The first heretic in the art of painting
ONE DAY, AN ART LOVER OF REMBRANDT’S ACQUAINTANCE SUGGESTED that he offer a painting he had just completed to an affluent gentleman in The Hague. Following the advice, the artist set off on foot, the little panel under his arm. The gentleman purchased the painting for 100 guilders. Rembrandt was so delighted that he rushed off home to tell his parents as fast as possible.
With his new riches, walking suddenly seemed too prosaic a mode of transport to the young artist, who leapt aboard a carriage back to Leiden instead. Halfway between the two cities, the coachman briefly halted to feed the horses. All the passengers dismounted to have a drink. Except for Rembrandt. He stayed behind, alone, keeping guard over his money. As the trough was being taken away and the coachman was returning with the other travellers, the horses bolted.
“Without paying the least heed to the pulling of the reins,” wrote Arnold Houbraken in his lives of the Dutch artists (De Grote Schouwburg der Nederlandse kunstschilders en schilderessen), “they galloped off with Rembrandt until they were within Leiden’s city walls, where they stopped in front of their customary inn. The astonished onlookers asked Rembrandt what had happened. But he shrugged and dashed off to his parents, bearing his prize.”
Houbraken’s anecdotes should be regarded as charming fictions. The painter-biographer told this story primarily to show that Rembrandt was parsimonious and fixated on money from an early age: “He was extremely pleased at having been transported to Leiden without having to pay, and even faster than usual.”
Whatever the case may be, Houbraken’s story does suggest that after the visit of Constantijn Huygens, who introduced him to connoisseurs and collectors in The Hague, and to the courtly circles surrounding Frederik Hendrik and his wife Amalia van Solms, Rembrandt had “piles of work”.
In addition to his contact with the prince’s secretary, there was another important reason for his success in the late 1620s: Rembrandt had started making etchings. Unlike paintings, etchings could be reproduced. He sold them to dealers who took them to art fairs all over Europe. Rembrandt’s fame soon spread with the speed of a team of bolting horses.
We do not know who taught him the art of etching. Since his etchings can scarcely be compared to those of other artists and he soon developed an entirely individual, painterly style, he must have been self-taught. “The extremely bizarre method that Rembrandt contrived for the etching,” wrote Baldinucci in his Vita di Reimbrond Vanrein, “which he alone practised, which was neither applied by others nor seen elsewhere… entailed the use of streaks and little dashes and irregular lines, without contours, to evoke an intense, powerful chiaroscuro.”
That Rembrandt developed a unique signature mode of etching, and that his character drove him constantly to experiment, is not to downplay other sources of inspiration. His first important influence was Lucas van Leyden, whose fame, well beyond his native city, was based on his marvellous etchings. As a boy, Rembrandt must have heard tell of the meeting between Lucas and Albrecht Dürer in Antwerp. One summer’s day in 1521 they signed each other’s portraits and exchanged a few prints.
Rembrandt would continue to collect work by Lucas throughout his life. The prints were rare and expensive, but the price did not deter him. One print in particular was in great demand: a 1520 Uylenspiegel, an etching of a family of beggars who trek from one city to the next, the children in straw baskets on their parents’ backs. The father plays the bagpipes, the mother goes barefoot. Rembrandt paid 200 guilders for a print. For such a sum you might have rented a canal-house for a whole year.
In 1633, Rembrandt depicted himself in an etching in exactly the same way as Lucas: with a scarf and beret, the left shoulder turned forward and the eyes meeting the viewer’s gaze sideways, producing a slightly distrustful expression. Here he posed as the hero of his boyhood days. Rembrandt would continue to use the beret—a fashionable accessory in Lucas’s day—as a trademark. It worked: his pupils took to wearing berets, and depicted their master and each other wearing them. The beret became the artist’s headgear par excellence.
Jacob van Swanenburg had shown Rembrandt the engravings by his brother Willem after the work of Rubens, Bloemaert and other masters. And Pieter Lastman, who is not known to have made any etchings, may nonetheless have provided both Rembrandt and Jan Lievens with some useful instruction, given that Lastman himself had studied under the first Netherlandish specialist in the art of etching, Gerrit Pietersz Sweelinck.
Before work could begin, it was important to study the subject attentively. To make a good etching required considerable technical expertise. The process can be broken down into several stages. First, a copperplate was heated and coated with a thin layer of wax. In this “etching ground” the artist could draw the design with a needle. The copperplate would then be dipped in a bath of acid. Wherever the etching needle had exposed the copper, the acid would “bite” the lines into the metal. Then the wax was removed, the copperplate inked all over and the ink wiped off the surface, leaving only the ink in the grooves. A slightly moistened sheet of paper would be placed on the inked plate, and the two would be put through a printing press together. Et voilà! Your etching would appear, printed in reverse image on the paper.
The Circumcision, 1624–28.
The Circumcision: small plate, 1628–32.
In the very first etching that we know by Rembrandt, he does not yet display any of his “bizarre” qualities. In 1626, he and Jan Lievens both produced etchings for the Haarlem printer I.P. Berendrecht. The printer would have given the young men prepared plates and carried out the remaining process himself after the designs were finished. Lievens produced an etching of John the Evangelist on the Greek island of Patmos. Rembrandt made a Circumcision. It is to be hoped that the mohel whose task it was to circumcise the infant had a surer hand than the young artist who depicted him. Excruciating. Just compare this etching with a Circumcision made four years later: a world of difference.
Self-portrait in a Cap, Laughing, 1630.
Self-portrait, Open-mouthed, as if Shouting, 1630.
Sheet of studies: self-portrait, a few beggars, heads of an old man and a woman etc., 1630–34.
From the late 1620s onward, Rembrandt appears to have had his own personal etching press. From then on, we find works preserved in different “states”—that is, prints in different stages of development. They clearly show how obsessively focused Rembrandt was on practising his technique.
If a design was unsuccessful, he rotated the plate ninety degrees and made something else in the remaining space. He applied incisions and strokes of varying depths. Sometimes he cut off part of the plate and carried on with just that piece. Most of the prints he made were tiny and fiddly, but he would occasionally use a larger plate and wield his needle with vigorous strokes, as if making a drawing. He also experimented by immersing the plate in an acid bath in between times, thus interrupting the process. Later on, he would not only draw in the wax with a needle, but scratch his design directly into the etching plate with a burin or “drypoint”.
His subjects were extremely varied, but one stood out above all else: images of himself. When he chose himself as his model, he could make all sorts of strange faces in the mirror to see how different emotions, moods and temperaments were expressed in the face. He undoubtedly told Samuel van Hoogstraten what the latter quotes in his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: the best place to depict passions was in front of the mirror, “so as to be both performer and spectator at the same time”.
“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face” says King Duncan (Macbeth, Act I, scene iv), but Rembrandt clearly took a different view. He portrayed himself in diverse moods: flabbergasted, with pouting lips, wide-eyed, head back and chin raised; angry, staring right at us, lips tightly shut in fury and dark-flaming eyes, with wild, tangled hair; grinning, or rather smirking, the cheeks of his round face raised, teeth bared and lips slightly parted, eyes squeezed to slits; suffering: open-mouthed, shouting in pain and frustration.
These passiones animi served as artistic experiments. They were a kind of autobiography, but were destined for the market. He signed his self-portraits on the plate “RHL 1630”. It was an ingenious way of establishing his reputation: Rembrandt used his etchings in much the same way as we now use Facebook and Instagram. He sent his “selfies” off into the world, and before long everyone would recognize him. Interestingly, he never sought to make himself more attractive than he was.
Sometimes it seems as if he deliberately downplayed his appearance. Or possibly that he wanted to emphasize the painterly qualities of his etchings by making his hair even messier and more tangled than it was in real life. Baldinucci pointed out that Rembrandt even scribbled his signature half illegibly: “He signed his prints with disagreeably written, slapdash, misshapen letters.”
Andromeda, c.1630.
It is precisely that looseness, bravura and ostensible nonchalance that give his etchings their enormous appeal. Rembrandt paid no heed to prevailing fashions or ideals of beauty. He play-acted and posed in front of the mirror, but also depicted quite honestly and informally the figure he saw there—and in this way etched a fascinating, complex new image of himself as an artist and as a human being. Sometimes he seemed to find it easier to show his emotions through his art than in real life.
In the same year that he depicted his surprised, grinning and angry tronies, Rembrandt had an opportunity to paint the naked truth. His first female nude was Andromeda—a woman of legendary beauty. Queen Cassiopeia boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the Nereids. To punish the mother’s pride, Andromeda was chained naked to the rocks to be sacrificed to a sea monster. When the Greek hero Perseus, who was speeding through the skies on his winged horse Pegasus, saw her standing there, he was smitten. He killed the monster and released the young woman from her chains.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Andromeda is “a marble statue”, a ravishing beauty who sets Perseus’ heart on fire. Not in Rembrandt’s painting. He did not paint a sensual, idealized lover but a woman of flesh and blood. The chains cut into her skin, the muscles in her neck and chest are taut, her belly is distended. Her fear is terrifying—and it is not a pretty sight.
Rembrandt’s realism must have been a shock. In the Calvinist world of Leiden, it was far from customary to have models pose nude, let alone to depict them thus. Rembrandt disdained custom. Was he out to shock? In any case, he did not shrink from depicting indecorous subjects indecorously. His nude was really naked.
When selecting models for a nymph or bather, he did not choose graceful young girls but older women. Judging from their appearance, Rembrandt might have plucked them from one of the brothels in Sliksteeg. According to the Amsterdam bookseller and poetaster Andries Pels, Rembrandt “chose no Greek Venus as his model but rather a washerwoman, or a treader of peat from the barn”. Pels carped at her flabby breasts, the pinch marks from the corset on her stomach and the imprint of garters on her legs.
In his 1681 Gebruik en misbruik des toneels (“Uses and Abuses of the Stage”), Pels articulated the incredulity that many of Rembrandt’s contemporaries must have felt. He could not believe that a brilliantly gifted painter had strayed wantonly and “ostentatiously” from the path of righteousness, choosing to be “the first heretic in the art of painting”.
Rembrandt’s female nudes were “too pitiful for words”, thought Houbraken, but he also told an anecdote which shows that in his teaching practice Rembrandt certainly kept an eye on prevailing standards of decorum. What was still unthinkable in Leiden, he put into practice in the more tolerant milieu of Amsterdam: drawing and painting from live models with his pupils.
Nude Woman, Seated on a Mound, 1629–30.
On a hot summer’s day, one of his pupils was busily painting a female nude model in a specially partitioned room. Because of the heat, the apprentice too “stripped to full nudity”. His fellow students peeped through a crack to see what the two were getting up to. Then the master arrived. He in turn looked through the crack, and heard one of them say: “We are just like Adam and Eve in Paradise, for both of us are naked.”
At this, Rembrandt thumped on the door with his maulstick and cried: “Since you are naked, you must leave Paradise!”
Adam and Eve hastened to leave, pursued by an irate Rembrandt aiming blows at them with his stick. Upon leaving the building, they just managed to put on enough clothes to avoid appearing naked in the street.
Rembrandt would train pupils for thirty-five years, building up an excellent reputation as a strict but fair taskmaster. His first pupil arrived on 14th February 1628: it was Gerrit Dou, fifteen years of age. Rembrandt himself was only twenty-one. Gerrit grew up just around the corner from him on Kort Rapenburg, where his father, a stained-glass artist, ran a successful business making church windows. When it became clear that the boy was a talented draughtsman, his father apprenticed him first to the engraver Bartholomeus Dolendo and then to the stained-glass artist Pieter Couwenhoorn, a friend of Scriverius and the drawing master of Constantijn Huygens’s son Christiaan.
After his apprenticeship, Gerrit started working for his father. Such were his gifts that he was soon bringing in a lot of money for the business. Even so, his behaviour struck terror into the heart of his ageing father, wrote Orlers in his chronicle of the city. For Gerrit would nonchalantly climb up ladders to install new windows or to repair old ones, without the slightest concern for his safety. His father was afraid that this daredevil attitude would lead to a tragic end. He decided to send him off to train with the nearest painter instead.
Under Rembrandt, Gerrit Dou became the sorcerer’s apprentice. Almost immediately he proved capable of copying his master’s compositions down to the smallest detail. Was it Dou who painted the copy of his master’s Self-portrait with Gorget, which now hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague and was long believed to be the original? For Rembrandt, his pupil must have been a blessing. Besides receiving the tuition fees, he also made money from the sale of Gerrit’s work.
The boy worked with the concentration, patience and precision of a watchmaker. He evolved more and more as a feinschilder—the term for a Dutch artist in this period who painted usually small, meticulously rendered images. Meanwhile, his master was moving in the opposite direction in the 1630s: working in an ever looser, more impasto style, with broad brushstrokes. In small panel paintings, Dou performed miracles using a brush consisting of a single tail-hair from a marten.
Rembrandt’s second pupil was another local boy: sixteen-year-old Isaack Jouderville. His father (also named Isaack) hailed from Metz and had come to Holland in 1607 as a soldier in the States army. Two years later, at the beginning of the Twelve Years’ Truce, he leased the Leiden inn De Drie Haringen, on the corner of Noordeinde and Kort Rapenburg—diagonally opposite the Dou family. When Prince Maurits came to Leiden in 1618 to change the composition of the city council, his retinue took lodgings with Jouderville.
The Laughing Man, c.1629–30.
Self-portrait in a Cap, 1630.
Isaack’s parents moved in artists’ circles. They had a harpsichord in the inn and traded in paintings—a common way for innkeepers to eke out their income. His brother Jacob became a bookseller, his sister Magdalena married a painter. When Isaack was seventeen, both his parents died within a short space of time: his father in November 1629, his mother Magdalena a month later.
It was around this time that Isaack came to Rembrandt as his new apprentice. His guardians paid fifty guilders every six months in tuition fees—a hefty sum, certainly considering that it did not include board and lodging or the cost of materials. This indicates how seriously Rembrandt was already being taken as a painter and teacher.
We know the exact figures for Jouderville’s apprenticeship because documents preserved in the archives of Leiden’s “Orphans’ Chamber” record, down to a stiver, Isaack’s expenditure on meat, butter and cheese, and on having his breeches mended. The documents also include a pile of receipts, one of which dates from the end of 1631, when Rembrandt issued a financial statement for the previous two years: “I assert that I received 200 guilders since the death of Machdaeleena Joddervyle for instructing her son Isack in the art of painting. Rembrant Harmensz van Ryn.”
Old Woman at Prayer, 1629–30.
Two self-portraits of Jouderville are known: a serious one and a smiling one. This suggests that he followed his master’s tactics in depicting emotions in front of the mirror. There was someone else who made copies of Rembrandt’s work, beside his pupils Dou and Jouderville: Jan Gillisz van Vliet, the son of a Leiden grain merchant who lived in a house overlooking the New Rhine, close to the Van Swanenburg family and Petrus Scriverius.
Jan Gillesz did for Rembrandt what Willem van Swanenburg had done for Rubens: he made prints after his paintings. They were reproduced in large numbers, and ten have been preserved. Prints made it possible for art lovers to glimpse Rembrandt’s paintings, which, once sold, disappeared for good behind their owners’ front doors.
Rembrandt’s workshop was doing good business. One painting after another was being laid in. Etchings rolled off the press. Clients and connoisseurs frequently dropped in to see what new work was hanging on the wall or to place an order. In a painting that has been attributed to Dou, we see an artist in a studio that may well have been Rembrandt’s. His metal shield with the sunbeam design lies in a corner. Behind the painter a fashionably dressed gentleman appears on the threshold: an art connoisseur.
The only little paintings that Rembrandt made on three gilded copperplates, all the same size, must have been intended for visitors of this kind—to give them something to talk about and a selection from which to choose. There is no common theme among the facial types or tronies depicted on the gilded plates: a laughing soldier, a self-portrait and an old woman at prayer. Rather, the connection is precisely the differences between them. The soldier is painted in wide, coarse brush-strokes, the self-portrait in softer, more fluid strokes and the old woman in delicate, cautious, meticulous little strokes.
At the Latin school, Rembrandt had learnt that Virgil employed three different narrative styles in his epic poem the Aeneid. The three types of linguistic expression or genera dicendi were the stilus humilis, mediocris and gravis: approximately, the plain, medium and sublime style. Rembrandt showed the ease with which he was able to apply these styles in his paintings: the soldier was painted in the stilus humilis, the self-portrait in the stilus mediocris and the old woman in the stilus gravis.
In executing commissions and finding the right composition, he worked in a spirit of ever fiercer rivalry with Jan Lievens. In 1630 there was a small contest to find the best composition of The Raising of Lazarus. Rembrandt went first. In his painting, Christ raises his right hand above the grave of Lazarus, whose body had been buried four days ago; “by this time he stinketh”, we read in John 11:39. Lazarus rises from the grave, his features ashen, frail and hollow-cheeked. His sister Martha leaps forward into the light from sheer astonishment.
Then it was the turn of Lievens. He depicted Christ standing on a podium, his hands devoutly folded, his gaze turning upward in a beam of light that reaches to the heavens. In the grave, far beneath him, we see only two hands poking out. “Lazarus come out!” The sister gapes in amazement. Lievens made an etching based on the painting in 1631.
Rembrandt produced a sketch in red chalk that largely corresponds to Lievens’s composition. He then reworked that drawing into an Entombment of Christ: probably by way of preparation for the series of Passion scenes that the stadtholder, Frederik Hendrik, had commissioned from him. The drawing is dated “1630”. Lievens’s etching dates from the following year. Gary Schwartz thinks that Rembrandt antedated the drawing, to record that he, rather than Lievens, had conceived the original idea for the composition.
Would Rembrandt have felt any need to practise such a deceit? Whatever the case may be, with the etching that he then made of The Raising of Lazarus, the final move in the contest, he carried the day. The work was just a little larger than his rival’s and was rounded at the top—exactly the shape that was needed for the court’s Passion paintings. Furthermore, it is the shape of the painting that Lievens is executing in Rembrandt’s drawing of him. They kept an eagle eye on each other’s work.
Now he showed Christ diagonally from the back. The viewer’s gaze follows the line of his arm upward to his hand. Now, the head of Lazarus ascends into the bright light. The bystanders lend extra dramatic force to the resurrection. The man opposite Christ mirrors the hand gesture, the thrust of Martha’s head suggests a forward leap. And a man behind Christ wrings his hands, just like Judas in the painting by Rembrandt for which Huygens had such boundless admiration.
The 1656 inventory of Rembrandt’s property includes both a Raising of Lazarus by himself and one by Jan Lievens. Did he keep the two as a vivid memento of their contest?
Rembrandt did extremely well out of the introduction to the court that was engineered by Huygens. Together, Stadtholder Prince Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms ordered a total of thirteen paintings from him. The 1632 inventory of their property includes Simeon in the Temple, “made by Rembrandt or Jan Lievens”, Minerva in her Study, The Rape of Proserpine and Andromeda. In 1633, Rembrandt painted the portrait of Amalia, a profile as on a coin—that was to serve as the pendant to the portrait that Gerrit van Honthorst made of Frederik Hendrik.
As early as 1629, probably right after Huygens’s visit to Leiden, the stadtholder purchased two paintings by Rembrandt—a self-portrait with a gold chain and an old woman with a veil—and two by Lievens. It should be noted that the attributions to Rembrandt have been questioned: the self-portrait may be a studio copy by Jouderville and the “old woman with a great shawl” is believed by some experts to have been made by Lievens.
Frederik Hendrik gave the paintings to Sir Robert Kerr, Lord Ancrum, as a gift to King Charles I of England. Kerr had been sent to The Hague as an envoy after the eldest son of the Winter King, the Elector Palatine Frederick V, had been killed in a tragic accident. The Winter King was married to Elizabeth Stuart, a sister of Charles I. In other words, the king has lost his nephew, and the pictures by the noble young painters were presented to him as a small token of comfort.
The young prince had drowned when he and his father sailed from Spaarnwoude to Amsterdam to go and see the treasures of the Silver Fleet that Piet Hein had seized as booty from the Spanish in the Battle in the Bay of Matanzas, present-day Cuba. It was a foggy day, and the ship carrying the Winter King and his son to Amsterdam collided with a fishing boat. Fire broke out and the panicking passengers jumped into the water. A servant barely managed to save the Winter King’s life. His son drowned.
In the summer of 1631, Rembrandt and Lievens were each commissioned to make portraits of one of the Winter King’s other sons. The young princes were then living in Leiden, in the Prinsenhof, on the corner of Rapenburg and Langebrug. In 1628 they enrolled at the university. The two painters each produced a portrait historié, depicting the princes in the form of a biblical and historical figure respectively. Rembrandt painted Prince Rupert in Oriental costume with his teacher—we do not know his identity—in the manner of Eli Teaching Samuel (1 Samuel 1:24). Lievens portrayed Karl Ludwig, dressed in a classical, gold satin cloak, with his teacher Wolrad von Plessen as Aristotle Teaching the Young Alexander the Great.
The evidence strongly suggests that Rembrandt did not complete his portrait historié himself. The detailed execution of the velvety cloak and the almost polished face of the young prince point to the hand of Gerrit Dou. X-ray photographs reveal that the teacher’s frowning forehead was initially more brightly illuminated and that less attention was paid to his pupil’s face. Did Rembrandt’s client want it to be the other way around? It is striking: in the painting that depicts education, Rembrandt allowed his best pupil to add the finishing touches.
All these commissions arose from that first studio visit by Constantijn Huygens. However, there was someone else who was extremely important for Rembrandt. It was one of the “most excellent friends” of the brothers Constantijn and Maurits Huygens: Jacques de Gheyn III, who was known as Jacob, the son of the extremely affluent and highly esteemed court painter Jacques de Gheyn II. As a result of his father’s success, Jacob grew up in luxury. He proved to have a great talent for etching. “He made an overwhelming impression,” wrote Huygens, “arousing expectations that the whole of Italy might envy.”
Prince Rupert of the Palatinate and his Tutor as Eli and Samuel, c.1629–30.
Jan Lievens, Prince Charles Louis with his Tutor, 1631.
We do not know whether De Gheyn Junior introduced the Huygens brothers to Rembrandt; perhaps it was vice versa. In any case, Jacob visited Rembrandt’s studio in the late 1620s and managed to procure two paintings there. The inventory accompanying De Gheyn’s last will and testament included a painting with this description: “two old men sit debating, one with a large book on his lap illuminated by sunlight”. Even the notary was struck by the play of light in Rembrandt’s painting of Peter and Paul engaged in a dispute.
The other painting in the will—both works were bequeathed to De Gheyn’s nephew Joannes Wtenbogaert—was described as “an old sleeping man, sitting by a fire, his hand pressed to his chest”. The flames cause shadows and shimmering shapes to appear and disappear on the wall. Rembrandt’s black-in-black in the background is superb.
Every seventeenth-century viewer would immediately have understood which sin Rembrandt was depicting in that painting: it was “sloth”, or idleness. It just so happens that Huygens, a true moralist who never ceased to emphasize, when relating his childhood memories, how important it was for a young man to lead a pious, virtuous and industrious life, whipped himself up into a frenzy of indignation about this indolent artist.
Jacob did not have to work for a living, and so he did not. “That someone who was evidently born in the Netherlands that he might be for all eternity a pearl in the crown of his fatherland”, grumbled Huygens in his memoirs, “could so bury his talent and sink into a fruitless, dishonourable idleness.”
His lackadaisical friend threw such criticism to the wind. On one of the rare occasions on which he did finish something, he made an etching that might have been entitled “In Praise of Idleness”. A young man has pulled the hood of his cloak down over his eyes and sits, deep in delicious sleep, surrounded by clouds of opium fumes. Beneath the print is a French quatrain praising sleep as the beneficent state that levels shepherd and king (“Le bouvier & le Roy”), while mellowing and calming a mournful soul.
The print must have driven Huygens to despair. “Yet I do not relinquish hope that you, most magnificent of my friends, will turn once more to the seedbed where slumber the germs of fame, I refer to your brilliant talents.”
It is not inconceivable that Huygens may have taken Rembrandt aside and urged him to adopt some strong-arm measures to jolt Jacob out of his torpor. The idler’s fate could easily be foreseen, if he failed to mend his ways: slumped and snoring in his chair, in grimy clothes and reduced to penury. His life, like the little fire in the painting, was emitting its final flicker. The painting may well have been intended as a satire.
In Rembrandt’s Leiden years, he had been on excellent terms with Huygens. But the moralism of the prince’s secretary, as well as his uncompromising views of the role and style that he expected the painter to adhere to, would strain their relations. And eventually sour them.
The first sign that all was not well can be seen in the satirical poems that Huygens wrote in 1633. Rembrandt had painted his brother Maurits and Jacob de Gheyn in two friendship portraits. Outbursts of mischievous humour? Or did Constantijn really dislike the portraits? He wrote that the “skilful painter” had looked “askance” at his subjects and the portrait of De Gheyn was a poor likeness. Roughly rendered into English:
Whose face is this? Anyone who buys it
Can say it’s his but none that the features fit.
Or:
Rembrandt’s hand, De Gheyn’s picture.
Marvel, reader, none of De Gheyn’s features.
Huygens may have become irritated at the way in which Rembrandt’s art was developing. He had foreseen a great future for the artist: as a history painter at court, the same kind of role that Rubens played in Antwerp. For Lievens he had in mind a more modest role as a portraitist. However, in the early 1630s, when he was spending more and more time in Amsterdam, it was in fact Rembrandt who made more of a name for himself as a portrait painter.
Huygens ordered two paintings from Rembrandt at the same time—both destined for the stadtholder. They were a Raising of the Cross and a Descent from the Cross. They were to be based on the paintings of these classical devout themes by Peter Paul Rubens. It was no easy task for Rembrandt to surpass the works painted in 1610 and 1612, which hung in the St Walburgis Church in Antwerp—if only because Rubens’s paintings were twenty-five times bigger than the modest-sized panels that Huygens had ordered from Rembrandt for the stadtholder’s quarters in the Binnenhof.
In 1633, Rembrandt delivered the two piercingly realistic paintings, in which he did not shrink from according a prominent role to himself. In the Raising of the Cross the painter, wearing his blue beret, stands beside the nailed, bleeding feet of Christ.
Why would Rembrandt have done this? To start with, it was a way of placing himself on the wall of Frederik Hendrik’s gallery. He could be certain that he would be recognized there by the most powerful figures at court, wealthy art lovers and potential clients.
Portrait of Maurits Huygens, 1632.
Portrait of Jacques de Gheyn III, 1632.
His motives go further than that, however. It appears to be a confession. As if the painter were declaring, as in a poem that was well known at the time, “He Bore our Griefs” by Jacob Revius (1630), that he shared in the responsibility for the death of Christ: “No, it was not the Jews who crucified you, Lord Jesus,” wrote Revius. And a few lines further on: “I am the one, O Lord, who brought you there.”
In the Descent from the Cross, one of those who helps cautiously to take Christ’s body down from the cross has the face of Rembrandt. He holds his cheek tenderly against the abdomen of the leaden corpse. Here, the painter plays a supportive rather than a guilty role. In both cases, he displays his personal involvement. In his world, Christ’s Passion was a living event. Faith and life were inextricably intertwined.
Satisfied with the result, the stadtholder ordered three new paintings, to depict the Ascension, Entombment and Resurrection of Christ. But with this commission, something strange happened. Rembrandt took an astonishing six years to complete the paintings. He also grumbled about the size of the fee and the time it took for him to be paid, all of which aroused the irritation of Constantijn Huygens.
Did Rembrandt obstinately take his time, thinking and experimenting as long as he wanted until he was satisfied? Did he consider the prince’s commission less important than the lucrative portraits of burghers that he was producing in his new city of Amsterdam? It was not until 1639, when he had bought an extravagant house in Anthonisbreestraat—now the Rembrandt House—and needed money, that he sent them to the court in The Hague. The paint was still wet.
The financial negotiations and the foot-dragging were a painful issue for Rembrandt but a blessing for his biographer: because of them, we have seven letters from Rembrandt to Constantijn Huygens, from early 1636 to the end of 1639. They are the only letters from him that have come down to us. Notwithstanding their businesslike subject matter, he reveals his character in just a few words.
On 12th January 1639, Rembrandt reported that The Entombment of Christ and The Resurrection of Christ had been completed with the aid of “studious diligence”. The Ascension was yet to be finished. It had taken so long, wrote Rembrandt, because he was straining after the “greatest and most natural moving quality”.
What did those words mean? Did Rembrandt seek to depict the most natural movements? It is certainly true: the men guarding the grave tumble off in all directions in terror and astonishment when an angel lifts the lid of the sarcophagus and Christ rises from inside.
Or did he mean it figuratively? Did he seek to move the emotions of the viewer? In my view, that seems also to be true.
Although Rembrandt eventually succeeded masterfully in moving everyone, with his discourteous behaviour he had blotted his copybook with Constantijn Huygens. The relations between the painter and the powerful secretary never really recovered.
For Rembrandt, the Passion series had become his own Via Dolorosa.
Raising of the Cross, 1645.