Portrait of the Artist

Rembrandt’s paintings have the beckoning aura of warm tents on cold nights. Once you are inside, they envelop you. Writers routinely use the language of light to describe intangible, invisible states of mind: “illumination,” “clarity,” “spark.” For painters, such metaphors are harder to wield; no artist ever surpassed Rembrandt in wielding them. The golden light that fills his paintings seems like the actual stuff of spirit, the light of thought.

Rembrandt’s colors are relentlessly warm; he used the warmest palette of any great painter. The metal surfaces he depicts are apt to be gold, not silver. His reds are orangey, his yellows golden, his greens earthy brown. A Rembrandt pearl has golden warmth, not pearly coolness. His hatred of blue verges on the pathological. Modern scholars point out that the famous painting that has been called The Night Watch since the late eighteenth century is actually a daylight scene; it is said to have picked up its name because of surface grime. But today it stands degrimed — and it could still be mistaken for a night scene. Rembrandt hates blue so much (and ambiguity so little) that he omits the blue sky even when a painting seems to call for it.

Rembrandt’s figures seem detached, in a remarkable way — while looking you straight in the eye. They offer you the intimacy of a friend who knows you so well, he can acknowledge your presence without interrupting his train of thought. In a whole series of later masterpieces (for example the Portrait of Jan Six, or Saint Bartholomew, or the Frick Self-Portrait), the subject looks right at you but thinks about something else.

Rembrandt’s paintings nearly always have an immediacy that reflects an unusual cognitive personality: Every artist thinks in images, but some don’t merely think in pictures, they think by making pictures. Instead of pondering, they draw or they paint. Another artist might have thought obscene thoughts about his critics; Rembrandt made obscene pictures of them. He left a trail of vulgar, rude, and scatological images that has upset critics and admirers for centuries. But his unusual style of thought accounts also for his greatest achievement: the invention of a type of light that seems like a direct emanation of mind, that makes spirit visible almost in the sense that night-goggles make infrared visible. His art extends the eye’s capacity to see.

Rembrandt’s range was never broad, and grew narrower as he matured. Critics sometimes praise his range (of colors, moods, media, brush-strokes) — which is like praising the range of cut diamonds. Diamonds do come in several colors; they don’t all look alike. But their similarities over-whelm their differences. The celebrated “Rembrandt Look” appears on the faces of men and women, old and young, Jews and gentiles, whites and blacks, Biblical heroes, ancient Greek philosophers and modern merchants.

Rembrandt recreated one image again and again (or reinstalled one spirit in a long line of bodies) with a fanatic stubbornness unequaled until Alberto Giacometti’s work in the twentieth century. Giacometti kept remaking the same image because he saw each fresh attempt as a fresh failure, another failed effort to translate into paint, clay, or plaster the idea that obsessed him. We have no reason to think that Rembrandt saw himself as a failure — but every reason to understand his work in terms of an all-consuming compulsion.

The historian Simon Schama is an admirable man. He is a formidable and respected authority on the seventeenth century, and, more important, he is serious about scholarship and art. Today’s hot topics in academic art history — gender, race, class, Eurocentrism, multiculturalism, the oppressive tyranny of white males — he doesn’t believe are even worth dismissing. In Rembrandt’s Eyes, Schama has taken the radical tack of writing about Rembrandt. It is a rare achievement, and he deserves all the honor and glory he can get.

But his book should be evaluated on its own terms. Take, for example, the characteristic Schama discussion of an important early Rembrandt called The Artist in His Studio (1629). It is a small, striking painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that shows the artist with a large panel on an easel. We see the panel from behind. The artist turns his head aside from the panel, toward the viewer. The artist seems so tiny compared with the panel that some scholars have guessed it is the fourteen-year-old Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s student. But art historians who have reconstructed the room conclude that the figure’s size is a trick of perspective, the consequence of a viewpoint that is surprisingly close to the easel: The artist is a normal-sized adult, and the consensus agrees with Schama that it is Rembrandt himself.

The dispute about The Artist in His Studio tells us something interesting nonetheless about the picture: The reality it depicts is not quite right, not quite real; the image has the disturbing, vaguely unreal quality of a dream.

And what kind of dream? The panel is much bigger than the painter; we conclude that to be a painter is a big, daunting job. Yet this panel that dominates the painter (who looks at us with a vague, cool, questioning look) is also (paradoxically) the best way to convey that the painter dominates his art. Picture a small fisherman next to a big fish. He is a more formidable character by far than a big fisherman next to a small fish. This painting tells us plainly that Rembrandt is a powerful painter, a powerful man, a force to be reckoned with.

Schama’s discussion, which covers twenty-five paragraphs, starts with the cracks in the studio wall and explains why plaster tended to crack in Amsterdam and what you could have done about it. Several paragraphs later, he works around to an important question: How would the artist’s contemporaries have understood this painting? It was no history painting, no conventional self-portrait. So what was it? Schama’s answer: “It was a quiddity.” It was “the essence of the matter; the something that made things (in this case schilderkunst, the art of painting) just exactly what they were.” And furthermore it was “a subtle provocation; a riddling road to illumination.”

Now that we’ve got that straightened out, we are ready for a series of themes. Rembrandt could not have transcribed this scene directly from a mirror; he must therefore have imagined it, at least in part; it is therefore “a picture of in-sight [sic]” — a picture of what the artist thinks, not what he sees. Fair enough. Next: The picture is well done, and therefore proves that Rembrandt is skillful, and therefore that Rembrandt “is presenting himself” in this picture “as the personification of painting.” (I don’t follow the final “therefore,” and Schama’s big assertion seems extravagant and unnecessary.)

Next, a long excursus about the eye in seventeenth-century painting, leading to a major conclusion: “When Rembrandt made eyes, then, he did so purposefully.” Which is surely true, but was obvious before we started. Then an interesting observation: The tiny figure conveys “a sense of creative reverie, the waking sleep which writers on art since Plato have characterized as a kind of trance.” A few more paragraphs, a recapitulation of the “personification” theme, and we are done.

The passage is typical Schama. Wherever you go in this book, you are guaranteed to meet sharp observations along the way. You might also conclude that this author takes an awfully long time getting to the point and some-times never gets there at all. Certainly Schama is an author who feels no need to rein himself in. Rembrandt’s Eyes is a biography whose subject isn’t even born until page 201. The young artist’s first masterpiece (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp of 1632) waltzes into the story on page 342. The book could profit from “You are Here” locator maps every few pages. We find ourselves at one point in the middle of Prince William of Orange-Nassau’s wedding festivities — in 1561, nearly half a century before Rembrandt’s birth. Evidently the bride’s uncle fell off a horse and broke his arm. So what? Well, ten years after the wedding, the Princess of Orange-Nassau had an affair with Jan Rubens, whose son was Peter Paul Rubens, who was greatly admired by Rembrandt. In fact Rembrandt’s Eyes contains within it (like a nesting Russian doll) a complete biography of Rubens, free of charge — Schama is fascinated with the topic, but Rubens is box office poison and obviously had to be kept out of the title.

The sharp insights keep coming, sometimes with the force of revelation. Schama’s comparison of Rubens’s Het Pelsken (1638), a painting of his wife in her fur coat, only, and Rembrandt’s spectacular Hendrickje Bathing (1655) — to choose one example out of many — is superb from start to finish. But the process of retrieving the brilliant bits feels less like reading than like panning for gold, and calls for patience and fortitude: Schama has delivered not so much a finished product as a rumbling dump truck full of ore.

Great art can be appreciated against an empty background, but can’t be understood unless the background is filled in. The “context of Rembrandt’s art” means, to Schama, the culture, politics, and texture of daily life in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. No author has written more comprehensively and convincingly on this theme. But the “context of Rembrandt’s art” might also mean Rembrandt’s place in art history, his artistic relationships to the great men (largely of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries) who created our modern pictorial sense. But for Schama, the “artistic context” largely means Rubens, with an occasional glance at Titian.

Fair enough; Schama is a historian first, an art critic second. But his method sometimes leaves gaps and potholes in the discussion — which are the last things you would expect in a seven-hundred-page book that does not suffer from terseness.

His analysis of The Night Watch, for example, is the usual long ramble, with sharp observations embedded along the way like needles in haystacks. His big claim is that Rembrandt has used this painting to “repudiate” flatness more emphatically than any artist had ever done; Rembrandt’s plan called for him to “beat not just Rubens and Titian at their own game but Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Bernini as well.”

An intriguing claim — which demands some consideration of the art-historical context. Schama certainly knows the relevant points of comparison, but he doesn’t choose to discuss them. The Night Watch centers on two striding-forward figures who seem to emerge from the painted surface. Raphael’s School of Athens (1510) also centers on two striding-forward figures, and Rembrandt’s figures are, in a sense, the inverted mirror-images of Raphael’s. Raphael’s left-side figure extends his left arm upward; Rembrandt’s right-side figure extends his right arm downward. The companion figure in The School of Athens extends his left hand outward, palm down. In The Night Watch, the corresponding figure extends his right hand outward, palm up. Both paintings have arches in the background.

Schama might have used the comparison to strengthen his point: Rembrandt’s action tumbles forward out of the plane. Raphael’s takes place behind the plane. In fact when you compare the two, Rembrandt’s painting seems less a repudiation of flatness than a repudiation of Raphael and the whole poised, balanced, crystalline, classical world of the high Renaissance — in favor of thrusting baroque virility.

But does Schama really mean that Rembrandt has beat Michelangelo at the game of “repudiating flatness”? Do the figures in The Night Watch explode out of the plane more dramatically than, say, the crucified Haman on the Sistine Ceiling? Why does he think so?

The effort of extracting wisdom from the copious ore of Rembrandt’s Eyes is complicated by Schama’s prose. Rembrandt’s paint seems, at one point, “to have been inseminated with vitality.” (That must have been a messy procedure.) At another point, Rembrandt’s colors “are all stuck on the canvas as if the savages themselves [who are gathered round a table] were clutching it in their fists.” “Fists” is a big word for Schama; the artist’s early efforts “are what they are: a fistful of bare-knuckled energy.” But Rembrandt had no desire to be a “pseudo-Rubensian maker of angel-choked altarpieces.”

Any bold, venturesome writer hits sometimes and misses sometimes. If the hits are good, you forgive the misses. But Schama’s wild pitches tend to be not merely strange but illogical — as though they had been translated from some Oriental language, badly. “In the seventeenth century, grief had perforce to be economically measured out, for there was a lot to go around.” (If there was a lot to go around, why not measure it out generously?) The bells in an Amsterdam tower can be seen “hanging like magpies on a fence.” (Do the bells hang upward or do magpies perch downward?) Plain awkwardness lurks in the shadows: “To tell the truth, the three synagogues, one of them Neve Shalom, the Dwelling Place of Peace, housed in the old warehouse called ‘Antwerpen,’ were the result of another flourishing feature of Jewish culture. . . . ” Certain aspects of The Night Watch are “breathtakingly scary.” The effect is like an elegant white-tutu’d corps de ballet performing in wooden shoes.

Why does Schama write this way? Probably to make sure that no one mistakes his work for academic prose. Rembrandt’s Eyes reads like an inspired first draft. It could have been more; Schama could have drained the swamps of unnecessary verbiage (or at least built dikes), added art-historical background, cut out the strange images, calmed down the jittery prose. It is a tragedy of today’s intellectual marketplace that he didn’t feel he had to. Schama easily distinguishes himself from most of his academic colleagues merely by taking art and scholarship seriously.

The end of the twentieth century is a good time for a brilliant book about Rembrandt. You can see a great deal from the vantage point of twentieth-century art. Rembrandt has the moral statute of Giacometti, built on uncompromising artistic seriousness and integrity. But the artist he most resembles is Picasso — another man who thought not in pictures but by making pictures, another master of pictorial rudeness. Picasso too had an overwhelming technique, a strange sense of color, and a proclivity for print-making. Picasso too was aggressively original. Most of Picasso’s best pictures are portraits, and many are self-portraits. They were two powerful, physically small, spiritually gigantic men whose lives were dominated by art and women. Rembrandt was the greater artist and the greater man: He worked with unstinting, fanatic stubbornness at the same image again and again until his work was perfect and he died. He paid the price; he was unwilling (unlike Picasso) to satisfy the public’s need for novelty, to twist and turn with the times. He died poor. Public taste had long since passed him by. Time magazine would not have written him up; CBS would not have covered the funeral.

Of the greatest Old Masters, Rembrandt is the only one who is decently represented in the United States. Growing up in and around New York, I spent some of my happiest hours in the Rembrandt rooms at the Met — and there were several other major master-pieces a mere ten blocks south at the Frick. Many others have had the same experience. Rembrandt is our man, and we are still awaiting a great book about him. Simon Schama would be just the author to write one.

David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.