Two noble young painters of Leiden
IT IS AN IRRESISTIBLE IMAGE: TWO YOUNG BOYS FROM A PROVINCIAL town in Holland who team up and determine to conquer the world, recognizing the spark of genius not only in themselves but also in each other. They are totally absorbed with one another, Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Lievens. They constitute a mythical duo of painters like Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder—and, many centuries later, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
Michel de Montaigne wrote, in his wonderful essay of 1580, of a friendship in which “[our souls] mingle and melt into one piece, with so universal a mixture that there is left no more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined”.
At the end of the 1620s, even art connoisseurs found the work by Rembrandt and Lievens hard to tell apart. The 1632 inventory of the household effects of Stadtholder Frederik Hendrik included “a painting depicting Simeon in the temple, with Christ in his arms”, with the note “made by Rembrandt or by Jan Lievensz”. Rembrandt’s Minerva and his Proserpine were both wrongly attributed to Lievens. In the eyes of the outside world, for a brief period of time, they merged into a single painter.
Montaigne described true friendship as without self-interest, but that did not apply here. The two friends from Leiden sought to benefit from each other’s talents: Rembrandt from Lievens’s technique and zest for experiment, and Lievens from Rembrandt’s intellect, knowledge and capacity for empathy. Besides mutual affection and appreciation, the two were driven even more by an urge to compete: that rivalry “that has brought forth so many glorious masters in the arts”, according to Van Hoogstraten. Their work was in part a product of constant creative competition.
When did Rembrandt first meet Jan Lievens? Leiden was tiny, certainly if you moved in the same circles. They must have met when very young. Jan’s elder brother Justus was exactly the same age as Rembrandt and in the same class at the Latin school. Was Rembrandt as much of a bookworm as Justus? Did it start with their friendship, after which he became acquainted with the rest of the Lievens family?
The Lievens family lived close to the school, in Pieterskerk-Choorsteeg. The street was full of activity. The narrow alley led between the church and the town hall, the divine temple and its secular counterpart. Diagonally opposite them lived Jan Jansz Orlers. He watched Jan grow up, and it is thanks to him that we know some fine anecdotes from his boyhood. The section devoted to the life of Lievens in Orlers’s Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden is much longer than the one on Rembrandt.
Jan’s father, Lieven Hendrixcz, had fled from Ghent in 1584 after his native city had been conquered by the Duke of Parma. He came to Leiden, where he was able to find work as a skilled embroiderer and later as a milliner and merchant. It was there that he met his wife, Machtelt Jansdr van Noortsant. They married in 1605 and were blessed with a large family: four sons followed by four daughters.
Justus was the eldest. He loved books and was always studying. He attended the Latin school and then enrolled at the university, on 26th October 1622. After graduation he married a girl who would be Jan Steen’s aunt, and set up a bookshop on Rapenburg.
Jan was the second son, born on 24th October 1607. According to Orlers, Jan had such a passion for art that his father apprenticed him to Joris van Schooten when he was just eight years old. At that point, Rembrandt had just been admitted to the Latin school. Jan was fanatical about painting and would not let anyone or anything distract him from it. When rioting erupted around the town hall between the mercenaries and Calvinist ruffians on 4th October 1618, and everyone was shuttering their windows and bolting their doors, the boy just carried on with his work, unperturbed. He was copying a few prints by “Witty Willem”, the nickname of the etcher Willem Buytewech. In the words of Orlers, he “placed his love of Art on a higher plane than all the tumult in the world”.
Jan’s gift for painting was soon noticed. Artists were astonished at what he could accomplish at such a young age. His copies of work by contemporary masters were indistinguishable from the originals and were sold as authentic paintings to unsuspecting buyers abroad. At fourteen, he made a portrait of his mother that dumbfounded one of his neighbours, who thought it magnificent and a very fine likeness. It was Jan Lievens, rather than Rembrandt, who was seen as a child prodigy.
The two produced a prolific output of “diverse paintings and copies, which continue to be held in high regard today”. The emphasis that Orlers placed on the great value of Lievens’s paintings in his revised edition of his Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden was not entirely devoid of self-interest. When his book was published, he owned as many as ten of them—and their value would certainly not have suffered from his panegyrics.
Jan had already completed his training as a painter when Rembrandt had yet to begin. When Rembrandt started as a pupil in Jacob van Swanenburg’s workshop on Langebrug, Jan, who was one year younger, was at work just around the corner—no more than fifty paces away—busily copying fabulous portraits and paintings while also designing his own work. Rembrandt must have admired him immensely. And envied him.
Rembrandt’s very first little paintings, images of the five senses on five separate small oak panels, were probably made in Master Jacob’s workshop. They are tentatively dated to 1624. An X-ray of the one depicting Sight reveals that Rembrandt painted it over the image of a female nude. Was this a discarded painting by Master Jacob or one by his young friend?
It might have been Jan Lievens who gave Rembrandt the idea of depicting the five senses. His friend had chosen that exact subject, albeit on one larger, horizontal panel, representing the taste of wine, the aroma of tobacco, the touch of a woman’s bosom, the sound of the lute and a bespectacled man ogling the woman’s full breasts. Lievens’s painting had been purchased by Adriaen Claesz van Leeuwen, the wealthy owner of the brewery Het Lam, who in turn was married to Maria van Swanenburg, from the well-known family of painters and magistrates. There you have it: the universe of Leiden in a nutshell.
The senses were a popular subject among painters in the seventeenth century. Such images were part of the effort to fathom the inner depths of a human being, not only through reason—certainly important in the university city of Leiden—but also by exploring the senses. It was as if people felt a new, pressing need to taste, feel, smell, hear and see with more intensity and sharpness than ever before—there was an opening-up to the world.
Four of the five senses depicted by Rembrandt have survived. The search for Taste is still ongoing. In Touch a stone-cutter uses his chisel to remove an imaginary stone from the head of a groaning man. A quack using smelling salts to revive someone who has fainted is the subject of Smell. And in the painting depicting Hearing, we see three men singing together from a score; by the looks of it they are as out of tune as crows.
The Operation, c.1624–25.
The Spectacles Vendor, c.1624–25.
Sight was the most important sense—not only for painters. People became ever more adept at polishing glasses for microscopes, telescopes and spectacles. In Rembrandt’s image of Sight, we see a hawker in an Oriental costume with puffed sleeves, a turban and an earring. A purse dangles at his hip. In front of his belly he has flipped open a small wooden chest in which spectacles, lenses and accessories such as cords and fabric bags are laid out. An old woman is trying on a pince-nez. Smirking, the vendor offers a second one to an old man.
“Selling someone a pair of spectacles” was an expression meaning tricking someone, or making a fool of them. Every viewer from Rembrandt’s time would immediately have seen that this corpulent, grinning salesman, with his theatrical purple stage costume, bulging purse and sparkling earring, was a swindler.
The vendor has already put the pince-nez on the old woman’s nose. Her expression speaks volumes. Tiny, squinting eyes: she can’t see a thing. When the salesman offers a pince-nez to the old man, the prospective customer points at the tip of his bulbous, purple nose. Is he supposed to put it there? He is being “led by the nose”—an expression that in Dutch has more to do with trickery than coercion.
Even certain details of the small paintings can be linked to work by Lievens. The man selling spectacles appears to be wearing the purple suit with openwork puffed sleeves from the drinker in Lievens’s Five Senses. In any case, the wooden poses and arm gestures of Rembrandt’s figures are remarkably similar to the backgammon-players in a painting by Lievens.
The Three Singers, c.1624–25.
The Unconscious Patient, c.1624–25.
Rembrandt was not yet Rembrandt when he set about depicting the five senses. Like Lievens, he was searching assiduously for ways of rendering light in his little panel paintings. The coarse brushstrokes should not be seen as foreshadowing the fabled rough style of his late period. Here, it is awkwardness plain and simple. In 1624, Lievens was in every respect streets ahead of his friend. And that would remain the case for some time.
When Rembrandt returned from Amsterdam—we assume in the autumn of 1625—after his brief apprenticeship with Lastman, with whom Lievens had studied from 1618 to 1620, he set up in Leiden as an independent painter.
Ever since 1897, when a Dutch translation was published of the Latin text of Constantijn Huygens’s memoirs of his early years, in which he emphatically described Rembrandt and Lievens as “two noble young painters of Leiden”, it has been assumed that the two shared a single studio. It would not have been customary to set up a workshop together. On the contrary: most painters’ guilds forbade it, to prevent unfair competition. In Leiden, however, there was no longer a St Luke’s Guild after the Relief, so sharing was not ruled out.
Where might that workshop have been? There are two serious possibilities: at one of their two homes. According to Orlers, Jan Lievens worked at his parents’ house from his earliest childhood. His mother had died in 1622, his father remarried and became a tax farmer. That meant that he purchased from the city council the right to collect certain taxes. The accounts show that in 1623 he paid 1,160 guilders for the rights to collect the excise duties for firewood and another 1,430 guilders for those relating to vinegar. If he collected more than he had paid to the treasury, he made a profit. If he collected less, he would suffer a loss.
Initially he prospered. In 1635, however, everything would collapse. Jan’s father purchased the rights to collect the city’s milling tax for the huge sum of 103,800 guilders. That year, Leiden was hit by the worst-ever epidemic of the Plague. The Black Death claimed 15,000 victims, wiping out one-third of the city’s population. Trade came to a standstill. Lievens went bankrupt and was left with debts of 60,000 guilders, an astronomical sum for the time.
In the late 1620s, however, prospects still looked good. Jan Lievens was still living at home with his father, in a house that was full of children from the new blended family. The house may conceivably have been spacious enough to accommodate a workshop for two, but it seems rather unlikely.
Arnold Houbraken writes that after returning to Leiden from Amsterdam, Rembrandt continued working on his art, “diligently and with great zeal on his own at his Parents’ house”. Houbraken’s anecdotes should be approached with caution: he sometimes mangles the facts. In this case, however, there appears to be little reason to doubt his words. Why would he not simply have relayed what he knew from contemporary accounts?
Even so, the phrase “at his Parents’ house” admits of another interpretation. The house on Weddesteeg was not large and was already packed with relatives and the miller’s assistants. But Rembrandt need not stay at home in order to be in his father’s house. For his father had had five houses built on Galgewater, right around the corner from Weddesteeg. It was just a minute’s walk across the little courtyard and along the alley that had been constructed especially to connect the houses.
Did Rembrandt set up his studio in a front room of one of his father’s houses? If so, it would have yielded an advantage for a painter: the rooms were north-facing, providing the best light. It was partly a quest for north light that drove Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou, who grew up just around the corner on Kort Rapenburg, to leave his father’s house for a building where he could live and work on Galgewater. Dou would never move house again.
Whether Lievens came to work on Galgewater, we do not know. It seems quite likely. All we know for sure is that the distance between the alleys Pieterskerk-Choorsteeg and Weddesteeg is so small that even two separate studios would not have prevented the two painters from cooperating closely on a daily basis.
There were obvious advantages to such a partnership. Rembrandt and Lievens may have made joint purchases of panels and paint. Dendrochronological research reveals that some of their panels were sawn from the same tree. These would have been ordered from the same carpenter, sawn to size, no more than one centimetre thick, from one of the huge Baltic oaks—as thick as a man—that were unloaded from ships at the main carpenter’s yard on the other side of the water.
Paint was expensive. The artists purchased pigments from the pharmacy and oil pressed from linseed from a miller friend. Paint took hours to make, toiling over a grindstone, and had a short shelf life. The artists improvised tubes (metal tubes did not yet exist) from knotted pig bladders, submerged in oil. The perishability of the expensive paint also sometimes influenced the artists’ decisions in the painting process: Rembrandt and Lievens would occasionally prepare just one or two, or possibly three, colours to begin with. These they would apply to the relevant portions of the panel before proceeding to the next colour.
Their work fizzed with experimental fervour. They proved alchemists in the mixing of paint and were constantly searching for techniques to achieve dramatic effects. It was once again Lievens who took the initiative. “Jan Lievens was a true adept at working miracles in the blending of paints, varnishes and oils,” wrote Van Hoogstraten—and he must have heard this from Rembrandt himself.
Rembrandt collected all sorts of paraphernalia for his work. He went in search of weaponry and suits of armour. He purchased turbans, berets, items of jewellery, garments and fabrics—and both young men would use them. Father Lievens may have helped to make or alter costumes that looked as if they had been plucked from a work by Lucas van Leyden or one of the medieval masters. The painters shared their costumes and props. Thus, the shield that Rembrandt used in his Leiden History Painting, with a metal tip in the middle of the sun from which radiate wavy beams, turns up in Lievens’s work—and is later recycled in a painting by Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou.
Besides props and costumes, they also shared models. We find several characters, including an elderly man with a beard and an elderly woman, recurring frequently in the work of both Rembrandt and Lievens. Were these people neighbours? Family members? Sometimes they may have plucked someone from the street. They might press a gift of alms into a beggar’s hand and then get him to sit motionless in a specific pose in the armchair in the studio, while the two men made their sketches. Not infrequently, such sketches were used as the basis for a painting.
The Painter in his Studio, c.1630.
They used each other and themselves as models. Lievens made a portrait of Rembrandt, and Rembrandt drew Lievens from life in the studio. He is easily recognizable by his long face, angular jaw and slight build—Huygens called him “an inconsequential little tree trunk”. He is depicted resting his elbows on the back of the chair in front of his easel, palette in his right hand, maulstick in his left. Jan has briefly risen to gaze at the painting on which he is working from a distance. He looks and ponders. How to proceed?
As they developed their own styles, the young men gradually shuffled off the ties that held them to Pieter Lastman. In 1626, in painting his Tobit and Anna with the Kid, Rembrandt was still using the multicoloured palette of his Amsterdam teacher. The painting epitomizes his ability to render fabrics and other materials, from the torn cloak of the aged Tobit to the rough coat of the little kid under Anna’s arm.
This painting depicts a scene from the Apocryphal Book of Tobit and illustrates the ordeal in which Tobit’s faith is tested. The affluent, devout Tobit lives in exile in Assyria. His property is seized because he is living in accordance with Jewish law. The ultimate test is yet to come. Tobit goes blind after a sparrow has defecated in his eye. Since he is now unable to work, his wife Anna does so instead. She earns a living by spinning and weaving—an allusion that will not have been lost on the people from the cloth centre of Leiden.
One day, Anna comes home from work with a kid that she has been given in addition to her wages. Tobit accuses his wife of having stolen the animal, but discovers that his accusation is false. In Rembrandt’s painting, the sightless whites of his eyes weep bitter tears. Tobit folds his hands in remorse and begs his wife’s forgiveness.
Rembrandt based the composition on an engraving by Jan van de Velde after Willem Buytewech. In that image, too, Anna holds the little kid under her arm and leans over towards her blind husband. “Witty Willem” had previously depicted a different scene from the story: Anna’s outrage at the false accusation. Rembrandt chose to show the old man begging for forgiveness.
Rembrandt derived the hand-wringing gesture—in which the fingers are very oddly entwined—from a print by Willem van Swanenburg after Abraham Bloemaert’s The Penitent St Peter. The Latin caption to that print, on Peter and his remorse at the betrayal of Christ, was by Petrus Scriverius. It is signed “P.S. extempore”.
Tobit and Anna with the Kid, 1626.
Starting with his Flight into Egypt (1627), Rembrandt went in search of new paths to the light. He no longer sought to infuse drama into his scenes by using contrasting colours. Instead, he gravitated towards what Van Hoogstraten calls “congenial colours”—subtle shades of white lead, ochre, brown and black—and sharp contrasts between light and dark. In the Flight into Egypt, Joseph (in whom we recognize a Leiden beggar), as well as Mary and her infant, seated on the donkey, stand out against the blackness of the night.
The protagonist of the painting Parable of the Rich Man cups his hand protectively around the flickering candle, which casts a strange light on the folios and ledgers all around him. The coins on the table glitter: “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (Luke 12:20). No pile of bonds is high enough to prevent the fool’s life-candle from being extinguished.
In Christ in Emmaus, Rembrandt conceals the light source behind the figures, leaving much of the scene immersed in blackness. A silhouette stands out against a golden glow. Even without being able to see his face, we know him at a glance from his profile, hair and beard. Furthermore, the expression on the face of a guest at the inn in Emmaus leaves us in no doubt: he stares with a mixture of awe and veneration at the figure of Christ. Here we have a painting as a hall of mirrors.
A more secular shadow play is conjured up in the painting La Main chaude. A man with a large hat holds a candlestick. His hat casts a jagged shadow on the floor. A group of boys are playing the game of “hot cockles”. One boy has to shut his eyes, place his open hand, palm uppermost, behind his back and guess who strikes his hand or his buttocks. Rembrandt shows the boy sneaking a look, turning his face to the light. He is cheating.
The attribution of this work to Rembrandt—like his earliest genre paintings depicting the senses—has been challenged. Might these reservations have been subconsciously prompted by the subject’s sheer banality? Was it regarded as a little unseemly, perhaps, that a genius might produce a humorous genre piece? If so, it is a baseless view. Why should Rembrandt leave banal subjects to banal painters? We may recall that the Leiden artist Jan Steen, who tackled such scenes with gusto, was one of the cleverest and most ingenious painters of his day.
La Main chaude gives us a fleeting illusion of being in the company of his friends, as they play a game in the waning light. The same applies to Rembrandt’s The Music Party, in which he includes the figure of Jan Lievens playing the harp. Why might the young men not have amused themselves in this way in the evening? Rembrandt loved to dress up; he posed in all sorts of costumes in his self-portraits. It is quite possible that he had his friends act out scenes from his paintings.
At the same time, we must not interpret the work too literally. In the past, The Music Party has often been described as a portrait of Rembrandt’s family making music together, with the painter playing the harp and his sister Lijsbeth singing from her book. However, although Rembrandt’s mother may have posed as a model for the old woman, this is very far from an innocent domestic scene.
The painting is crammed with symbolic allusions. The figures’ Oriental attire, the red shoes of the young woman, her swelling breasts beneath the satin suggest the atmosphere of a harem. The playing of the strings, the wielding of the bow—they conjure up erotic acts. The little painting hanging on the rear wall points in the same direction. The angel gives Lot an opportunity to take his family and flee from Sodom, the city of sin, before it is engulfed by flames. This is a brothel scene—an admonition to resist the temptations of the flesh.
The Music Party belongs in the category of genre paintings of merry companies that were made by Caravaggio and by his Dutch admirers Gerard van Honthorst and Hendrik ter Brugghen. Lievens was already emulating the Caravaggists two years before Rembrandt, exploring the possibilities of chiaroscuro and choosing with care the right subject to reflect that influence.
In 1624, Lievens produced two paintings of a boy blowing hot coals in a brazier. He was showing off. The ancient historian Pliny the Elder had described the painter Antiphilus of Alexandria triumphing over his rival Apelles with a painting depicting just this subject. To flaunt his knowledge, Jan—who, unlike his brothers and Rembrandt, had not attended the Latin school—signed the works “J. Livius”. For his painting of the boy with the red-hot coals Lievens stole light, just as Prometheus stole the fire from the gods.
How should they paint? The two young men deliberated endlessly on this subject. Samuel van Hoogstraten relates in his 1678 Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst the captivating story of a “painting contest” between three landscape painters who had workshops in Leiden in the mid 1620s: François van Knibbergen, Jan van Goyen and Jan Porcellis, “the Phoenix of the Sea”. If this artistic competition ever in fact took place, we can be sure that Rembrandt and Jan Lievens would have been right at the front, watching. A likelier explanation, however, is that the story should be read as an allegory, like Pliny’s narrative on the contest between Antiphilus and Apelles. It was a way of conveying the rivalry between painters and their astonishing capacity to deceive the eye in a single exciting story.
The Music Party, 1626.
According to Van Hoogstraten, the three Leiden painters agreed to paint within a single day—“one shining of the sun”—a panel painting with a landscape so realistic that viewers could imagine strolling into it. The winner would gain a vast sum of money and eternal fame. On the day of the contest, they feverishly set to work.
Knibbergen started to paint as if writing a story. He plonked down the horizon with a single flourish of the paintbrush, after which—according to Van Hoogstraten’s over-elaborate account—he dashed trees, mountains and waterfalls from his brush as “letters from a copyist’s pen”. He wielded his brush in a confident, airy style. The thin clouds floated from his hand, and the cliffs and crumbling ground were born from his paint.
Jan Lievens, The Four Elements: Fire, c.1624.
Jan van Goyen—who was ten years older than Rembrandt, had grown up on Langebrug and had also been trained by a member of the Van Swanenburg family—“soused” his entire panel, “here light, there dark”. In the rough underlayer, Van Goyen went about looking for “drolleries”, which he seemed to conjure up effortlessly with a plethora of tiny brushstrokes. The painter saw things that lay concealed “in a chaos of paint”. His eye reliably guided his hand and intellect, so that the viewer would see a perfect painting even before comprehending what Van Goyen was aiming at.
Porcellis almost drove the spectators mad, because he endlessly delayed getting down to work. He hedged, hesitated, lingered. But then it happened: it became clear that Porcellis had created the painting in his head before he had even dipped his brush in the paint. Once he started, the work was rapidly completed. He won the contest, his one-day painting being judged the most lifelike of the three.
Rembrandt derived elements from all three of these contestants. He was a “writing” painter like Knibbergen, wielding his brush as if writing a poem: he infused his work with meaning elegantly, but also with intensity and drama. Rembrandt was not averse to painting wet-in-wet like Van Goyen, to create a swirling effect. And he embraced the Porcellis method: first developing the painting in his mind, completing the invention and only then starting to paint. That was the subject of his marvellous panel painting of the artist in his studio, standing at a distance from his work on the easel and gazing at it.
Rembrandt the inventor.
Not long afterwards, someone visited Leiden who would have greatly appreciated Rembrandt’s little painting of inventio: Constantijn Huygens, the poet-diplomat and secretary to Stadtholder Frederik Hendrik. Huygens thought it vitally important to be able to converse with great expertise on matters of art—as indeed was customary in the highest circles. In the late 1620s, he made the rounds of the most interesting artists in the Dutch Republic, often travelling with his brother Maurits.
We know of this visit because in 1629—Huygens was then just thirty-three years old—he recorded some memories of his youth, devoting one magnificent passage to Rembrandt and Lievens. The circumstances in which Huygens wrote this memoir were noteworthy: he was in Frederik Hendrik’s retinue on the occasion of the siege of Den Bosch. As the cannons bellowed, Huygens sat down and entrusted his memoirs to paper, calmly and in an even hand.
Constantijn was the son of Christiaan Huygens, secretary to William of Orange. He was already fluent in five languages as a young boy and wrote metrical poetry in Latin, which was also the language in which he recorded his memoirs. The youth did not hesitate to correct his erudite father, when the occasion arose. “When Father himself tried to make a Latin distich, the rascal observed in a couplet that if great poets take many liberties in the metre, Father is certainly a great poet.”
In the autobiography of his youth, Huygens describes the upbringing and education that enabled him to develop into a Renaissance man. His memoirs are superbly written: eloquent and erudite and more than a little self-important. Had he already mentioned that besides his consummate abilities in draughtsmanship, design and invention, his lute-playing was divine?
Huygens had been raised for a future at court. He received the finest possible education, was introduced into all the right circles around Europe and enjoyed a rigorous training in the arts, so that he would never be at a loss for words in a conversation with art connoisseurs. Furthermore, he and his brother Maurits had had lessons in draughtsmanship so as to become well versed in the basic principles of art from their own experience.
His tutor and mentor was Johan Dedel, a relative of Isaac van Swanenburg’s wife. Perhaps it was Dedel who first told Huygens about Rembrandt. Although the news might have reached him through a variety of channels. Huygens was a former student of the university, he was on terms of friendship with the erudite poet and university librarian Daniël Heinsius as well as with father and son De Gheyn, and the Wtenbogaert family too were among his circle of acquaintances. He had excellent connections who could always be relied upon to tell him where he needed to go.
In 1625, after Prince Maurits had died and been succeeded by his half-brother, Frederik Hendrik, Huygens was appointed as the stadtholder’s secretary. Besides advising in affairs of state, his remit also included mediating in the court’s artistic commissions. He held the key to the prince’s treasury. For Rembrandt and Lievens, his visit was a momentous occasion on which much might depend.
In his memoirs, Huygens sang the praises of the young painters in the tradition of classical rhetoric. “Even if I say they are the only ones who can equal those great artists I have already praised as the wonders of mortal men, I would still be selling them short. And if I say that it won’t be long before they surpass those whom I have already designated as men of genius, then I wouldn’t be adding anything to the expectations of the most distinguished authorities based on their extraordinary debut.”
Jan Lievens, Portrait of Constantijn Huygens, c.1628–c.1629.
The explanation he gives for their talents also appears to have been drawn from a handbook of rhetoric. He was struck by their extreme youth. “Both are still beardless, and, judging by their faces, more children than young men.” He praised them both as naturally gifted. They were developing without regard for birth. He pointed out that Lievens was the son of an ordinary burgher, a needle-worker, and the other the son of a miller, “although he was decidedly not baked from the same dough”.
“Whose mouth would not fall open,” demanded Huygens, “were he to see two such miracles of talent and skill rise from the furrows behind such ploughs?”
Their teachers were barely known outside the common classes, asserted Huygens. “Due to their parents’ modest circumstances, the boys were compelled to take teachers whose fees were low. Were these teachers to be confronted with their pupils today, they would feel just as abashed as those who first instructed Virgil in poetry, Cicero in oratory and Archimedes in mathematics.”
This was pure chutzpah. Huygens was only too well acquainted with the reputation of the Van Swanenburg family, partly through his tutor Dedel, and he respected Pieter Lastman, who was certainly no obscure, cheap or vulgar master. No, Huygens was not so concerned here with the facts. He wanted to prove that he was not dealing here with well-trained craftsmen, but with “absolute geniuses”.
Besides these bombastic fusillades, Huygens also gave a meticulous account of the differences between the two artists:
Impromptu, I venture to say that Rembrandt surpasses Lievens in aptness and liveliness of emotions. On the other hand, Lievens excels in grandeur of invention and audacity of subjects and forms. Everything that his young mind strives to achieve must be majestic and sublime. Rather than adhering to the true size of the subject, he prefers to make his image in a larger format. Rembrandt, in contrast, is pleased to concentrate with supreme dedication on a small painting, and achieves in the small scale a result for which one may search in vain in the largest paintings of others.
Here, Huygens hits the nail on the head. That is all the more remarkable when you think that no one before him had published a single word about the two young painters. Panel size was indeed an important issue. Quantity is also a quality. Huygens’s observation that Rembrandt was capable of telling a complex story in a small panel painting was astute: his comments apply just as well to the mysterious self-portrait with dark eyes, The Painter in his Studio, as they do to David before Saul with the Head of Goliath.
This small panel painting from 1627, scarcely larger than an iPad, looks like a sketch in paint. It may be a preparatory study for a larger painting that was never made. Just as Lastman’s Coriolanus had served as an example for The Leiden History Painting—the army tent, the motley crowd, with spears poking into the sky, and the horseman in the left foreground are clearly derived from it.
But Rembrandt injected new significance into the figures. David killed Goliath with a single well-aimed shot from his sling, “[so] that the stone sunk into his forehead”. Then the shepherd’s son chopped off the head of the Philistine giant with his own sword. In the small panel painting he gives Goliath’s head to King Saul, the powerful king with his small lackeys, to whose throne David would later ascend.
Rembrandt’s horseman, the richly dressed young man in the vivid blue cloak and a turban on his head, must be Jonathan. Saul’s son forged a lifelong friendship with David. In 1 Samuel 18:1 we read: “And it came to pass… that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Rembrandt’s small painting shows their first meeting.
David with the Head of Goliath before Saul (1 Samuel 17:57–58), 1627.
Constantijn Huygens foresaw a bright future for the two painter friends: Rembrandt as a history painter of small-scale panel paintings, the other as a maker of life-sized portraits. The stadtholder’s secretary recalled that after an occasion on which he had visited Lievens together with his brother Maurits, Lievens had been possessed with a passionate desire to paint his portrait. Lievens’s anxious desire to ingratiate himself with Huygens gives the account a slightly poignant air:
His yearning was so unquenchable that he turned up just a few days later, saying that since that first moment he had been unable to sleep at night and had been so befuddled in the daytime as to be unable to work. So persistently had my image remained in his mind that he was unable to wait any longer to satisfy his enthusiasm. The effect of his imagination was all the more remarkable, because he was generally reluctant to ask someone to pose for a portrait, and could be persuaded to do so only with difficulty.
Huygens praised the portrait that Lievens had painted of him and had high expectations of the boy’s career. He considered that, quite aside from his enthusiasm, Lievens displayed keen insight, “more mature than that of an adult man”. His only objection—unsurprisingly for the vain secretary to the prince—was that he found Lievens too unbending and self-assured. He could not abide criticism of any kind. “That bad quality, damaging at any age, is simply ruinous in youth. For just a small quantity of sourdough makes the whole dough go sour.”
Huygens saw Rembrandt as the more gifted of the two, that much was clear. To highlight the sure hand and vitality in the work of the miller’s son, he described—again with a tremendous sense of pathos—the painting that was set up on the easel in the studio at the time of his visit: Judas, Repentant, Returning the Pieces of Silver.
The paint was still wet; it was not yet finished. Rembrandt would carry on working on it for a whole year to get the composition right. He made numerous drawings to try out the characters’ poses. He depicted the moment at which Judas comes to the temple to return the pieces of silver he had accepted for betraying Christ, “saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.” (Matthew 27:3–4)
Judas throws the coins on the floor of the temple and sinks to his knees, hands folded. His hand-wringing has an extra bitter association, since after his visit to the temple, the Bible relates that Judas hangs himself. Again, Rembrandt derived the pose from Van Swanenburg’s print after Bloemaert’s The Penitent St Peter.
Three Scribes, preparatory drawing for Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1629.
Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (Matthew 27:1–5), 1629.
Huygens wrote:
The gesture of that one figure of Judas, reduced to despair (not to mention all the other impressive figures in this one painting), that one frenzied figure of Judas who shouts, begs for forgiveness, but who no longer has any hope and in whose face all traces of hope have been erased; a wild look in his eyes, his hair torn out, his clothes ripped, arms twisted, hands clenched so tight they are bleeding; in a blind impulse, he has fallen to his knees, his entire body contorted into pitiful hideousness.
Huygens compared this history painting by the young Rembrandt to “all the beauty that has been created down the ages”. And that comparison to Protogenes, Apelles and Parrhasius, the divine painters of antiquity, worked out to the advantage of the young miller’s son from Leiden.
Huygens had only one point of criticism regarding “the famous young men”. He could not understand that they did not take a long break for a study trip around Italy, the “promised land” of art:
That is of course the one morsel of folly in young men who are otherwise so brilliant. If someone could get that into their young heads, truly, he would be adding the only missing element for the consummation of their artistic powers. How glad I would be if they could make the acquaintance of a Raphael and a Michelangelo and take the trouble to feast their eyes on the creations of so many giant minds! How fast they would be able to do all that better and give the Italians reasons to journey to their own Holland.
The boys answered Huygens that they were in the full bloom of their life and had to take advantage of it. They did not want to waste any time on foreign journeys. Anyway, they said, “if you want to see the best Italian paintings, in the genre that is nowadays best loved and most collected among kings and princes north of the Alps, you must look outside Italy. What you find there with great difficulty, scattered here and there, you can see here in abundance, to the point of saturation.”
Were they right? Both Rembrandt and Lievens devoted intensive study to the prints of the Italian masters and the work of the Caravaggists. In the stories, lessons and examples of their teachers Jacob van Swanenburg—in whose house Italian was spoken—and “Pietro Lastman” they had, in a sense, already been to Italy.
“To what extent this excuse is valid, I shall not venture to say,” wrote Huygens. However, he did feel compelled to declare that he had never before witnessed such dedication and tenacity as he saw in these painters. “For they truly make the most of their time. This is all that matters to them.”
The memories related by Constantijn Huygens enable us to spend a brief space of time in the direct vicinity of Rembrandt and Lievens. We can feel the feverish excitement, the burning ambition on their beardless faces. The place smelt of paint and stank of sweat.
“The most remarkable thing of all”, noted Huygens, “is that they dismiss even the most innocent pleasures of youth as a waste of time. They are so indifferent to such things that you might think you were dealing with old men, who are weary of life and have long left all those trivialities behind them.”
In reality, everything had yet to begin.