AFTER THREE YEARS—ROUGHLY FROM 1622 TO 1625—IN MASTER JACOB’S studio, Rembrandt was an accomplished draughtsman who was proficient at mixing pigments and oil to make paint, priming the surface of a panel and “laying in” a painting, one layer at a time. According to Orlers, art connoisseurs in Leiden were confounded by his progress and could see that he was destined for greatness. But he still had a long way to go.
Rembrandt wanted to become a history painter. In the hierarchy of visual arts, the history painter occupied the highest-ranking position because he had to be able to depict biblical, mythical and secular “histories” with the aid of light and colour, perspective and composition. He had to be adept at painting a range of subjects: portraits and tronies, animals, objects, draperies, landscapes and—above all—human figures in diverse poses and in different relationships to one another. A history painter was a divine director-cum-choreographer.
To redeem the promise of his artistic prowess, he had to widen his outlook, deepen his knowledge and refine his taste. In 1625, his father agreed to allow the young man to continue his training with Pieter Lastman, the best history painter in the Dutch Republic. Vondel compared Lastman to Rubens, calling him “the Apelles of Amsterdam”, after the divine painter of antiquity.
For Rembrandt, who had just turned eighteen, it meant his first real entrance into an arena outside Leiden. He had undoubtedly accompanied his father on a trip by carriage to The Hague, or gone with his mother on a visit to her ancestral town of Katwijk. The Hague and the seaside were relatively easy to reach: the return journey took just a few hours.
Travelling to Amsterdam, however, meant going by sailing vessel, on a journey that would take the entire day. And if he was unlucky, if the wind shifted or a gale blew up, it might take an additional day. The ferry service went three times a day: the first boat left at 6 a.m., when the city gates opened. It departed from the quayside of the Old Rhine canal in front of the poorhouse bakery, and travelled via Kaag and Braassem. After that the journey led close to the wind across the lake of Haarlemmermeer.
Haarlemmermeer is no longer a lake today. The hydraulic engineer Jan Adriaensz Leeghwater had already—back in 1641—submitted impoldering plans, which involved the use of 200 drainage mills, but two centuries would elapse before the land was reclaimed. In Rembrandt’s day a huge expanse of water stretched between Leiden, Haarlem and Amsterdam where conditions could quickly turn lethal. On 26th May 1573, this tempestuous lake had witnessed a sea battle in which Spanish ships led by Admiral Boussu sank part of the Dutch Sea Beggars’ fleet and routed the rest. In a storm, the water took such great bites out of the embankments—in 1611 the villages of Nieuwerkerk and Rietdijk were submerged as a result—that the Haarlemmermeer was known as “the water wolf”.
Did Rembrandt hold on tightly to the stay as the wind rose, the churning waves spewed white foam and the roaring water crashed across the bows? Did he grip his cap to stop it from being blown off his head? If so, he would have looked just like that single passenger who stares straight out at us, with an expression of eerie calm, in the middle of his own painting of Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633): “And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. / And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? / And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.” (Mark 4: 37–39)
The arrival in Amsterdam must have had an air of magic about it. As the boat sailed across the IJ towards the harbour, its boom stretched out wide, the west wind propelling it forward, the silhouette of the city would have appeared to fill the entire horizon. Church towers pierced the clouds and a forest of masts gradually came into focus. Hundreds of ships lay moored in rows, one behind the other, on the quayside of Damrak, surrounded by men busily loading and unloading their cargo.
The ferry pressed on, into the canals, which “swarmed” with small vessels, as noted in the seventeenth-century Beschryvinge van Amsterdam. The warehouses were taller and the shadows they cast in the canals blacker and deeper than the young Rembrandt would have seen before. Everything was larger and more congested. Even for a self-assured young painter from Holland’s second-largest city, Amsterdam must have been an astounding sight. A city into which one might vanish for good.
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633.
The French philosopher René Descartes marvelled at the anonymity of life in the Dutch Republic: “In what other country can one enjoy such complete liberty?” Descartes lived in several Dutch cities, including Leiden and Amsterdam, from which he wrote in a letter of 1630: “in this great city where I am, containing not a single man except me who doesn’t pursue a career in trade, everyone is so attentive to his own profit, that I could live here all my life without ever being noticed by a soul”.
Rembrandt’s first and second teachers must have known one another, if only by reputation. They had a good deal in common: both were Catholic, both had spent some of their formative years in Italy. Pieter Lastman came from an affluent Amsterdam family. His father was a messenger and his mother an assessor and dealer in second-hand goods. She possessed such a shrewd head for business that there was ample money to fund her sons’ education. One trained as a sail-maker, one as an engraver, a third as a goldsmith. Pieter became a painter.
After his apprenticeship with Gerrit Pietersz in Haarlem, Lastman had journeyed to Italy. He departed in the summer of 1602, staying away for almost five years. In Venice he copied paintings by the Italian masters, and in Rome he frequented the same circles as Caravaggio and Adam Elsheimer. Together with his Amsterdam friend Jan Pynas, Pieter rose early to watch the sun rise over the Eternal City and to see the golden morning light play over the ruins on the Palatine Hill. He must have started to feel like an Italian—Italian enough, in any case, to sign his paintings “Pietro Lastman”.
Returning to Amsterdam in 1607, he had moved in with his mother. His father had died while he was away. A year later, his mother took possession of a building on Sint Anthonisbreestraat (“Breestraat” for short), number 59, which was spacious enough for Pieter to set up his studio there. It was a strategic location. Within a short space of time, Breestraat between the old St Anthony’s Gate and the newer gate on the east side of the city became the beating heart of the art trade.
It was not only wealthy local burghers who gravitated to the new, spacious houses; the mansions also attracted immigrants from other parts of the world: Flemish cloth merchants, Germans, French people and Sephardic Jews, some of whom employed Moorish servants. In 1625, the art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh, whose father was the painter at the court of the Polish king in Cracow, took possession of a house on Breestraat. He found himself at the centre of an artists’ colony that included the painter brothers Jan and Jacob Pynas, Jan Tengnagel, the Remonstrant painter François Venant, the portraitist Thomas de Keyser—and Pieter Lastman.
When Rembrandt arrived at Lastman’s studio on Breestraat, there was a colourful painting on the easel in which at least twenty-five figures crowded around an ancient warlord sporting a laurel wreath: Coriolanus and the Roman Envoy. Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus was a Roman general who defected to the Volsci. As army commander he conquered one city after another, until he came to the city where he had been born. The Romans sent his mother and wife to beseech him not to attack Rome. He initially refused their entreaties, but eventually relented. The painting depicts the women’s supplication.
Pieter Lastman, Coriolanus and the Roman Envoy, 1625.
In Lastman’s studio, numerous colourful small and medium-sized paintings stood leaning against the walls, waiting for buyers. One was The Baptism of the Eunuch, which depicts a scene from Acts 8: 26–40: an angel appears to the deacon Philip and tells him to depart in the direction of Gaza. There he sees a chariot riding, carrying the chief treasurer of Ethiopia, “a eunuch”, who is reading the Old Testament Book of Isaiah. Philip then hears the words: “Go near, and join thyself to this chariot.”
The deacon complies, and then asks the Ethiopian if he understands what he is reading. He proceeds to explain the text, which so convinces the eunuch that he immediately asks to be baptized. Rembrandt must have been familiar with this curious, exotic conversion tale, but he now saw for the first time what a black man actually looked like.
Rembrandt must have been dazzled by his master’s erudition. Lastman’s paintings attested to a wide-ranging, sophisticated knowledge of literature, art, architecture and history. He derived the scene with the women kneeling before Coriolanus from Livy. The story of Balaam and the ass, which had previously been depicted almost exclusively in engravings, comes from the Book of Numbers. Every splash of paint was inspired by a book.
Training with Lastman meant hours of painstaking study. Rembrandt was no longer required to perform menial tasks in the studio, as he had done for Master Jacob in Leiden. He could set to work straight away copying his master’s works, in red chalk on paper—which was exactly how Lastman laid in his own compositions.
Rembrandt may possibly have produced some fully fledged copies in oil. If so, they have not been preserved—or have never been recognized as such. It was not customary for an assistant to display his own style. Customers came to Lastman’s workshop to see the master’s own hand, even if the work they were shown was made by his pupil.
In painting, as in classical poetry and rhetoric—which Rembrandt had studied at the Latin school—imitatio was not disparaged but respected as a way of honouring tradition. Borrowing or collecting themes, motifs or characters was not seen as intellectual theft, but as elegant allusions to admired predecessors.
Thus the sweet angel who breathes inspiration into the Evangelist Matthew in Caravaggio’s painting in the Contarelli chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome ended up (by way of a copy by Adam Elsheimer) in a painting by Lastman—later to fly into Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Abraham in 1635. Just in time to grasp Abraham’s arm and to save the life of his son, Isaac.
Rembrandt did more than execute copies in Lastman’s studio. He was driven by a keen sense of rivalry. That compulsion characterized his single-mindedness, although his desire to excel was also part of the tradition within which he was trained. Samuel van Hoogstraten stated baldly, in his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (“Introduction to the Academy of Painting”), that what had driven Raphael to vie with and eventually surpass Michelangelo was a combination of envy and ambition. “Let your rivalrous spirit be ignited,” he counselled young painters.
Remarkably, Rembrandt stayed only about six months in Amsterdam. Did he tire of it so soon? Probably it was a matter of finances. If we infer the apprenticeship fee from the sum that Rembrandt himself would demand four years later from his pupil Isaac Jouderville, his father was paying Lastman around fifty guilders every six months. This would have included the expenses incurred for materials in the workshop, but not the cost of board and lodging.
Perhaps he and his father made a joint assessment: would paying for additional training, at that stage, be a profitable investment? They decided it would not. But he was not eligible to set up in Amsterdam as an independent artist. To join the Painters’ Guild, he would need to have proved his worth with an Amsterdam master for three years. Since Leiden no longer had a St Luke’s Guild—it had not been reinstated after the relief of Leiden in 1574—there was nothing to prevent Rembrandt starting out there as a painter “alone and for himself”, as Orlers put it. In his native city, he immediately became a big fish in a small pond.
Rembrandt returned at a dark moment in time. Leiden was in the throes of the Black Death. In the last few months of 1624, so many bodies piled up that throughout Holland, as we read in the Van Heemskerck and Van Swanenburg chronicle, the name of Leiden struck terror into people’s hearts. If someone visiting another town let slip that he came from Leiden, he soon found everyone giving him a wide berth. Rembrandt’s sister Machtelt may have been one of the last victims of the epidemic. She was buried in the family grave at the Pieterskerk on 6th September 1625. Had Rembrandt rushed home in order to attend her funeral?
Once he had settled back into Leiden, he took Pieter Lastman’s colourful compositions and reworked them in his own style. You might say that he took them apart and then reassembled them. In his own Balaam and the Ass he surpassed Lastman by enlivening the story and conveying the figures’ emotions in their faces. From the outset, the pupil showed himself to be a better storyteller than his master.
The prophet Balaam is summoned by the Moabite king, Balak, who wants him to curse the Israelites who have entered his realm on their flight from Egypt. When the prophet mounts his ass to go to King Balak, God’s angel blocks his path three times. Through a miracle, the ass can see the angel but Balaam cannot. The ass keeps trying to go around the angel; each time the prophet strikes the ass with his stick. After the third time, God causes the ass to speak: “What have I done unto thee?” Then Balaam sees the angel and realizes the error of his ways.
Rembrandt rotated his panel by ninety degrees and presented the story of Balaam and the ass in a vertical rather than horizontal format. He added depth and movement to the scene by depicting the prophet, the ass and the angel behind and above one another rather than side by side in a line. In Lastman’s painting Balaam and the angel are frozen in their poses, whereas in Rembrandt’s they swirl around one another. Balaam is beating the ass on its head with grim determination. In Lastman’s the ass’s mouth is open; in Rembrandt’s it is speaking.
Balaam and the Ass, 1626.
Pieter Lastman, Balaam and the Ass, c.1620.
We know from a 1641 letter from the Parisian art dealer Claude Vignon that Rembrandt sold Balaam and the Ass to the art lover Alphonse Lopez, secretary to the King of France. Lopez came to The Hague and Amsterdam to conduct negotiations on behalf of Louis XIII regarding the procurement of munition, cannons and ships and broke his journey in Leiden, halfway between the two cities. The letter proves that Rembrandt did not necessarily need a clearly defined commission to start on a work. He felt free in his choice of subject, although he initially took his lead from Lastman’s history paintings.
Nonetheless, Lastman was not the only influence on Rembrandt’s work. His development was closely followed by a small group of art lovers—the same connoisseurs who had been so astonished by his progress with Master Jacob. One was Pieter Schrijver, known as “Petrus Scriverius”. His circle of friends included the Van Swanenburgs and Schrevelius, the headmaster of the Latin school. Scriverius was a passionate Remonstrant, whose beliefs repeatedly got him into hot water with the sheriff, De Bondt.
The probate inventory of his estate, drawn up in 1663, includes “two fine large paintings by Rembrandt”. These may have been two of his earliest independent works: The Stoning of St Stephen (1625) and the painting that is known by the nondescript title Leiden History Painting (1626). The two are roughly the same size, and both convey a message that accords with Scriverius’s uncompromising views.
The Stoning of St Stephen, 1625.
This scholar may very well have served as adviser to the young Rembrandt. He certainly had the library, the knowledge and the fervour to perform such a role, and did not shy away from giving well-defined commissions to young painters. A surviving letter from the painter Cornelis Saftleven, written just after his fourteenth birthday and dated 16th April 1621, has a detailed design on the back for a painting that Scriverius had ordered from the boy. It was a parody of the Synod of Dort, portraying the preachers and theologians who took part in it as a parliament of dozy owls presided over by a rooster in a stable (this is a visual pun on the Dutch word oproerkraaier, literally “the rooster that crows riot”, meaning “agitator” or “ringleader”). A drawing of a calf hangs on the wall—a playful allusion to the name Calvin.
Might Scriverius have given Rembrandt instructions in much the same way? In any case, The Stoning of St Stephen is also a variation on a painting by Pieter Lastman with the same subject. Rembrandt could find the story of Stephen in the seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, on the same open page as the story of the baptism of the eunuch. Stephen was the first Christian martyr. As one of Christ’s disciples, he was falsely accused of blasphemy. In his own defence, he gave a sermon in Jerusalem that incensed the judges—so much so that he was stoned to death outside the city walls, in the presence of the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus.
The Stoning of St Stephen by Pieter Lastman has been lost, but the composition is still known because a drawing was made of it. Rembrandt accentuates the drama of the scene more than his mentor. He shifts Saul to the background and introduces a watching horseman, who casts a pitch-black shadow over much of the painting. Furthermore, rather than depicting a single executioner throwing stones, Rembrandt surrounds Stephen with a mob of stone-throwers. Behind the deacon, a boy weeps tears of anguish at the flagrant injustice. He has Rembrandt’s face.
Copy after Pieter Lastman, The Stoning of St Stephen.
Lastman was a Catholic, for whom the portrayal of Stephen’s martyrdom was an age-old image of papist iconography. In the Dutch Republic, however, art also served as a weapon between the warring Protestant factions—Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants. Well-known biblical stories were given fresh interpretations. After the Counter-Remonstrant coup and the Synod of Dort, the Remonstrants saw themselves as martyrs who were unjustly accused of blasphemy. Is Rembrandt referring, in his Stoning of St Stephen, to the urchins who threw stones at the Remonstrants?
We are often in the dark when we try to interpret a seventeenth-century artwork. Many allusions and suggestions that Rembrandt’s contemporaries would have automatically registered and understood are lost on us today. At the same time, we are sometimes inclined to ascribe meanings that may never have been intended. Sometimes, a plethora of interpretations can do more to obscure than illuminate the true significance of a painting.
This seems to apply in the case of Rembrandt’s Leiden History Painting (1626). It is quite possible that this was the other “fine painting” that was owned by Scriverius. But this does nothing to clarify its subject matter. Over the past several decades, as many as fifteen different interpretations have been published by learned art historians claiming to have unlocked the mysteries of this enigmatic painting.
The Leiden History Painting, 1626.
What do we see in the Leiden History Painting? A soldier kneels before an emperor who stands on a platform, holding up his sceptre. Grouped around the emperor are an army general holding a map scroll, a priest, a bearded man clad in a fur-trimmed cloak and a respectably dressed citizen. Weapons lie at their feet. A whole army is arrayed behind the kneeling soldier. Another soldier holds up his hands to the emperor, palms facing forward, while a third, his index and middle finger forming a “V”, appears to be swearing an oath. The surrender, entreaty or petition to the ruler—we are already indulging in the business of interpretation—is set against the background of a city, a palace or a temple. A column in the distance is surmounted by a sculpture of a lamb.
Is this Saul arming David? The judgement of Brutus? The clemency of Titus? The magnanimity of Alexander? The surrender of the German cities to Charles V? Or the arraignment of Piso? I would not venture to say. The art historians do venture to say, but they contradict each other.
Two interpretations posit an intriguing connection with the contemporary political conditions in which Rembrandt produced his history painting. The first of these—the most recent theory—is that the painting depicts “the magnanimity of Emperor Ferdinand II”. In 1618 the Thirty Years War had broken out after an incident known as the “Defenestration of Prague”: a group of furious Protestant noblemen had grabbed two Catholic government officials and their secretary, manhandled them into the air, “rapiers and cloaks and all”, and tossed them out of the window of Prague Castle.
The attack was intended as a warning to the representatives of the Habsburg emperor, who sought to establish the absolute power of the Holy Roman Empire, thus curtailing the existing rights of the nobles, burghers and peasants and imposing restrictions on the freedom of religion. The conflict that erupted—which consumed Central Europe, claimed millions of victims and precipitated flows of refugees across the continent—was not unlike the beginning of the Dutch Revolt against King Philip II of Spain, the other branch of the Habsburg dynasty.
When the devout Catholic Archduke Ferdinand II was crowned emperor in 1619, the Protestant Elector Palatine Frederick V, grandson of William of Orange, proclaimed himself King of Bohemia. German princes were obliged to choose sides, and that is when the war began in earnest. Maurits of Nassau sent money and troops to support his cousin Frederick.
This support did not sway the battle in his favour. The Bohemian rebels, under their commander-in-chief Christiaan von Anhalt, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Bavarian general Johan Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. The clash had lasted just two hours. Von Anhalt’s son, whose name was also Christiaan, had fought bravely but was taken captive. The commander-in-chief fled, full of remorse at his role. Christiaan Junior, who kept a diary during his time in captivity that has been preserved, also came to rue his actions. Father and son professed their loyalty to Ferdinand II, who showed mercy and accepted them back into the fold.
The Protestants had lost one battle after another, and in 1622 the forces of the Elector Palatine were routed with the aid of Spanish troops. Frederick was forced to abandon his palace at Heidelberg and fled to the Dutch Republic, where he would live out the rest of his days in exile. He and his wife and children initially moved into the former home of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt on Kneuterdijk. Frederick was known as the “Winter King” because he had only been king for one winter.
The events surrounding the Winter King were followed closely in Holland. Pamphlets were published on Frederick’s marriage to the “Queen of Hearts”, the nickname bestowed upon Elizabeth Stuart, the beautiful daughter of King James I of England. The wedding had taken place on St Valentine’s Day, 1613, amid great pomp and ceremony. Meanwhile, the episode of the defenestration was related by Jacques Hoefnagel, a cousin of Constantijn Huygens, who had been in Prague at the time. Maurits’s help to his cousin was also remarked upon and reported.
If the History Painting depicts the young Von Anhalt professing his allegiance to Ferdinand II, Rembrandt was poking fun at Maurits and his cousin, the Winter King. All their unbending Calvinism and bellicosity had yielded nothing but the humiliation of bending their knee before a Catholic emperor.
Mockery like that would have been very much in the spirit of Petrus Scriverius. But there is another interpretation of the painting that fits: might Rembrandt have been depicting “Palamedes before Agamemnon”? Palamedes was a virtuous, contemplative Greek hero who proposed a truce during the siege of Troy. He was wrongly accused of having accepted a Trojan bribe. Odysseus planted money and a forged letter in Palamedes’ tent. On the basis of this trumped-up evidence, Palamedes was sentenced to death by the Greek king, Agamemnon.
This story had only become widely known shortly before Rembrandt produced his painting. It is not in Homer’s Iliad, only in Virgil’s Aeneid. Even so, it was painfully topical. For Joost van den Vondel had chosen it as the theme of a play, entitled Palamedes or Innocence Slain.
Holland’s most illustrious poet, a Mennonite who converted to Catholicism, did not mince words in his poetry or plays. In a poem about the issue of predestination, “Decretum Horrible”, Vondel calls Calvin “an aberration, a calumniator, and a child devil”. In 1625 he wrote an allegorical indictment of the political assassination of the land’s advocate Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the unconscionable role played by Maurits. It was incendiary material, fraught with danger.
On the advice of the Amsterdam magistrate Albert Burgh, Vondel had searched for a story from antiquity that would reflect the themes of the day. Vondel’s friend Johannes Meursius, a self-important but extremely erudite Remonstrant professor of history and classics at Leiden University, suggested the story of Palamedes. Meursius had tutored Oldenbarnevelt’s sons, Reinier and Willem, and accompanied them on a grand tour of Europe. He had witnessed with sorrow the beheading of the old advocate, and a few years later of his two sons, who were found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Maurits.
According to his friend and biographer Geeraert Brandt, Vondel was sitting in his house in Amsterdam on 23rd April 1625, putting the last touches to his play, when his wife stood at the bottom of the stairs with a message from The Hague.
“Husband!” she cried, “the prince lies on his deathbed!”
“Let him die,” Vondel called back. “I’m just now seeing him off.”
In Vondel’s play, the characters of Palamedes and Agamemnon clearly stood for Van Oldenbarnevelt and Prince Maurits. The last words of Palamedes echo almost exactly those of the advocate mounting the scaffold in The Hague. They may be rendered:
Standing before the public gaze, head held high:
Oh men, he said, that your true souls ne’er believed
The charges of treason, which are false and quite contrived—
That was my dearest wish. My duty I have done—
Acted with candour, piety and truth,
And die, as I lived, a sincere Greek.
The play caused a scandal. Vondel had to go into hiding, reappearing only after he had received assurances that Amsterdam city council would not hand him over to the Court of The Hague. He was let off with a mild punishment: a 300-guilder fine, which was paid by Burgh. “A flogging with a foxtail,” joked the locals.
Might Scriverius have sent Rembrandt a copy of the play? Innocence Slain was immediately banned, but it was distributed secretly and reprinted multiple times. Scriverius knew Vondel well. In the liber amicorum of the Leiden man, Vondel wrote a poem signed “P.v.K.”—the initials of his pseudonym, Palamedes van Keulen.
Would Rembrandt not have seen any danger in carrying out the idea proposed by Scriverius? Did he shrug off fears of a flogging, albeit with only a foxtail? It is fair to assume that the highly charged political-religious situation, the devastating war in Europe and the Protestant conflict that was tearing apart the Dutch Republic, the city and even his own family, was reflected in his work. But exactly how—that remains unclear.
All we can say with confidence is that Rembrandt largely based the composition of his history painting on a work by his teacher Lastman: Coriolanus and the Roman Envoy. In that painting, too, we see an imperial figure on a high podium, with soldiers in the background whose spears and halberd pierce the sky. The shoes worn by the emperor in Rembrandt and by Coriolanus in Lastman are the same. Had Rembrandt been tasked with adding those blue-and-gold sandals to his master’s painting? And did he use them again in his own painting a year later?
Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me, c.1628.
For the painting’s powerful impact, it is unimportant. What we see here is an artist flexing his muscles: Rembrandt, twenty years of age and bursting with ambition, shows the full range of what he has to offer. He goes to town in the rendering of materials, the play of light on the general’s brocade cloak and the smooth, gleaming shield with its halo of sunbeams.
Right next to the corpulent councillor with the fur-trimmed cloak, behind and to the side of the emperor’s sceptre, Rembrandt himself pops up: a boy with a full head of curls. Since he wanted to depict the play of light in the boy’s hair, he turned the brush around and again used its wooden tip to scratch the curls into the wet paint, exposing the dead colour beneath.
Rembrandt must have found it frustrating to be compelled to leave the vibrant, cosmopolitan city of Amsterdam so soon and return to his native Leiden. It has always been assumed that he painted his first independent history paintings in Leiden, and that he did not continue to travel back and forth between the two cities for a time. The argument goes that it would have been difficult to transport the panels on which he painted—all his early work was executed on oak panels, with the exception of three tronies on gilded copperplates.
A recent discovery sheds new light on this matter. In May 2014, the art dealer Jan Six—a descendant of the Amsterdam patrician Jan Six, who was Rembrandt’s friend and the subject of a magnificent portrait by the artist—discovered a hitherto unknown painting by the young Rembrandt at Lempertz auction house in Cologne. Lempertz’s auction catalogue lists, as lot 1174: “Niederländischer Meister Mitte 17. Jahrhundert, Lasset die Kinder zu mir kommen. Öl auf Leinwand (doubliert)” (“Dutch master, mid-17th century, Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me. Oil on canvas (lined)”). The dimensions were given as “103.5 × 86” (cm). Six gained the backing of an investor, and together they acquired the work for 1.3 million euros.
Sometimes the material itself tells a story. This large work was not painted on a panel, but on linen. Rembrandt could easily have rolled up the canvas and taken it along with him on the ferry boat back and forth across the Haarlemmermeer. He may have worked on it alternately in Leiden and Amsterdam. In all probability this painting remained unfinished. That was something that Rembrandt allowed to happen throughout his life. Houbraken lamented that “much of the work is only half finished”.
The painting depicts a scene from the Gospel of St Matthew: “Suffer little children to come unto me”. When Jesus arrives in Judea, children are brought to him from all sides so that he may place his hand on their heads and pray with them. At first, the disciples try to block their path. But Jesus says: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:13–14)
The theme never lost its fascination for Rembrandt. In his Hundred Guilder Print of 1648—so named because Rembrandt had to pay 100 guilders to buy back a copy of his own etching after his bankruptcy and the forced sale of his property—he depicts not only the episode of Peter keeping the women and their children away from Jesus, but all the stories in Matthew 19. Thus he shows the dispute with the Pharisees, the healing of the sick, and the young man who is told to give his riches to the poor if he wants to enter the kingdom of heaven.
In his painting with the “little children”—similarly to The Stoning of St Stephen and the Leiden History Painting—Rembrandt used his teacher’s colourful palette, with combinations in soft yellow and light blue, pink and mauve, olive-green and ochre. He also borrowed a figure from Lastman’s painting St John the Baptist Preaching (1627). The dark silhouette of this figure, who has his back to us, adds depth and contrast to the composition.
An even more intriguing aspect of the painting as found by Jan Six was the way it had been treated. It was soon discovered that much of the image had been painted over at some point in the intervening centuries: the nude little boy, who stands with his buttocks towards us, was given some breeches. Christ’s purple cloak was painted red. Behind Christ stood a single disciple, arms crossed, but in the original we find three disciples engaged in a debate—including bald-headed Peter.
Why were these changes made? They must have been driven by prudishness and religious rigidity. Erasing the debating disciples banished the unwelcome idea that God’s laws could conceivably be debated—as in the fierce dispute about predestination between the Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants.
The most wonderful parts of the painting had remained intact all those centuries. Among the bustle of parents and children, we see the woman who has been identified for centuries as Rembrandt’s mother. The resemblance with the little prints that he made of her in 1628 is striking.
And then, the most beautiful thing of all. Right at the top, elevated above Christ and the children, a boy hoists himself up with his hands to be able to look over the heads. A figure serving as “bait” to guide the viewer’s gaze, precisely as Rembrandt had learnt from Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck. Chubby face, surprised round eyes and a head of curls. Full of curiosity, he looks at us.
Wondering what is to come.
Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me (detail), c.1628.