When the exhibition, Rembrandt: A Genius and His Impact, was shown in Melbourne at the end of 1997, viewers were surprised by the quality of the loans. It was widely assumed that leading museums would never lend us major works by the Dutch Master, but this did not take into account the negotiating skills of Bob Edwards (1930-2023), former director of Art Exhibitions Australia, whom we farewelled last week in Adelaide. Bob set about convincing key people that Australia was a valid cultural destination and succeeded in improving our standing in the world. However, the door is only ever ajar, and will close if we don’t keep a firm grip.
Twenty-five years after that landmark show, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-69) is back at the NGV, in a survey put together by Petra Kayser, Curator of Prints and Drawings. This new show, Rembrandt – True to Life, is on a smaller scale, but still manages to present an overview of the artist’s entire career, from his early years in Leiden as a brilliant apprentice, through his rise to fame and fortune in Amsterdam, to the bleak finale of old age, deserted by luck and his patrons.
This exhibition is based around the NGV’s comprehensive holdings of Rembrandt’s prints, which have long been one of the boasts of the collection. The first examples were acquired 130 years ago and have been accumulating ever since. There are over 100 etchings on display, supplemented by representative paintings by Rembrandt and his workshop. The loans, not as plentiful but of high quality, come from the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, and the Teylers Museum, Haarlem. As usual, the NGV has published an excellent catalogue with first-class reproductions and intelligent, highly readable essays.
With most artists, a show based largely on etchings would be considered a tame affair, but Rembrandt is not like other artists. His prints are virtually unmatched for skill, boldness and adventure. To examine them closely is to risk falling into a deep reverie, as one explores the imaginative world of one of the great innovators.
In some pieces it’s Rembrandt’s incipient modernity that astonishes, as he uses the etching needle with the freedom of a pencil, drawing in a loose, expressive manner. In other works it’s the complexity of the composition and wealth of detail that holds our attention. Most impressive is his mastery of light and space – qualities not easily captured by purely graphic means.
The NGV owns examples of Rembrandt’s most celebrated etchings, notably The Three Trees (1643), The hundred guilder print (c.1648), and Christ crucified between the two thieves: ‘The three crosses’ (1653). The latter exists in two very different states, showing how the artist’s thinking evolved. It’s no small adjustment, but a major overhaul, with the airy, spacious feel of the 3rd state being plunged into darkness in the 4th. The figures in the composition have been rearranged so drastically one of the crucified thieves virtually disappears.
In the 3rd state the picture is bathed in transcendental light, rendering figures as mere outline sketches. In the 4th, the gloom encroaches from either side, as if two black curtains are closing on the scene. It’s not simply a compositional change, it’s an emotional upheaval. In the earlier state we feel Christ’s power and the glory of his sacrifice. In the work that follows, there is an atmosphere of doom and despair, as if the end of the world has arrived. This clearly reflects the artist’s own moods, underlining his ability to translate feeling into form.
Everywhere in this show we feel Rembrandt’s intense emotional investment in images that other artists have treated in the most academic manner. This applies especially to those Biblical scenes that became a major preoccupation in his maturity. Although he could have made more money from portraiture, Rembrandt is said to have turned to religious imagery because of the superior status of history painting. Ambitious, not simply in own time, but for all time, he wanted to set himself alongside the giants of the Renaissance, challenging them at their own game.
It wasn’t commercial suicide because in the staunchly Calvinist Dutch republic there was a great appetite for pious images. In the best of them we can feel the abiding contradiction of a small, prosperous society in which material wealth and sharp business practice were glazed with stoic self-denial. All those portraits of men in dark suits were nonetheless expressions of pride and self-satisfaction. The wellknown stories from the Bible provided opportunities for drama, and – in the case of tales such as Susanna and the Elders – a little titillation.
Rembrandt was unbeatable in this field. His religious images seethed with drama or eroticism, but his extreme realism rendered the figures utterly plausible. His Man in oriental clothing (1635) is a Dutchman in fancy dress. His naked women don’t have the ideal appearance of Botticelli’s Venus, they are wrinkled and chubby, deformed by age, hard work and childbearing.
It’s as if Rembrandt was so sceptical of the idealistic fantasies of art that he pushed deliberately in the opposite direction, making images that could be viewed as ugly or vulgar. Yet when it suited him, he could create a picture as subtle as The three trees, in which an immaculate Dutch landscape acts as an allegory for the crucifixion of Christ and the two thieves.
Rembrandt’s emotional engagement is never more obvious than in the self-portraits, in which we chart his changing humours and fortunes. There are the early etchings in which we find him in a playful frame of mind, making faces, as if posing for a comical snapshot. There is Rembrandt in his pomp, dressed in the finery of an earlier age, announcing his fellowship with the Renaissance masters. We chart his rise and fall, as age, failure and disappointment turn the conceited cavalier of the earlier etchings into a sad, frail old man.
The self-portraits have crucially shaped our image of Rembrandt, allowing many commentators to portray him as a tragic, misunderstood figure. In recent decades art historians have begun to take a tougher line, pointing out accounts of Rembrandt’s vanity and extravagance. He has been repainted as unreliable and downright nasty, largely the author of his own undoing. But even the most uncompromising critics of the man can’t deny the power of the work, or the depths of feeling he explored. Rembrandt, a true son of the Dutch golden age, was a mass of contradictions. His life and art provide one the best arguments for not judging the work by the attitudes of the artist, which is the current moronic fashion.
To gauge the breadth of Rembrandt’s achievement one might start by looking at an early painting such as Two old men disputing (1628), in the NGV collection. Painted when he was 22 years old, it is a virtuoso performance in the manner of Velázquez’s Old woman frying eggs (1618), created at the age of 19. Like Velázquez, Rembrandt goes out of his way to include every kind of texture and surface, demonstrating his full skill set. His handling of light is breathtaking. At this early stage of his career he already has it all – from here he will cultivate an originality that entails un-learning some of his lessons in the name of greater expressivity, or as some might put it it, a higher realism.
The will to experiment is found in both the prints and the paintings, but the works in this show that were most revelatory for me were the very dark etchings, in which Rembrandt has scored the plate so heavily we glimpse figures as spectral presences in a cloud of black. In an image such as The adoration of the shepherds: a night piece (c. 1657), we not only feel the feel the oppressive weight of the night, we envisage an entire planet wreathed in gloom, ignorance and superstition, to be dispelled by the birth of Christ.
It’s the most glorious moment in the entire Christian tradition, but Rembrandt doesn’t give us adoring acolytes and angels with trumpets. These very realistic shepherds are straining in the dim light to see the famous child who is all but invisible. In place of a celebration, we recognise the profound mystery of the Nativity, and realise what a monumental task Christ has ahead of Him, bringing enlightenment to this dark, dark world.
Rembrandt – True to Life
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,
2 June – 10 September, 2023
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 24 June, 2023