In the fifteen years before his death in 1669, Rembrandt’s prestige as an artist fell. “The dark lighting and rough brushwork of his pictures were deemed unfashionable by many,” writes Andrew Butterfield, reviewing an exhibition of the artist’s late works at London’s National Gallery. “While still able to attract the occasional attention of major patrons, he was now often passed over for major commissions, which frequently went to his former pupils instead. Yet this time of anxiety, debt, grief, and solitude was the most productive of his career.
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His contemporary Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the Religio Medici, “The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on.” Rembrandt, too, was an artist of obsessive self-regard, especially following the deaths of Hendrickje and Titus. The show opens with a room of five self-portraits, painted between 1659 and 1669, and the effect of seeing them together, with their extraordinary range of mood from pride to self-pity, is unforgettable.
The artist was able to use the knowledge that came from lifelong scrutiny of himself as a way to imagine the temperament and the inner life of others, whether the sitters in his portraits, or the characters in the Biblical and classical stories he depicted. Indeed, Rembrandt is thought to have played out in front of a mirror the expression of the figures he wanted to illustrate in order to be “actor and spectator at the same time,” as one of his pupils wrote. The psychological profundity of many of the pictures in the show seems to stem from an exceptional gift of empathy combined with an extraordinary capacity for the projection of the artist’s own emotions on the subjects he painted.”
To read more about Rembrandt in the Depths: http://j.mp/1sfpP9W
Image: Rembrandt van Rijn: Lucretia, 1666 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
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