The 17th century painter, printmaker, and draftsman Jan Lievens was an estimable and, in his time (1607-1674), famous painter of portraits, landscapes, allegories and religious art, but he was no Rembrandt – or so goes the conventional wisdom. But a show on view at the National Gallery of Art into the new year makes a compelling case that Lievens may actually have originated many of the themes and stylistic hallmarks often ascribed to his friend and contemporary, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.
“Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered” features about 130 works, many of them previously attributed to Rembrandt. Arthur K. Wheelock, the NGA’s curator of Northern baroque painting, points out that students of art history typically hear Lievens described as an also-ran, if they hear of him at all. He was indeed Rembrandt’s pal in the Leiden, Netherlands of the late 1620s. Both studied under Pieter Lastman, and for a time, each man’s development influenced the other’s. (That crediting-Rembrandt-for-Lievens’s work thing was happening even back then the two were alive.) Lievens was born a year earlier, but his artistic maturation, this show proposes, precedes Rembrandt’s by half a decade.
“Lievens actually was a pretty amazing artist in the early 1620s, before Rembrandt even picked up a brush,” says Wheelock, who organized the show. A child prodigy, Lievens had barely entered his teens before he’d completed his training and was making paintings that won the admiration of Leiden’s patrons and collectors. Certainly he’d learned to ape Caravaggio at an early age, as his striking 1622 “Allegory of the Five Senses” confirms.
“You see that youthful vigor and enthusiasm and power and, sometimes, awkwardness of an artist reaching beyond himself in those early works,” Wheelock says. He adds that both Lievens and Rembrandt were fully aware of their powers and probably “not nice people to know.”
Only in retrospect have Lievens’s fortures have seemed the poorer. In his time, the ruling classes of the Netherlands, Germany, and England commissioned Lievens frequently and compensated him handsomely. (Like many young geniuses, however, Lievens still managed often to be broke.) As a portraitist, he could flatter any subject, including himself, without rendering him or her unrecognizeable – no mean trick, that. Rembrandt didn’t attempt flattery, or if he did, he was really bad at it. Lievens’s paintings for what is now the Royal Palace of the Netherlands in Amsterdam still hang there, 350 years after he made them. Rembrandt painted the “Raising of Lazarus,” as Lievens did, but it was the 1631 Lievens version, rendered in hues of ghostly gray, that Rembrandt chose to display in his home.
The key difference, however, is that Rembrandt’s evolution continued through mid-career and beyond, while Lievens seemed to flame out after a meteoric beginning. Perhaps he was too much of a journeyman: Lievens adapted his style to the nature of each commission, while Rembrandt always remained firmly in the Rembrandt business. Then as now, if you want to be remembered as an artist, a singular identity matters more than impeccable chops.
If you go
“Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered” at the National Gallery of Art
Where: National Gallery of Art, 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
When: Through January 11, 2009
Info: Free; 202-737-4215; www.nga.gov
