Rembrandt’s late works at the National Gallery, the ultimate exhibition

 

 

As National Gallery’s Director, Nicholas Penny, and Rijksmuseum’s director, Wim Pijbes, write in the foreword of the catalog of the epic exhibition devoted to Rembrandt’s late works now in London, it took 20 years – and the kind support of a generous Anglo-Dutch oil company, we may add – to gather together approximately 20 drawings, 30 prints and 40 paintings, including key works such as : ‘The ‘Jewish Bride’’ (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), ‘An Old Woman Reading’ (The Buccleuch Collection, Scotland), ‘A Man in Armour’ (Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery, Kelvingrove), ‘A Young Woman Sleeping’ (British Museum, London), ‘Juno’ (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), ‘Portrait of a Blond Man’ (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), ‘The Suicide of Lucretia’ (The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota), ‘Bathsheba with King David’s Letter’ (Musée du Louvre, Paris), ‘Titus at his Desk’ (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam), ‘A Portrait of a Lady with a Lap Dog’ (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), ‘Lucretia’ (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC).

 

As for a good wine, twenty years are a considerable amount of time. But after visiting the show we can assert that not only this time was well spent, but that it deserved to be spent indeed. Until 18 January 2015, and then from 12 February to 17 May at the renovated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the visitors have the opportunity to see what not even Rembrandt himself saw in his troubled life. Why is it so? Once again the answer comes easily. It is because even if you travelled all around Europe and had access to the private collections – that is possibly the hardest part of the task – it would be impossible to read with similar pleasure the extraordinary novel unconsciously written by the artist in that season of his life that goes from 1650 to 1669, when he died. As the two seminal shows dedicated by the National Gallery to Leonardo da Vinci and Paolo Veronese have proved, the idea of the artist that comes to your mind when looking at this rare kind of solo exhibitions is truly unique. It is more or less like listening for the first time to a certain symphony played together by musical instruments that you have always listened playing alone.

 

In Rembrandt’s case the symphony tells about an artist who was able to describe human beings in a way comparable only to Leonardo da Vinci’s, and in point of fact there are many affinities between the two artists. Both of them, for example, employ the light not just to reveal a certain side of their subject, as also Ribera and Caravaggio masterly do, but also to isolate the subject from its surroundings. The extraordinary effect of displacement between the subject and the background that Leonardo achieves with the Mona Lisa – her figure seems to be at the same time detached and interlaced with the mysterious landscape behind her – is to be found also in many of the best portraits painted by Rembrandt, and especially in his enigmatic “Self portrait with two circles” (1665-69).

 

The two curved lines, painted not with a continuous movement of the brush, but by short, overlapped strokes, have been variously interpreted. Perhaps they refer to the perfect circle freehand Giotto is reputed to have painted as the ultimate proof of his skill (Vasari). We don’t know whether this is true or not, what matter here is that these two lines have a specific visual power. If the light on the left side of Rembrandt’s face puts a significant portion of space on the figure’s back, the abstracted lines seem to have been drawn as an explicit contradiction to this space, making it extremely, and conceptually, flat.

 

 

January 13, 2015