. In Hamburg the red cloth from Leiden was dyed black and sold for the city’s far more expensive black cloth, a ruse that badly damaged Leiden’s reputation. Perhaps he had returned from a journey to address a commercial problem of this kind to find the Spanish troops suddenly surrounding the walls, and was unable to get back into Leiden safely. He was not dogmatic in political or religious matters, but was rather a skilful pragmatist. He moved in Remonstrant circles without ever breaking off contact with Catholic family members.
Master Nicolai had a successful career and was appointed as a magistrate in 1576. Between 1596 and 1607 he served several terms as burgomaster. A few months after the relief of Leiden, he was called on to design part of the decorations in the procession to mark the inauguration of Leiden University. This was the first in a long series of commissions: designs for stained-glass windows in churches and images of the cloth trade for the Saaihal. For three whole decades, not a single artistic commission was granted without this administrative and artistic jack-ofall-trades being involved in it in some way or other.
In his house on the New Rhine, Master Nicolai trained three of his sons for a future in the studio: Jacob, Claes and Willem. Other sons followed their father’s career in public administration. One succeeded Jan van Hout as town clerk after the latter’s death in 1609. The most brilliant son was the youngest, Willem: he became a superb printmaker, producing beautiful engravings depicting the anatomy theatre, the library, the fencing school and the university’s botanical garden. Willem’s promising career was cut short by his premature death in 1612 at just thirty-two years of age. Claes, a “righteous Remonstrant”, was a respectable painter of unremarkable work.
As Master Nicolai’s eldest son, Jacob van Swanenburg would have been destined to continue the family tradition. He brought his period of training in his father’s studio to a close with a trip to Italy to study the paintings of Leonardo, Raphael and Titian in the original. He left for the south around 1591, when he would have been maybe twenty years of age. But to the astonishment of his father, Jacob did not come back. He would not return to Leiden for twenty-four years.
Jacob was bewitched by what he saw in Italy. He went to Venice, moved in painters’ circles in Rome, and then went still farther south. His travels ended in Naples, when a woman captured his heart. He fell in love with Margaretha Cordone, the daughter of a grocer and merchant in Oriental goods. To marry her, he returned to the bosom of the Mother Church. Seven children were born to the couple, three of whom survived to adulthood.
Jacob had not sought his parents’ consent for the marriage. They did not hear about it until afterwards. When his father and mother had the notary draw up their wills on 28th January 1610—Master Nicolai was ill and feared for his life—the document stated that Jacob was “abroad and married in Italy”. Alone among the children, he was excluded from the inheritance. For his father, it must have been a bitter disappointment that his son had not wanted to follow in his footsteps, marrying into a well-to-do family and making a career for himself in Leiden.
Jacob would never see his father again. Master Nicolai was troubled by a bladder stone in 1614 and suffered severe pain, “caused by passing water”. The family chronicle recorded that the ageing Van Swanenburg was afflicted by attacks of fever for several weeks. On 10th March 1614, he fell into a sleep from which he failed to awake. He breathed his last breath and “gave up the Ghost in the gentlest of ways”.
Had the news of his father’s death reached Jacob? Was that why he returned to his native city? All we know is that he had run into trouble in Naples before then. He clashed with the Inquisition in 1608, after he had hung a painting of a witches’ sabbath at his stall within the grounds of the Church of Santa Maria della Carita. Jacob was questioned but not convicted. He managed to escape prosecution by offering the feeble excuse that he had only hung the painting up to let it dry. Possibly the ground had become too hot under his feet.
Jacob decided to leave his wife and three young children with his parents-in-law and return to Leiden. On 21st December 1615, he knocked on the front door of his parental home on New Rhine. The Van Swanenburg family welcomed the prodigal son back into the fold. Jacob found the city of his birth to be a congenial place. He put his affairs in order, taking over a year to do so, and left for Naples on 4th April 1617 to fetch his wife and children.
On 6th January 1618, Jacob returned to Leiden, having crossed and recrossed the Alps in a journey that took a little over two months, with his wife Margaretha and their children Maria (aged fifteen), Silvester (ten) and Catherina (four). The family moved into a building on Langebrug, present-day number 89, diagonally opposite Wolsteeg, a road that ended, fifty metres farther, across from the steps of the town hall on Breestraat: a few hundred metres, as the crow flies, from the house overlooking the New Rhine in which he had been born.
The road now called Langebrug—“Long Bridge”—had been a canal known in the Early Middle Ages as Voldersgracht (“Fullers’ Canal”), because this was where the cleansing or “fulling” of woven materials took place. The mush of uric acid, soil and soap with which fabrics were “felted” went straight into the canal. It emitted a noxious stench, and fulling was eventually banished to the outskirts of the city. In the seventeenth century the Voldersgracht was covered in stages with stone vaults, eventually becoming one long bridge—which is how the street where Master Jacob lived acquired its name. The stone vaults were safer for pedestrians, whether or not in an inebriated state. The artist Aertgen van Leyden, who had taught Jacob’s father, had been relieving himself in the Voldersgracht in 1564, having had rather too much to drink, when he lost his balance, toppled into the water and drowned.
Around 1620, when Rembrandt arrived at the painters’ workshop as a young trainee, the residents of Langebrug were a miscellaneous bunch. They included many small businessmen and artisans. No really wealthy people—they lived in the great mansions on Breestraat or Rapenburg—but neither was there any real poverty.
The Slaughtered Ox, 1655.
There was a constant toing-and-froing in that section of the narrow street, especially with maidservants and other women who were off to the tripe hall or Penshal to purchase bacon, blood pudding, sausage or tripe. There were two entrances to the Penshal market: one on Breestraat, the other on Langebrug, diagonally opposite the Van Swanenburg residence. The latter was called the “Sheep Gate”: its stone arch, dating from 1607, displays an image of a ram holding Leiden’s coat of arms.
The Penshal was not an actual hall but a small square with covered colonnades on either side. It had once hosted a haberdashery market, but now it was the place where offal such as liver, kidneys, brains and lungs were arrayed on stone tables beneath the arcades, carved and sold. There were only two approved sites for the sale of meat in Leiden. Beef was sold at the meat market in the town hall, while pork and offal were traded in the Penshal. This facilitated good hygienic practices and produced clarity for those charged with levying excise duties.
While the meat trade at the town hall was conducted by men, it was women who sold low-quality offal at the Penshal. These market women—the “bacon or tripe wives”—mainly catered for the poorer sections of the local community. Rembrandt would have seen slaughtered cows dangling in the indoor meat market in a splayed posture resembling the upside-down crucifixion of the Apostle Peter, the carcass sliced open. Did he shudder at the sight? In 1655, he depicted the cruel beauty of a crucified ox, in an image that would in later centuries serve as a source of inspiration to Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon.
We do not know why Rembrandt’s parents chose to apprentice him to Jacob van Swanenburg. One might have thought Joris van Schooten, Leiden’s most highly esteemed and experienced master painter at the time, would have been a more obvious choice. Simon van Leeuwen wrote in his brief history of Leiden (Korte besgryving van het Lugdunum Batavorum nu Leyden, 1672) that Van Schooten was in fact Rembrandt’s first teacher, but there is no corroborating evidence for this.
Father and mother Van Rijn moved in the same non-dogmatic circles as the Van Swanenburg family, whose influence was sharply curtailed after the 1618 purge of the local executive. Even so, Rembrandt’s parents would have hoped that a scion of that family might be able to introduce their son into the world of city magistrates, patrons and art collectors. Perhaps the story of Jacob’s long sojourn in Italy also had a certain appeal. He was the only painter in Leiden who boasted foreign experience of this kind.
Art historians have endlessly insisted that Jacob van Swanenburg did not exert a shred of influence on his brilliant pupil. But are they right? According to Orlers, who himself owned a “magical piece” by Master Jacob, Rembrandt developed his skills so rapidly with Van Swanenburg “that art lovers were quite amazed, and that it was abundantly plain that he would mature with the passage of time into an outstanding Painter”.
At first sight, few resemblances suggest themselves between the work of the fifty-year-old Jacob and that of the young Rembrandt. Not much of Master Jacob’s work has survived: we have a stiff View of St Peter’s Square in Rome and a handful of apocalyptic horror scenes. A Temptation of St Anthony is attributed to Jacob—the subject of the first painting we know by Michelangelo, along with The Rape of Proserpine and several scenes from Dante’s Inferno.
When Rembrandt entered the studio on Langebrug, around 1622, Master Jacob had just finished painting the underworld on a panel measuring 1 × 1.25 metres. A spectacular piece. Pluto, lord of the underworld, steers his chariot through billowing dark clouds. The sky is ablaze: the night is on fire. Damned souls are trying in vain to evade their fate, as Charon scoops them up into his ferry boat across the River Styx. They are skewered and gobbled up by devils with wings and grotesque heads. Portrayed in the enormous, gaping jaws of a monster are a number of detestable sins. The woman who is pulling out her tongue represents bearing false witness. The man stuffing himself with food symbolizes gluttony.
Jacob Isaacz van Swanenburg, The Underworld with Charon’s Boat, c.1620.
What possible link suggests itself with the work of the young Rembrandt? The relationship is invisible. It is easy to understand, however, why Master Jacob’s influence is so hard to demonstrate. As an apprentice, Rembrandt had come to lay the foundations for his career as an artist. These foundations would later be painted over—quite literally—with the passage of time.
Man Drawing from a Plaster Model, 1639–43.
The boy had to make endless sketches, by daylight and candlelight, of plaster busts, feet and hands, and anatomical prints to master the art of depicting the human body. He will have had the occasional opportunity to draw from a live model, to strengthen his grasp of perspective. He had to practise the rendering of materials—depicting the folds in a woollen cloak, for instance. Again and again. All those initial efforts from the days of his apprenticeship have been lost. They were rarely made on paper, but mostly on a blank slate or tabula rasa—drawings that were subsequently erased for all eternity.
Rembrandt learnt to distinguish between different pigments, from white lead to chimney-black or bone-black—obtained from charring animal bones in the fire for hours—and from vermilion to Spanish green, and was taught how to pulverize pigments on the grindstone and mix them with linseed oil. He had to continue crushing the pigments until they became a wonderfully smooth dye, sometimes thin, sometimes thick and creamy, giving off a pungent aroma. He had to clean paintbrushes—coarse, bristly ones made of ox hair, and the very finest ones consisting of just one or two tail-hairs from a marten—and prepare his master’s palette.
He also learnt how to prepare Master Jacob’s oak panels: cracks in the panel had to be filled in, and the surface made non-absorbent, by using a brush to apply an initial primer of glue, followed by a layer of glue-chalk gesso. This smoothed out the knots and irregularities and stopped the oil seeping into the wood. Next came a sanding procedure, creating a smooth surface on which the master would apply an underpainting of the scene in “dead colour”. Only then would Van Swanenburg paint the different sections of his composition on the panel, moving from the background to the foreground.
As part of his daily routine, Rembrandt became versed in the complex grammar of form, light, colour and space. The pupil would often stand beside his teacher, literally copying his movements. He also studied theory. The most important text was Karel van Mander’s didactic poem on the art of painting, Den Grondt der Edel vrij Schilderconst (“The Foundations of the Noble and Free Art of Painting”), part of his Schilder-Boeck, which was written in rhyming verse to make it easier to recite and to commit to memory.
It will have been some time before Rembrandt was allowed to apply the initial design for a painting himself. Or to make a copy of one of the master’s works, which meant first copying it as precisely as possible and then personalizing it with minor alterations. Working on an Inferno would have shown him how difficult that was: painting fire. Karel van Mander has a special word of praise, when discussing the topics of reflection, shimmer and lustre, for painters who are able to depict convincingly the rage of Vulcan. His words may be roughly rendered as follows:
He exercises imperious rule over art
Who figures well with colours Vulcan’s wrath
And the awful misery of his realm.
Jacob van Swanenburg had learnt the art of painting dark-flaming underworlds in Italy. At the end of the sixteenth century, when he had left Leiden and journeyed first to Rome, then Naples, he found himself in a land that was fascinated by dramatic nocturnal scenes. He was not the only artist to draw inspiration from Italy in this area: countless foreign painters came to steal the fire of the night there, including Adam Elsheimer from Frankfurt, Peter Paul Rubens from Antwerp and Gerard van Honthorst of Utrecht, who became known as Gerardo della Notte—“Gerard of the Night”.
When Van Swanenburg and his wife were living and working in Naples, the famous Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who was seen as a magician who could conjure with light, stayed there for some time. Caravaggio was the master of chiaroscuro, the sharp contrasts between light and dark that give his paintings such a dramatic impact. Later, after his return to Leiden, Master Jacob would undoubtedly have told his pupil about Caravaggio. It was like a spark in a barrel of gunpowder.
There was something else about Caravaggio’s work that must have fascinated Rembrandt, besides his chiaroscuro: his realism. For the Italians it was a shock to see the lifelike quality of the figures in his paintings. They looked as if they were about to step right out of the canvas. The angel caressing Matthew’s hand (in Matthew and the Angel), in what was almost a loving embrace with the Evangelist, caused a scandal in Rome. The cardinal of San Luigi dei Francesi forced Caravaggio to rework the painting in 1602. But even the new version, which still hangs in the Contarelli chapel of the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, stirred consternation because of the realism and humanity with which the angel and the ageing, ungainly Matthew were painted.
Karel van Mander, who had the honour of being the first to publish a biographical sketch on Caravaggio, pronounced the indecorous work a disgrace. He scoffed that the Italian master simply painted what he saw in the natural world—an accomplishment in which Rembrandt would later indeed take pride. The word edel—“noble”—in the title of Van Mander’s Den Grondt der Edel vrij Schilderconst, from which Rembrandt recited lines as a pupil, reflected the writer’s underlying moral purpose.
Besides teaching the technique of painting, the book also included moral exhortations for aspiring young painters. They must take care to maintain an unblemished reputation at all times, in their work and their life. That could certainly not be said of Caravaggio, who was embroiled in a series of scandals and brawls, and who had been obliged to flee from Rome in 1606 to escape a murder charge. Rejecting the popular image of artists—“Hoe schilder, hoe wilder”—Van Mander instead urged the opposite: “Hoe schilder, hoe stiller” (“The truer the painter, the quieter he is”).
Master Jacob pointed the way to Rembrandt. Studying with the Van Swanenburg family brought Rembrandt into contact with other painters in a natural way. Otto van Veen had been trained by Master Nicolai, after which he served an apprenticeship with Peter Paul Rubens. In his turn, the astute, successful artist from Antwerp travelled to Leiden to ask Willem van Swanenburg to make engravings after his paintings. In a sense, then, Rembrandt and Rubens might be seen as cousins from the same family of painters.
The influence of his first, eccentric master on the young Rembrandt is perhaps a little hard to demonstrate. But Jacob undoubtedly contributed to the formation of his student’s emotional life. In the Van Swanenburg and Van Heemskerck family chronicle we read, following Jacob’s death on 16th October 1638, that he was a gifted painter of works of great artistic quality, and a man of “a very fine character and disposition”.
With his tales of Rome and Naples and his blistering images of the underworld, the amiable Master Jacob must have fired Rembrandt’s imagination. Master Jacob and his wife communicated in Italian. It is an intriguing thought that the boy studying his craft in the Langebrug workshop did not draw models only from plaster busts, but that Maria, his master’s daughter, an Italian girl aged seventeen, may also have caught his eye.
Paint would not have been the only smell to have met Rembrandt’s nostrils in the studio. Might Margaretha have sometimes had a pasta sauce bubbling away on the fire? The cookery book for the Dutch housewife written in 1612 by Antonius Magirus, based on the work of Bartolomeo Scappi—the personal chef to Pope Pius IV and the “Michelangelo of the Italian kitchen”—includes a recipe for hutspot that would have appealed to locals. This same cookery book also has a recipe for mostaccioli, Neapolitan pastries. Magirus warmly advocates the use of Parmesan cheese, garlic and truffles. If Margaretha was able to obtain these ingredients, which would not have been easy in Leiden, she would certainly have used them.
Rembrandt served his first apprenticeship in Little Naples on Langebrug.