Rembrandt’s Debut in Amsterdam

you you good afternoon everyone good afternoon I'm Laurence Kanter the chief curator here at the Yale art gallery it is my great pleasure to welcome you all today and to introduce John Walsh the easiest job any curator could ask for is introducing John Walsh Yale graduate from the class of 1961 director emeritus of the Jay paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles renowned specialist in the study of Dutch paintings art gallery governing board member and above all great friend to all of us here at the Art Gallery he begins today his new lecture series Rembrandt today inspired by the generous loan to the gallery of Rembrandt's incomparable portrait of Alta Ellen borer rosemary thank you so much Ellen book from the collection of rosemary and I cannot hello John will lead us through a rapid but penetrating tour of Rembrandt's career over the course of six lectures all generously sponsored by the Martin Ryerson lecture fund as is John's way each lecture will begin with a single picture focusing closely on that object before stepping back to look at the wider context in which it was made in the lectures that follow John will examine works in the collections of the state Hermitage Museum in st. Petersburg the Frick Collection in New York the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as well as edgings in the galleries collection and of course Alta erlenberg John you're gonna have the easiest time in the world following this we are especially grateful to Rosemary and Ike funada Lowe whose collection of 17th century Dutch paintings and the generosity with which they share that collection are rapidly becoming legendary they are the inspiration for this series we are also grateful of course to John Walsh in addiction to the lectures he offers in this hall John works tirelessly with Jessica sack in our Wordle gallery teacher program teaching graduate students from a variety of disciplines across campus to slow down look closely and take the time to fit to find out what can be learned from works of art if you have not done so already please pick up a Rembrandt today gallery card on your way out for a complete list of all the lectures in this series now may I ask you to turn off your cell phones and join me in welcoming John Walsh introduce you the Rembrandt's they do announcer Larry thank you very much Rembrandt was the dominant artist in the Dutch culture that I studied as a graduate student fifty years ago it seemed to me that my teachers more or less agreed on what Rembrandt made him what made Rembrandt important his skills his knowledge his goodness his candor his independence from fashion in fact the Dutch people I knew recognized Rembrandt as one of them they saw their own national virtues embodied in him their own best selves since the 19th century Rembrandt had become a moral hero for them and for many other people as well when in 50 years time the picture of Rembrandt has changed we know more today about his business his patrons the web of his connections among people in a circle we know more about his ambitions about his teaching about the Diaspora of his pupils many pupils and his sources of inspiration we recognize that his dealings with other people personal and commercial didn't always have the generosity of spirit that he'd been credited with his huge output of drawings and etchings has been restated and for most of those 50 years the Rembrandt research committee examined every painting and tried to identify what he did and didn't paint the result was a corpus of the paintings that runs to six volumes and about sixty pounds the number of pictures attributed to Rembrandt in the catalogue that I'd used as a student was cut roughly in half and then in the past dozen years including the last topmost volume of the corpus dozens and dozens of paintings that had been rejected or placed under suspicion were reinstated and quite a few previously unknown paintings by Rembrandt have come to light for these lectures I've chosen topics that have interested me at different times during these years some of them tied up with my experiences of studying Rembrandt and even I'm lucky enough to say acquiring worked by him will re-examine Rembrandt and how things stand with him today we look at what's been learned about the artist what's been claimed and refuted by dozens of academics and curators and we'll encourage you as Larry said when you go to museums to look at pictures slowly and up close so that you make the guards nervous today we look at the launch of Rembrandt's career at the most as the most accomplished painter in Amsterdam when he got there at the age of 26 he'd already spent almost 10 years in training and painting professionally in his hometown of Leiden but he'd never had a commission for a portrait the picture on the screen gives an idea of how talented he was and how he sees the opportunity when it arose for him in Amsterdam let's just look at it for a few minutes I'll show you some details things you can see for yourself upstate in the galleries thanks to the wonderfully generous people who have lent it I'm not gonna comment on these images I'm just gonna look with you well it may have struck you at first how exact the whole thing is how carefully detailed her costume and her features are now here's we're coming close pays off you realize that what appears from a distance to be in sharp focus is not so sharp for example the furrows of her forehead and the corners of her eyes are strokes of grey that you can actually see the lighter parts of her face have a kind of template texture the highlights on her nose are thicker touches of white and the more you look the more active the surface becomes look at her jawline for instance the light bounces up off of her color onto her skin and it gives it a sheen like pewter that white cap viewers could have cost Rembrandt a lot of labour but you see it's quite freely laid on with detached strokes of white and grey her fur trim is suggested by brown blotches put on with a very soft brush and then just flicked up onto the background to appreciate the difference between Rembrandt and the competition here's the head of a somewhat younger woman on the left by the very competent nicholas of iose similar pose costume color range and a pleasant but sober expression but look at the cheeks and the foreheads one smooth little bit of a gloss the other with a distinct texture produced by a buildup of paint that's not been smooth over and look again at the shadow on the cheek and jaw both are invaded by light reflected up from the rough one is uniform and the other seems to shimmer so Rembrandt's advantage was that he delivered all the clarity that people were accustomed to paying for plus a lot of subtle virtuosity to linger over and admire and point out to your friends this is not the more familiar Rembrandt of the late years the painter of margarita - here almost 30 years later with its tremendous directness and sombre setting and thickly applied paint and the sense of a message intended for aspects a spectators about mortality and dignity this is the young Rembrandt a painter of refined delicacy but I think at the same time there's strength and algae are limber there's in the level candor of the way she looks at us Rembrandt paints a kind of Oriole of light around her making the background darken above her and this adds a subtle sense of drama and importance to her portrait modest as it is she was the 62 year old wife of an Orthodox Calvinist minister in Amsterdam young Cornelius Silvius the man and in Rembrandt's portrait in her position she would have been expected to dress conservatively without ostentation and she has normally Rembrandt would have been asked to paint Silvius - and we'd have a pair of matching oval portraits which is a shape of portrait that was popular a kind of novelty in Amsterdam in these years well if we did paint them we've lost Angelo's portrait and just to show you what's such a pair might look like here's a substitute from the Metropolitan on the Left same size same shape same date Rembrandt knew algae erlenberg she was the niece of Hendrick Arlen Bert a well-connected art dealer to whom Rembrandt lent a thousand guilders in these days he had the money already and with whom Rembrandt formed a business partnership I'll chip had a 21 year old cousin named Saskia Allender and in the following year Rembrandt was engaged to her this delicate silverpoint drawing records their betrothal and Sasuke's birthday the next year they were married this was evidently a love match and certainly a good career move Rembrandt married into a well to a large and well-to-do family that gave him access to a clientele that was linked together by their merchant status and often their religious affiliations this wasn't the uppermost crust of Amsterdam society but these were people with money usually recently fairly recently gotten and with social ambition many of them lived near one another in Ireland worse neighborhood which was recently built up with fine houses the city was expanding outward from its medieval core with a damn Square and the new church in the center Island Burke I lived up here in a neighborhood mixed neighborhood you'd say that was becoming a magnet for artists and artisans running through that neighborhood was Broadway the brass rod was renamed a century later the Yoda knew a rod after the well-known well-to-do a Jewish population that lived and worked there at the end of it is the zyre Dirk Eric oops where am I looking here and further along at the lower right the weighing house that was soon going to get a large painting by Rembrandt Allan Burke was a dealer in paintings he handled older art and was also an agent for contemporary artists a kind of go-between and business getter for contemporary artists and there was a studio in his house Rembrandt became a boarder in the house and the head of the studio I wouldn't put him in that position because REM brats work in Leiden during the previous four years had gotten him some notice especially his hall-small history paintings and in fact several of them had been bought for the court of the stuff holder in The Hague Prince Frederik Hendrik you see at the left such as this small scene of Pluto abducting a very unwilling Preserve inna and plunging down into the underworld with her in his chariot the action is lively the craftsmanship brilliant and the surfaces jewel like Rembrandt was 25 how did he get so fast so far so fast let me flashback for a few minutes to his years in Leiden that City was the second largest to Amsterdam but much smaller his father was a Miller you can see his grain mill there the lower left and right on the Rhine which cuts through the city milling was lucrative and respectable and his father had married above his station so Rembrandt got to go to the Latin School through his high school years that's it by the way on the left you can go look at the building although the school has moved on and there's a computer software company in there now there he studied classical and modern literature the Bible and history at 14 he registered in the Leiden University but never attended at all instead he studied drawing and painting with Jacques Francois Annenberg a Leiden artist who'd worked for many years in Italy and he'd learned enough after a few years Rembrandt did to go to work in Amsterdam under Peter last month last month was the perfect teacher if you wanted to be a history painter he'd also worked in Italy and he'd observed the revolutionary changes in Venetian and Roman painting in the early 17th century last month got very at composition what the Dutch called ordinance II clear legible arrangements of figures which you can see in small paintings like this one a scene from a play by Aeschylus in which two close friends here are arguing about which of them is going to get to be sacrificed for the sake of the other mmm last month had made a market for himself for high-minded subject from the Bible or classical writers and he showed Rembrandt how to give his figures solid believable physiques and poses clear gestures vivid expressions and also how to use classical looking props and costumes in the background blastmon paints this scene in 1625 probably while Rembrandt is still in the studio it shows the general Coriolanus during a siege being begged for mercy by his own mother and wife and other women Rembrandt adapted the composition for one of his own which is set also in classical antiquity but what scene it represents is still a mystery recently a costume historian pointed out that there's a big difference in what the two main figures are wearing here Coriolanus by last month has credible Roman gear on but Rembrandt's man wears a fur-lined tunic and leggings a kind of imaginary outfit with barbarian associations that puzzle remains like last month Rembrandt worked on small panels and pretty quickly learned how to use a subtler range of colors he gave his actors a whole repertory of exaggerated expressions in the scene on the right of Christ driving the money changers out of the temple the emotions are anger fear and pain in the case of old Tobit at the left the impoverished pious blind Tobit the situation calls for pathos his wife Anna brought back a goat from the market an Tobit is convinced that she must have stolen it he's in despair she's astonished this is a true trivial incident in a long rich story but it is a test of the power of pose and expression facial expression was Rembrandt's closest study in these years he looked in the mirror and recorded his own face over and over and over he studied himself in fact with more persistence and fascination than any artist ever had the main purpose seems to have been to build his skills at expressing emotion certainly there's some play-acting to a trying out of aspects of himself we'll discuss that in a later lecture on self-portraits in the upper left though it's a shock to see him giving his own features to a miserable looking beggar at the lower right he's a soldier wearing neck armor like the gear that the militiamen wear in the Night Watch remember I had a close colleague in Leiden for a couple of years young Levin's who was talented and had what appears to have been also a working partnership with Rembrandt Levin's also painted his own face many times and at the top he painted his friend Rembrandt - it's hard to tell the unsigned paintings of one artist from another this is a large panel on the right that shows the Israelite heroine Esther Rafi revealing to the king the treachery of his trusted Minister Haman you can see him on the left for a long time the picture was attributed to Rembrandt then to a combination of Rembrandt Elevens and now the consensus is leave ins leave ins alone sorry robots power of an impression of expression impressed of Constantin Huygens who was the private sector secretary to the prince of orange a man who was a learning connoisseur and something of a talent spotter arrogance was the first person to write about Rembrandt's abilities in his diary about 1916 29 or 30 he mentions to young artists in Leiden who were barely three years into their careers he writes this Rembrandt surpasses Levin's in his sure touch and in the liveliness of emotions conversely leavings a superior and invention and in a certain grandeur of his daring themes and forms Heron's was especially smitten by Rembrandt speeding of the repentant Judas which I'm sure some of you went to New York to see this summer in the Morgan Library show about it called Rembrandt's first masterpiece hyphens wrote this about the picture the singular gesture of the despairing Judas that one furious howling Judas praying for mercy but devoid of hope all traces of hope erased from his countenance his appearance frightening his hair torn his garments rent his limbs twisted his hands clenched bloodlessly tight fallen prostrate on his knees on a blind impulse his whole body contorted in wretches hideousness I placed this against all the elegance that has been produced throughout the ages and Happiness goes on to say that he's amazed that but he says a youth a Dutchman a bearded Miller could bring together so much in one human figure and express it all Rembrandt for hire has had the Faculty of penetrating to the heart of his subject and bringing out its essence hardens put his finger on qualities that were going to distinguish Rembrandt for 40 more years particularly that skill at finding the emotional and moral center of gravity in a story and expressing it Rembrandt got more and more ambitious in his last years at Leiden especially as a painter of narrative scenes of myth and scripture this painting in Boston shows a solitary artist maybe Rembrandt himself facing a huge panel like David sizing up Goliath we can't see what he's painting he makes it an image of an idealized confrontation of youth and the great unknown the task ahead a year so later Rembrandt got a commission to paint a portrait of Amalia from Psalms the wife of this doth holder Frederick Frederick of Orange Prince Frederick who was the chief executive you could say and she commander in chief of the Dutch Republic Rembrandt must have spent some months in The Hague you see the Prince here wearing red and gotten a taste of life at court which was insular french-speaking and small potatoes compared to the commercial metropolis of Amsterdam it was evidently this picture to be a companion piece to her husband's portrait by carat Jared from hon Horst improv profile like the Emperor's and empresses on Roman coins and not exactly a format for peering into people's souls he pitted at least one other person living in The Hague a wine merchant an officer in the militia company your estate cholerae who had Rembrandt present him as every inch the military officer and not one bit the wine merchant he's wearing the buff coat of a soldier holding a calibre which is a kind of musket and on hip and his gesture of command with a gleaming with gleaming armor and a confident gaze light behind him creating it again a kind of force field even stronger than the ones you saw around LT Allen burr he introduces a theatrical trick here the inexplicable shadow that falls on him so that his face and upper body get extra emphasis Rembrandt had painted the first great life-size portrait of this type in Amsterdam the year before a picture that I imagine you all know in the Frick Collection we have to imagine that it was Islander who got this commission for Rembrandt his protege this man Nicolas roots was a merchant whose business included trade with Russia which probably accounts for the fur hat on his head and the unusually conspicuous for a trim of his over garment called a table art which was borne by worn by academics and clergymen and other people of distinction or who wanted to claim distinction rember him turning toward us and holding out a slip of paper making the point that he's a man of affairs his forehead is a bit contracted as he gives his whole attention to the spectator the face is patiently finished but everywhere there are signs of the painters energy the flicks of his wide brush that make the fur the gouges was the butt of the brush that make the wiry hairs in his mustache the whole effect is of mental and physical forcefulness subdued for long enough to make a likeness this is another portrait of 1630 one round brass first year in Amsterdam we don't know who the man on the left was he's painted as though he'd been caught writing interrupted head turned mouth open to speak what do you might ask where did remember get the idea of animating a portrait in this way probably from group portraits like this one by Nicolas Elias who had been the leading portrait painter in Amsterdam until remember I arrived it's a group of trustees pictured as responsible citizens the man at the left as you'll see with the book he's interrupted and looks up and out at us remember it takes that formula and gives it something extra it gives it a vibrancy and a mystery through the light in the room and an even more momentary feeling to the action a portrait of just a bit later shows the Amsterdam merchant Martin Lawton with what looks like a letter with his name on it and the date January 11th 1632 and a lot of pretend writing V an idea of the picture is one we've seen already that a man taking a moment from his busy profitable life to look at us and do that for posterity for all to see and remember him by lotin sapped for his portrait in Rembrandt's place of business the studio in the house of Ireland er is dealer an agent and soon-to-be father-in-law to please his clients Rembrandt first of all had to meet the expectations that other portrait painters like P Cano had established the picture had to resemble the person naturally and also convey his or her status in the world and so much the better if the artist could give this spectator a sense of being in the actual presence of the client give him the illusion of life so Lotan contracts his forehead a bit parts his lips as though just beak you also use lighting and pose and props to make the man a person of importance and the woman a person of virtue and sympathy well here's an example of what an Amsterdam client might expect of a portrait painter just a few years before Rembrandt arrived on the left this is Paulus mer Elsa painting a well born man dressed in extremely expensive clothes and with a meticulous technique giving him as you can see it's a conventional pose bland expression and very little animation and the face when he wasn't doing portraits Rembrandt continued to paint historical subjects on a small scale the kind that constant inheritance and evidently the Prince of Orange favored the Prince had bought the picture on the right a few years earlier perhaps after his Scout hyphens saw it in remembrance studio in Leiden Rembrandt returned to this subject as this and did another version very different doing away with the intimacy close up and instead drawing back to present a scene that's breathtaking in its theatrical setting and lighting he invents a vast temple that's a dizzy kind of Semitic gothic fantasy swarming with tiny figures a beam of light comes from some offstage source and picks out the old rabbi and the Holy Family the light becomes the messenger of divine revelation to the Jews who aren't it must be said paying much attention Simeon's robe shimmers and seems translucent it may in fact have been one of the Rembrandt's purchases around this time since he was an avid buyer of costumes and exotic props of all kinds which he used for biblical and historical scenes like this and also for single figures for example this one at the Met which is best-known I think of all these figures they weren't commissioned portraits or mere costume pieces they were also exercises in pose and expression and also in various kinds of lighting and techniques of painting rich fabric and metalwork arms and armor and so on they also served his pupils who made copies or variations of Rembrandt's style of studies like this and use them for entire compositions sometimes we belong to a category that the Dutch called tronie a single figure in or military outfit with no specific historical identity their great many throw knees by Rembrandt and his pupils mentioned in 17th century archives Rembrandt used this particular male model on the right hand the right side right half here a half a dozen times including for this one an imaginary yeah here imaginary portrait of st. Peter to judge from the keys that he's clutching what sets this Peter apart is the intensity of his expression he's clearly troubled the core of Peters story is his repentance after he betrayed Christ which accounts for his expression which is all the more striking when you compare it for example to the other great painter of trow knees and saints his older contemporary in Antwerp Peter Paul Rubens Rubens is Peter by comparison is robed in white like the Pope that he was the first pontiff of the church and he attends entirely to God not to us fellow humans his picture is about sanctity and authority Rembrandt's is about guilt Peter focuses his guilty and disturbed mind on the viewer as if he were asking for our understanding thirty years later Rembrandt painted a series of apostles in the same format but now in his most thickly built-up style of painting with broad strokes of the brush this Saint Bartholomew holds the instrument of his martyrdom the knife that was used to skin him alive and his pensive state of mind is something fascinating but that we can't fathom only guess that Rembrandt kept on with small figured history paintings during the 1630s this one is hardly more than 2 feet wide it's the picture I have the greatest feeling for I think cuz when I worked at the Metropolitan Museum I was very conscious that we had no early narrative paintings by Rembrandt and this was the best one in private hands anywhere I wanted in the worst possible way for the owner to lend it to us but he was an elderly disagreeable Swiss who wouldn't talk to me my successor Walter lead cabañas - prior to pry it away and in the early 1990s you could see it at the Met as you many of you dude probably covered with yellow varnish as it is here in the picture but in wonderful condition meanwhile I'd moved on to a museum that needed the picture even more and eventually we got it and after a judicious cleaning the painting looked the way Rembrandt intended it to the story is from Ovid it's how Europe got its name the Princess Europa of Tyre and modern Lebanon encountered an attractive white bull in an nearby meadow who was of course at Jupiter in disguise who was so sweet that he invited her to get up on his back for a ride which she did and the ride proved longer than she had expected this despite her protests all the way to the island of Greece at Rica Crete rather and they are with Jupiter's help she had a great many important children Rembrandt imagines her handmaidens theatrically distraught and a Moorish driver there at the top in an astonishing golden wagon which would have looked at home parked outside Rembrandt's Temple of Jerusalem it supposed to be happening on the Mediterranean Sea but this is more like a Dutch River with a with a fortified town of fantasized antiquity Rembrandt pulls off some feats of illusion here like the calm water with its colourful and woozy reflections of the bull and his passenger and there are delightful details like Europa's expression of amazed disbelief her tight grip on his hide and his horn and the Bulls eager gaze towards the future with his tail erect with excitement I mean it's a sure thing that some paintings like this were commissioned but we rarely know which ones we assume though that Islanders house and at that house portraits sitters and and visitors could come and look at other pictures by Rembrandt on display and buy them for example such biblical subjects as this one the raising of Lazarus on a three-foot high panel Rembrandt imagines Christ as a kind of magician in a cavern hung with swords and armor he stands high above the tomb with his arm raised and his mouth open Lazarus seems insensate but he sits up obedient to the command Rembrandt creates a mysterious place that's live lighted from this side from offstage you could say and populates it with actors who use body language and expressions to multiply the reactions one might have to a grotesque and impossible and joyous surprise remember had set out to reproduce this picture in a large itching not just reproduce it but to rethink it he turned the cave you see to face outdoors so it admits a bigger splash of light at both edges he makes the spectators reactions even more attention-getting and makes Christ even more impossibly tall we'll come back to this print which is two feet high and terrifically ambitious it marks Rembrandt's turn towards attracting a wider audience for his art at this point Rembrandt was doing well he was getting ahead in the lucrative portrait practice he was painting history paintings with small figures in the meticulous style he'd perfected in Leiden and he was getting serious about edging his Great Leap Forward came when he got a commission probably through eyelander again from a prominent physician called dr. Nicholas taupe a celebrated surgeon and anatomist who wanted a portrait of a group of colleagues with taupe himself shown as their teacher it was intended for this building the headquarters well the upstairs rooms were his the headquarters of the surgeons guild in the scent the scent I'm Tony's father a medieval gatehouse converted to a weighing house it's five minutes walk from Island Burke's house this wouldn't be the first time that a teacher of anatomy had been portrayed in a dissection these anatomical demonstrations were public events teachers perform them in anatomical theaters a small theater in the round where they dissected corpses of recently executed criminals in front of spectators here in mirror felts picture the doctors surround dr. Thunder Mayor as he proceeds in the sequence prescribed by Vesalius in his book on human anatomy seventy years before he proceeds by opening the abdominal cavity first Rembrandt took this dull yearbook picture formula for a group portrait and turned it into something thrilling I'm here we're not in an anatomical theater but instead some kind of shadowy vaulted building more like Lazarus's cave and taupe was not dissecting in the prescribed way at all he's opened up the arm so that others could see how the arm and the hand work how the tendons make the fingers move it's a demonstration of the intricate ingenious machinery of the body mastered by Vesalius who I have to say was from the Netherlands he was baptised underneath from basil and then latinized himself to Vesalius who was certainly the author of the big book on the right popped up on dr. topes calling in life is to expound this knowledge to his followers and they react with expressions of surprise of excitement doubt wonderment each expression different and vivid calm on the other hand is to topis utterly calm and speaking to well-dressed well-educated people looking at the picture Vesalius must have been present in their minds he they would have seen this portrait on the left in his great treatise and perhaps remember what he chose to be pictured doing showing how the arm and hand work doing what taupe is doing a taupe certainly knew the picture and he had Rembrandt paint a demonstration of his own mastery of that knowledge by extension human mastery of nature and more than that a demonstration of taupe as inheritor and transmitter of that magic that mastery Rembrandt's portrait practice surged in the following years some of his clients belong to the clergy in island Burke's circle liberal Calvinists Mennonites and remonstrance the most famous and important of all of these was this 76 year old man johannes Archibald heart a preacher who hadn't been tutored to the prince of orange a hero to moderates during the sectarian struggles during Rembrandt's youth and now returned from self-imposed exile when bran gives him a familiar gesture of heartfelt conviction hand on breast and the details of the heavy lines on his face that seemed to be the record of his spiritual struggles now documents shed some interesting light on how Rembrandt worked Archibald Hart noted in his diary that he only sat for Rembrandt for one day and that probably was not enough time for him to catch the whole composition and paint in the face since the hands in the portrait are relatively crude the assumption has been recently that he had help from assistance for those hands and that's certainly true with a good many of Rembrandt's forretress one people of Rembrandt's noted in addition that Rembrandt made a practice of having his portraits subjects bring with them a collar or a ruff and leave them behind in the studio after their sitting which helps to solve the puzzle of how he managed to paint something as intricate difficult subtle to pain as this man's collar in the short day he had another category altogether are the marriage portraits of Martin Sol Mons and Opie inchoate last year the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre bought these jointly from the Paris Ross Hills they were from a rich she was for a rich and socially prominent family marrying for the second time she steps toward her proud betrothed who shows the glove that he's he'd accepted from her father which was a conventional symbol for the groom's acceptance of authority over the woman he's marrying sorry but that's how it was getting painted life-sized and full-length had been the prerogative of highborn people but in remembrance and things were changing and some merely wealthy people had begun to commission full lengths and find the wall space that could hold them or build the wall space this man was a cloth dealer in Harlem called villain from hate Asian who had friend friend's house give him the full treatment including sword cloth of Honor over his head Renaissance garden behind and so forth these were social climbers there and there were everywhere but not many had the cheek to present themselves quite as grandly as this man in full length yet the couple is dressed in spectacularly expensive and showy outfits and by their actions they get the message across not so much to do with personality or mutual attraction but everything to do with their family alliance and their standing in the world other sitters wanted other things from Rembrandt including some move even excitement this young woman that the met turns in her chair to look at us over the years her portrait was separated from our husbands so we've lost the fullness of Rembrandt's invention here which was to have the man lunge forward rising out of his chair gesturing to her as she turns away as though in modesty when Brad sticks to the convention of having each of them look at the spectators which limits what they can express for each other I think I was the first one to bring these portraits back together but only temporarily in a show of Dutch peer portraits at the Met in 1970 I had matching frames made for them and which they still wear whenever they have conjugal visits as they were as they were as they were having at the Met two years ago when I took the cell phone picture her portrait is most both more beautifully painted and in better condition than his but still they generate excitement together and each of them makes more sense here's a couple that's never been separated this is a shipbuilder in the act of evidently drawing a ship's hull one of those fast and roomy merchant vessels that carried much of the dutch overseas trade but it's the drawings probably for a treatise on ships rather than an actual design to be built in any case his wife reaches out holding the door handle as she is she's got Messina her hand up here's got a grip on the door handle as she makes her delivery and opens her mouth as if to speak to him this is a new and different kind of portrait of a marriage this is an active partnership a couple engaged with each other and the wife creating the action when I was a student we had no idea who these people were but soon after the amsterdam amsterdam archivist issa from Aten managed to identify them through the archives they were the very successful master shipbuilder young orexin and his wife creature yawns both were early investors in the Dutch East India Company this was a good thing to do I think Microsoft the people who and the people who paid the highest taxes of anybody living in the shipyard district where other rich people lived it's been another recent development with this picture 19th century engraving has been published that tells us something important about how the picture once looked it was taller and more spacious an analysis of the canvas has confirmed that it indeed been cut down by whom and why we don't know and the space is now a lot more compressed around the figures than Rembrandt intended before and after her merit his marriage to marriage to Rembrandt Saskia Allen burr served as a model for him she did that fairly often here are two pictures of her in fancy dress on the right with a big hat on a feather and a coquettish smile not intended as a portrait but again it's what contemporaries called a tronie intended for the market probably via the family dealer Islander and on the Left she's dressed in gorgeous Arcadian or shepherdess outfit with a staff holding a mass of flowers she probably represents flora the goddess of gardens like the shipbuilder portrait this composition underwent some major changes long after it left the studio x-rays have revealed a welter of form on the lower right it doesn't match what we see on the surface it was obviously painted over at some early stage of the design if you look hard at it you can see that at the level of Flora's shoulder here there's a head in profile and below that a kind of scoop of drapery researchers in London showed that Rembrandt's gentle flora began life as the Israelite heroine Judith who seduced the in invading Babylonian general Holofernes got him drunk and cut his head off she's often pictured doing just that or else handing off the head to her maidservant which is what you see in Rubens as painting at the bottom you can verify the fact that Rembrandt was thinking about this subject by looking at the drawing on the top here which includes the bed with the head headless corpse and the bed and the maid on the floor stuffing the head into the bag this is quite a change she first held a sword in her right hand which remember and painted out and replaced with this staff with Ivy wand around it the head and the maid are gone but her expression didn't change at all the calm killer Judith becomes the Fertile flora without moving a muscle we have no idea why Rembrandt made the change it's easy to imagine a client in the studio though seeing the Judith and the head and asking for something well more pleasant in earlier I mentioned Rembrandt's admirer Constantin Huygens and his boss the Rembrandt's admirer Constantin - I mentioned bream breasts the sorry I mentioned the admirer constant in her hands and his boss Frederick Henry Prince of orange and the fact that by the age of 25 the artist had sold several small history paintings to the prince including this one just a few years later came a bigger Commission for two paintings of scenes from the life of Christ what seems to have prompted the Commission was this painting by Rembrandt that was discovered and published while I was a student a Christ on the cross in an unexpected place the parish church in there a town in well in a town near Bordeaux a picture signed and dated 1631 it's a stark image of an isolated victim crying out to God at the ninth hour why have you forsaken me both Rembrandt and his old studio made and competitor young Levin's painted the same subject in the same year in a similar round-topped format since hyphens admired both artists it's very possible he asked each of them to compete to paint this subject so he could compare them as a drawing by Rembrandt that may record this it's a show us an artist with the features of leave ins pondering a picture on the easel whose round top shape is like the ones that he and Rembrandt have been painting well the next thing we know is that Rembrandt got a commission to paint two scenes of the passion which led to a total of seven paintings in the end seven paintings of the life of Christ in the same round top format each about three feet high a project that took him seven years before we leave these pictures I want to show you how much both Rembrandt and Levin's ode to Rubens whose isolated Christ crying out is the prototype they might have seen this very painting by Rubens that's a recent acquisition by the front owner Lowe's and is hanging upstairs in any case they certainly knew the engraving after it we expect Catholic Catholic patrons patrons like Rubens's to commission paintings of the passion for chapels or at home for devotional purposes that's a normal but not so often Calvinists like hyphens and Prince Frederik Hendrik and Rembrandt and we expect we're soon would be regarding such things as tinged with idolatry so the princes passion series comes as a surprise the first picture was the raising of the Cross which Rembrandt set in near darkness you can pick got a massive mostly faceless men pulling and shoving the cross up watched my apostles at the left and the centurion on horseback who just looks out of the pictures if commanding us to watch justice being done the light falls on just a few figures mainly on Christ and on a fashionably dressed young helper who has features of none other than Rembrandt himself their artist presents himself as an actual participant a sinner who bears responsibility for what's happening I'll come back to that idea in a lecture on the self-portraits we assume for a long time that this to paint this subject Rembrandt must have turned to Rubens to his famous older piece in Antwerp but there's no evidences turned up that he ever saw that older piece and it wasn't engraved and besides it's very different it's daylit it's swarming with muscle men and Christ is a beautifully posed idealized athletic figure a better idea was proposed some time ago that this small woodcut by the German artist al brushed outdoor fur now suggested a much simpler composition to Rembrandt like all great artists Rembrandt was never too proud to borrow and he often turned to renaissance print makers for ideas to do Lukas van Leyden and many others when Brant made a preliminary chalk drawing it was more obviously inspired by outdoor first composition well the second picture he delivered was this scene of the aftermath the lowering of Christ from the cross and Christ's mother collapsed on the ground Rembrandt imagines the corpse as a kind of Miss shapen sack greenish his features distorted and unmistakably having been tortured to death this time it is based on Rubens as transmitted by this engraved copy but everything that's Noble and beautiful and Reubens becomes horrible in Rembrandt's remake of the composition and the figures and again Rembrandt puts himself in the picture it had been suggested that his motive was to play the part of everyman the medieval personification of all sinners now I think it's much more credibly proposed that there's been a more particular reason especially for the educated audience that this picture was going to have at court just a few years earlier a prominent Calvinist minister published a poem entitled he bore our sorrows which describes all Christ's tortures in the vivid detail and says it was not the Jews Lord Jesus who crucified you it is I Lord who have done all this to thee it seems to be the spirit and the purpose that led Rembrandt to paint himself as one of the executioner's in the raising of the cross and this man receiving the corpse in the descent from the cross remember I saw this composition as an opportunity to do as Rubens had done to produce a large print of it which he did with a great deal of help from a artist he had trained young humfleet after this there were a few more large reproductive edgings but Rembrandt gave that up and devoted himself to smaller prints by his own hand that too is going to be the subject of another lecture the two crucifixion pictures got him a commission for three more scenes from The Passion which took him six years he exchanged letters with about this with hyphens who was evidently not at all pleased and in one of them in 1639 Rembrandt offers a celebrated excuse for the delay the entombment and resurrection did indeed take a long time he said but the result was that in these two pictures the greatest and most natural emotion and animation have been observed which is also the principle reason why they've been so long in the making in the translation I just read to you Rembrandt was striving for the translation says emotion and animation the words Rembrandt used was Bavaria colic head to see they're in italics or movement Dutch scholars have argued for years over what that meant movement is that literally physical action or his movement in the sense of being moved by what you see the consensus now I think would be that Rembrandt was adopting an idea from classical rhetoric the function of rhetoric was to persuade the reader or the listener by using an appeal to strong emotions in other words I'm moving the listener Rembrandt's ability to depict emotions and arouse them in the viewer it's just what hyphens had praised so lavishly seven six or seven years later never all of us these paintings seem to have been difficult for him in part maybe because of their small size which he probably felt confining he certainly wanted to prove himself with bigger things as Rubens had and so what followed in 1639 after he'd finished the series but hadn't yet been paid for the last delivery was a curious episode he wrote this two hyphens as my Lord has been troubled in these matters for a second time a piece ten feet wide and 8 feet high will be presented to my lord at his home when Hawkins learned that when Rembrandt learned that Hawkins had doubts about accepting the gift he wrote again he said against my Lord wish this is rember writing again against my Lords wish I'm sending this accompanying canvas hoping that you will not decline this he also requested he get paid right away for the last two passionate pictures and Rembrandt adds the only other observation about his art that survives My Lord he wrote hang this piece in a strong light so that one can stand at a distance and then it will Sparkle best the picture was almost certainly this one the blinding of Samson definitely apiece the standard a distance from not that - ever did he seems to have stuck by his refusal to accept it in Rembrandt staging Delilah's trick has worked she has seduced the Israelites strong man she's learned that his strength is in his hair and she's removed some she flees with it as the soldiers slam him to the ground and put out his eyes it's as graphically violent as the descent from the cross and painted with a forceful design and great breath the way Rubens did remember had to have seen himself in a contest here Rubens's version of the subject at the bottom all looks positively polite by comparison he chooses the moment of the haircut before it ignites the action at the right Rubens's most horrific victim upside down this is prometheus upside down and having his liver eaten by an eagle even prometheus has a kind of elegance in his pose that's the opposite of Rembrandt's ungainly sound Samson helpless on the ground well here's a realistic detail to turn your stomach the spirit of blood from Samson's eye and the dagger being used to produce it and not even a normal European weapon but a wavy bladed southeast-asian dagger called a Criss which seems somehow even worse with this I want to end thank you in the next lecture I'm going to pick up the thread and talk about what made Rembrandt such a brilliant success in Amsterdam this was not just portraits but above all it was his ability to choose important events from the Bible from history from the myth and visualize them in him original and powerful and memorable form will look closely at this painting of the sacrifice of Isaac and many others besides so please come back thank you

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 10,642

Rating: 4.9703703 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, rembrandt, john walsh

Id: HYh3NX2ymJc

Length: 64min 11sec (3851 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2016