Rembrandt

Rembrandt by Frederick Wedmore

Frederick Wedmore argues that Rembrandt's three hundred etchings alone, even without his paintings or drawings, would secure him his standing among artists, because true artistic greatness rests on freshness of spirit, individual vision, and command of one's instrument, whether that instrument is language, paint, or the etcher's needle. Rembrandt possessed all these, and his work, across canvas, drawing, and etching, is marked by absolute sincerity: he recorded his own perception of the world and his own understanding of human souls, unaffected by prejudice or fashion. Wedmore traces Rembrandt's etched work from one of his earliest prints, called by Wilson's title "Head of a Woman lightly etched," a portrait of his mother showing a sagacious, kindly smile, through to what is generally accepted as his last print, the "Woman with the Arrow," a nude mixing realism with a classical touch in the figure's allegorical arrow. Many plates treat Sacred Subjects with a homeliness and directness particular to Rembrandt, reflecting genuine belief rather than convention. The "Death of the Virgin" draws on tradition to show St. Joseph, St. Luke feeling the dying woman's pulse, a company of Apostles, and angels and cherubim above. The "Christ healing the Sick," known as "The Hundred-Guilder Print," earned its name because an impression once sold for that sum during Rembrandt's period of popularity; its intense reality and homely pathos influenced later etchers such as Legros and William Strang, and fine impressions of its rare First State command vastly higher prices than the Second State. In landscape, Rembrandt's painted works, such as Lord Lansdowne's "Mill" and a landscape at Cassel, are few, likely because, as with Gainsborough later, he painted them chiefly for his own pleasure rather than for a public that preferred Italianised Dutch painters to men like Hobbema, Wynants, and De Koninck. His landscape etchings, though rare, include the modest "Six's Bridge," named for his friend the Burgomaster Six, and the "Goldweigher's Field," a panoramic view of Uytenbogaert's estate stretching toward the Zuyder Zee. Wedmore also singles out the "Large Landscape with a Cottage and Dutch Hay-barn," an intricate record of sunshine, and the "Landscape with a Ruined Tower," a broader, more dramatic work anticipating Constable's method; its domed roof, visible only in the rare First State, shows the tower was not truly ruined. In portraiture, Rembrandt is most penetrating when depicting his own family. He portrayed his son, and several times his mother, as in the "Mère de Rembrandt au voile noir," showing her in austere meditation, contrasted with her social ease in the earlier "Head of a Woman lightly etched." He depicted his wife Saskia repeatedly and variably, from buoyant self-satisfaction in a Dresden canvas to the frail, dimmed vitality of the etching Sir Seymour Haden called "The Dying Saskia." Hendrickje Stoffels, his later companion, appears less often, recorded in the Edinburgh picture. Most frequently, Rembrandt painted and etched himself, producing a series of self-portraits tracing his life from spirited youth, through haggard mornings after revelry, through pride in cap, feather, and sword, to heavy, stooping age marked by trouble, the loss of his wife, obscured fame, and narrow means, as seen in Lord Iveagh's picture and related works in Vienna and St. Petersburg. Wedmore also notes an etched self-portrait existing in many states, best appreciated in its rarer, more vigorous early impressions rather than the flatter later ones, alongside notable portraits of others including "Clément de Jonghe" the printseller, "Lutma," "Jan Six," and the tender "Burgomaster Six."

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1894 · Genre: Art Criticism, Biography, Art History · 4,034 words

First lines

It is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true one, -- and the saying is welcome to surprise the academic and conventional -- that if the painted work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his drawings were unknown, the three hundred etchings that he wrought during some forty years of labour would assert for him, amongst all capable judges, a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now admitted to occupy. It is not that in saying this I would underrate for a moment the skill of the pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who plays with subtle hue, the master of the material which is applied to prepared canvas; but that if one asks oneself, ‘What are the qualities, really, which in any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it his particular and permanent station? ' one finds shortly that one's answer has to be the following, or something like it: ‘The qualities are an alert freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an individual vision of the world, and the knowledge how best to wield the instrument by which that vision is expressed.'

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etchings · art criticism · artistic technique · sincerity in art · portraiture · self-portraiture · artistic development · individual vision · landscape art · religious art · character revelation · artistic genius

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