The 17th century was by all accounts the Golden Age of Dutch art, but it was not a golden age for the Dutch. In the Netherlands, the first half of the century was a period of intense turmoil. Spain, which had controlled the region since the 1500s, used terror and its military might to attempt to keep the Dutch within the Catholic fold. The Dutch rebelled, and after 80 years of war, they finally gained their independence in 1648. But even after the Spanish left, the region’s conflicts continued. The south of the country (modern-day Belgium) remained predominantly Catholic, and within the Protestant north, disputes erupted between fundamentalists and liberals over how to read the Bible and the proper relation between church and state.
The Netherlands was also a rapidly urbanizing country. By the 17th century, 75% of its population was living in cities. Many citizens of the new Dutch republic were gripped by an intense nostalgia for the countryside, as well as by feelings of admiration for the newly wealthy merchants who were able to buy up large tracts of land. These feelings found their outlet in landscape paintings, such as Jacob von Ruisdael’s Wheat Fields (1670) and Aelbert Cuyp’s Young Herdsmen with Cows (1660). Deprived of the patronage of the Catholic Church, Dutch artists began catering to the tastes of the Dutch merchant class with paintings of landscapes, still lifes, and domestic scenes — works of art meant to be hung over fireplaces, not altars. The Dutch quickly became masters in the genre of landscape painting, pioneering the use of atmospheric perspective (where the higher your eyes go in the painting, the smaller and lighter things get, giving you a sense of distance) and other techniques that have preserved their reputation to the present day.
“In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met,” on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, features the work of Von Ruisdael and Cuyp, as well as the great paintings of the most popular artists from this period — Rembrandt van Rijn, Fans Hals, and Johannes Vermeer. Any exhibition of Dutch masterworks will almost ineluctably highlight the work of Rembrandt, and “In Praise of Painting” is no exception. But modern viewers may be surprised to learn that by the time the Dutch republic was born, Rembrandt was no longer popular. He had been in the 1630s, but a self-portrait on view here from 1660, painted when he was 54, depicts him as a broken man, ravaged by age and the vicissitudes of life. By the time of the portrait, his wife had died, all but one of his children had died, and he had fallen out of favor with the Dutch art establishment and gone bankrupt. The students he had trained had abandoned his shadowy, character-driven style for the airy, neoclassical historical scenes popular in the French-dominated art world of the time. One, who went on to become an art critic, went so far as to deride his teacher’s work as nothing more than “liquid mud on canvas.”
If you stand close enough to the painting, however, you will see that it is anything but. You can see the delicate way Rembrandt layers his paint — the brushstrokes, the rough textures, the dark palette, the reddish color that unifies the composition, the golden tonality of the flesh, the full-bodied portrayal of human character in all of its rawness and unvarnished vulnerability, even his unconventional touches, such as painting the curls of his hair with the butt-end of his brush, as art historians believe him to have done.
And then there is the light — the famous Rembrandt light that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, stated was “the very light that was originally created by G-d Almighty.” Rembrandt’s manner of creating light and shadow is nearly unmatched in the history of art, surpassed only by Caravaggio. Rembrandt was heavily influenced by Caravaggio, but as far as we know, he never saw one of the Italian master’s paintings in person, only in etchings — which makes his own use of light all the more remarkable. His light shines even more brightly now, thanks to the work of conservators who have recently restored some of his paintings, including this self-portrait, by replacing their old, synthetic yellow varnish with a more natural color that is closer, according to art historians, to the earth-toned colors Rembrandt typically used.
One of the more intriguing Rembrandts in the Met’s permanent holdings, on view here, is The Toilet of Bathsheba (1643), depicting the future mother of Solomon being prepared by two servants for her bath. King David watches her from afar, up in his tower, while the bath attendants comb the knots out of her hair and clean the dirt out of her toenails. These are signs she is preparing for a mikvah, the Jewish ritual bath, which requires heightened standards of preimmersion cleanliness. It is one of the few historical scenes Rembrandt ever painted, but the style is still characteristically his: the striking use of light and shadow, the complex layering of paint and texture, the importation of elements from Dutch still life, and the unglamorized depiction of what people actually look like without makeup, fancy hairstyles, and expensive clothes. In Rembrandt’s universe, even the beautiful Bathsheba is flawed — the marks of her garter are clearly evident on her left calf.
Another historical Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653), is an icon of the Met’s collection and one of Rembrandt’s most celebrated works. But the Dutch did not much care for it at the time. It was commissioned by a Sicilian (not a Dutch) merchant. In it, we see Aristotle, dressed by Rembrandt in 17th-century clothes, contemplating a sculpted bust of the Greek poet Homer. In his left hand is a golden chain attached to a medallion, believed to depict Alexander the Great, whom Aristotle tutored for nine years until Alexander assumed the throne and dismissed him. His right hand rests on the bust. He’s thinking, perhaps, about how he’ll be remembered: as an eye-catching but fleeting object, a chain that glitters today but rusts tomorrow? Or as Homer, whom Aristotle called the greatest poet who ever lived? Rembrandt, through Aristotle, appears to be contemplating himself as well, wondering not how but whether he would even be remembered at all.
Rembrandt died in poverty, rejected by the art world of his time. But he is embraced and venerated in ours. Oceans rise, empires fall — and Rembrandt has come out on top after all.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
