Making It

Why is it that Rembrandt’s works continue to have a hold on our feelings and our imagination? It is largely a matter of a profound human engagement. His works make what is distant and strange--Amsterdam burghers and their wives, biblical figures, and Rembrandt himself--seem present and familiar, depicted in a most singular manner. So it is, that when one catches sight of a Rembrandt in a museum, one wants to confront it and, also, to be confronted by it. There is a relationship to be had, or so we imagine, with the person portrayed and also with the portrayer. In this, Rembrandt is unique.

It is hard, therefore, to believe that his reputation needs rehabilitating. He is still an exemplary genius among artists. But the aim of Simon Schama’s brilliantly narrated account of Rembrandt’s life and works, “Rembrandt’s Eyes,” is to bring his genius clearly into focus once again. There is a reason.

Rembrandt has been in the news in recent years, and it hasn’t been because of the discovery of a great new painting or because of the high price received for an old one. Instead, the major topic has been the dis-attributing of beloved works by a team of Dutch experts known as the Rembrandt Research Project. By now, they have changed some of their judgments: “The Polish Rider” in the Frick is, perhaps correctly, back in, while the Berlin “Man with the Golden Helmet” remains, certainly correctly, out. But in the meantime, amid all the attention to his workshop and to his painting technique, an established notion of the individuality of Rembrandt has been either threatened or complicated. It depends on your sense of things.

The painters in his workshop, who used to be thought of as students, are now seen as his assistants. And the number of works they painted that have been confused with his, suggests that they were encouraged to draw and paint like their master. That is normal workshop practice. But it is different in the case of an artist whose manner of painting, repeated self-portrayals and conspicuous signature all seem designed to display his own authority. Does what we now know of the workshop practice dilute Rembrandt’s genius or suggest that we ought to think of it differently? Schama wants to combat this latter view, what he takes as the threat to his genius.

The story of Rembrandt’s life is familiar because it has been told so often. He is one of those artists--Caravaggio is another--whose art tends to be accounted for with an appeal to his life. It has helped that there are some stirring events and also the element of self-depiction. Both have been featured in movies and several novels have been written about Rembrandt. The miller’s son from Leyden drops out of university to paint; apprentices in Leyden and then Amsterdam; returns to Leyden, where he shares a studio with Jan Lievens, another ambitious young painter. Both are acclaimed early on by Constantine Huygens, secretary to the Prince of Orange and father of the great scientist Christian. Rembrandt refuses to go to Italy; while Lievens is off to England and the court, he moves to Amsterdam, where he joins an ongoing painting business; marries Saskia, the owner’s monied niece; paints “The Anatomy of Dr. Tulp” and a host of other portraits; takes on a series of student-assistants; works on and off on a group of works depicting the Passion for the court at The Hague. Eventually he buys a ruinously expensive house next door; paints “The Nightwatch”; and Saskia dies; their son Titus survives. Rembrandt then deserts and has committed the family maid, who is displaced by his mistress, Hendrickje Stoffels, who models for him as “Bathsheba.” He declares bankruptcy, moves house but keeps on painting magnificently. Stoffels and Titus die before he dies in poverty in 1669.

How, one wonders, will the story be told this time?

“Rembrandt’s Eyes” is not chronologically organized. But many stories are not. It unfolds in an order that can best be described as indeterminate. It begins (the year is 1629; Rembrandt is 23) with a long and gripping description of an early “Self-Portrait.” “We should apologize for daring to speak about painting.” There is a certain wit about placing this quotation from Paul Valery at the start. A dazzling ability to conjure up what Schama calls the quiddity of a painting is repeatedly on show in what follows. The diminutive artist, his piercing eyes in shadow, stands back from a canvas that is turned away from us. The peeling plaster of his studio exposing the rosy brick beneath attracts his attention. The painting is attended to not as a display of fine feeling but as a display of high intelligence. This is a promising basis for a new account.

But would the above-mentioned Huygens have thought the “Self-Portrait” suitable for the court at The Hague if he had seen it in Rembrandt’s studio--supposing that he did? In Schama’s telling, client and artist were both pursuing genius, Huygens for the court, Rembrandt for himself. And the model of success at the time was Rubens, nearby but across enemy lines in Antwerp.

A change of scene now to New York, 1998. Some thoughts are entertained on the predicament of Genius in the postmodern world. And then the story begins. But, most surprising, for the next 150 pages or so, the story we are told is not of Rembrandt but of Rubens. The Rubens story, much of which concerns his parents, is not well known. But that is not why it is told. The reasoning is that in order to become singular, Rembrandt had to become someone’s doppelganger. And that someone was Rubens. Therefore, let’s see how Rubens became Rubens.

This is a new twist in the telling of Rembrandt’s life. Because the two artists never met and because their relationship was not remarked at the time, what evidence is there, as Schama puts it, that Rembrandt wanted to be the Dutch Rubens? That he worked as if he shared a studio with him? That he wanted to get a foot in a palace door and be a gentleman intellectual and have a career making angel-choked altarpieces?

The clearest evidence of an artistic relationship is that Rembrandt borrowed the format of a “Descent from the Cross” from Rubens and etched a “Self-Portrait” in 1631 that has long been recognized as modeled on an engraved portrait of Rubens.

Rembrandt’s relationship to Rubens used to be described in terms of style. In the mid-1630s, Rembrandt painted some large history paintings displaying brutal, physical action. His depiction of Samson, for example, focuses not on snipping off the hair but on the violence of putting out eyes. When stylistic terms were in fashion, this used to be referred to as Rembrandt’s “baroque” period. It was seen as an aberration, a detour from the inward nature of his artistry. One might call it Rubensian. But why claim that he wanted to be Rubens?

Is it Rubens’ art that Rembrandt was emulating, or was it his successful career? Schama chooses not to distinguish the two.

Given the available traditions of art in Europe, Rubens was a possible event. Even a necessary one. He brings to a culmination what is available. Rembrandt’s art, on the other hand, could not have been anticipated. It breaks away. If it is Rembrandt’s uniqueness that one is after--and that is surely the basis for understanding his art--then one should emphasize his difference from Rubens.

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Rembrandt refused to go to Italy, never painted himself with his wife or his wife with a child, almost never collaborated with artists in his workshop, while Rubens organized a factory system based on collaboration. Rembrandt rarely copied the older art he collected and did not teach assistants to do so; he received no golden chains from courts. Rembrandt portrayed himself many times, Rubens hardly ever; Rembrandt signed almost every painting and etching, Rubens signed only five paintings in his entire career. Rembrandt drew nudes and used women in his household as models although, despite the look of his paintings, Rubens seldom drew models and surely never asked his wife to hold a naked pose for him to paint. After a failed attempt at replicative prints after his works (like Rubens), Rembrandt treated the replicative medium of etching as a way to produce individual, almost unreplicable works. Finally, though most of Rubens’ drawings are connected to a future painting, Rembrandt drew without a specific project in view. The great majority of his drawings depict enactments of obscure biblical scenes.

As art historians have replaced the old questions of style and iconography with studies of careers, however, Rembrandt has been transformed from an artistic rebel into an artist bent on making it. It is his relationship to others, not his difference from them, that is now in play. Although Schama does not put it this way, his foray into Rubens is in part a response to the important book by Gary Schwartz, “Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings” (1985). It is a book to which we are all indebted even when we disagree with it. Schwartz, a dedicatee of Schama’s book, framed remarkable archival discoveries about Rembrandt and his patrons with a point of view that came close to trashing the man and his art. Rembrandt is judged to have been a failure because he failed to get on with the court at The Hague and squandered his opportunities with patrons.

Schama has transformed this indictment of Rembrandt’s career into a sympathetic story of wanting and failing to be like Rubens, the most successful artist of the day at the European courts. Not to succeed in becoming a Dutch Rubens is a limited kind of failure after which, in this account, Rembrandt went on to be himself.

Something like this point was previously made but in a novel nearly 30 years ago. Though Schama writes that with Rubens’ death, Rembrandt is free of his obsession, Gladys Schmidt in her “Rembrandt” (1961) created a Rembrandt who continues to despair of not gaining court acceptance even after his rival’s death. In her telling, a visit from Lievens, his former studio-mate who had made it at the English court, brings home to him his own lack of success. As fiction, it makes for a surprisingly good read.

So, what does it do to a sense of Rembrandt to entertain a Rubens scenario? It serves to highlight ambition and to give shape to a puzzling career. But it is unsustainable from the point of view of the art. And what is more, if one aims to give a unified account of the making of art and the making of a career, Rubens does not suffice as a representation of Rembrandt’s ambitions.

Schama has the great gift of bringing to life whatever he turns to. This is a matter of creative imagination and creative writing. Together they predispose him to get at art’s relationship to life. In Rembrandt’s case, this means that his art is taken as opening up to life in the world--like the rendering of peeling plaster in the “Self-Portrait” that Schama imagines to be what he actually saw on his own studio wall.

“Rembrandt’s Eyes” is full of remarkable passages on what Rembrandt depicted, from evocations of what is shrewdly called the drama of models undressing to the countryside haunted by people and hemmed in by the profile of a distant town. There is no doubt that Rembrandt’s art is life-like in many respects. What is most strange, however, and rather side-stepped here, is that aside from some landscape drawings, Rembrandt never worked from life except in the studio. He took life in and directed it himself. Even his beggars were not encountered on the street.

Schama’s appeal to the real world is an attempt to keep historians who would place Rembrandt in a workshop setting from diluting his unique genius. Himself no mean describer of the working of paint, Schama has a taste for the lived world and often for the life of the world today. All historical writing is necessarily a mix of then and now. The reconstruction of the past is rendered by someone writing in the present. In this case, the tendency is to blur the two. Much of the immediacy is achieved by an appeal to the here and now. The remarkable array of people in “The Nightwatch” is described as being how we all are. And the “Jan Six,” that subtlest of portraits of a recalcitrant sitter who, soon after, deserted his painter, is said to stand before us much as we would dearly wish to imagine ourselves, with all our contradictions resolved.

Is this Rembrandt or is this Schama? Does it matter? *