Art: Amsterdam’s Rembrandt

The great Dutchman, Rembrandt, lived in Amsterdam most of his life, put into his greatest pictures the faces of Amsterdam’s burghers, surgeons, soldiers. Last week in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, went on view more indisputable Rembrandt pictures than have ever been seen before in one place. Included were the Rijksmuseum’s own nine Rembrandts and 36 more borrowed from abroad for the summer. Among the U. S. importations were Andrew Mellon’s Self Portrait, a sharp-chinned, bloated, anxious man of 53 with a Vandyke beard (see cut); Julius Haass’s Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt’s amiable young mistress; the Knoedler Galleries’ ‘Joseph Accused By Potiphar’s Wife. Among the Rijksmuseum’s own canvases were Rembrandt’s three most famed paintings, The March-Out of Captain Banning Cocq’s Company of Amsterdam Musketeers, long miscalled The Night Watch because soot in the Harquebusiers’ clubroom had murked the canvas; Dr. Deyman’s Anatomy Lesson, rated far higher than the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp painted 24 years earlier; and The Syndics of the Cloth Hall.

The Dutch by no means rate Rembrandt the greatest Dutchman ever. The Rijksmuseum ordinarily shows its Rembrandts scattered among other 17th Century Dutch masters such as Jan Steen and Frans Hals, in some six rooms. Four years ago a Dutch court methodically turned down the whimsical application of U. S. Author Hendrik Willem Van Loon, collateral descendant of Rembrandt’s wife, to have Rembrandt’s 262-year-old bankruptcy wiped from the records.

Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn was no eccentric, no drunkard, no lecher, no misanthrope, no hermit, no seeker after scientific truth. He simply loved to paint. He also loved mankind and knew it as few painters have ever known it. He liked money and what money bought; he knew everybody in Amsterdam from the famed Burgomaster Jan Six to his Amsterdam Ghetto neighbors, the Portuguese Jews, and the tramps and prostitutes along the spotless city’s spotty waterfront. He spent most of his life turning out an amazing total of paintings, etchings and drawings, most of them first rate.*

He was born in Leyden on the Rhine circa 1606, youngest son of a prosperous miller. His four elder brothers all became poor cobblers and millers. His parents soon assigned Rembrandt to something better, gave him a year at the University of Leyden before he brought home a pile of drawings, said he was determined to be a painter.

His parents staked him to three years of study in Leyden and in Amsterdam. Then at 18 he went to work on his own. By the time he was 25 he had made a brilliant reputation, which he proceeded to follow to Amsterdam, then one of Europe’s greatest trading cities. There he stayed for the rest of his life.

At that time, almost exactly parallel with Rembrandt’s career, The Netherlands was entering its “Golden Age” under the able stadtholder. Frederick Henry of Orange-Nassau. And Amsterdam was the golden city of the Dutch. Their armies were the crack fighting force of Europe. Their sea captains were preparing to smash Spain, rival Britain. All about him Rem brandt saw a young nation of tradesmen, sailors and soldiers, the litter of trophies brought home from the Orient.

When he arrived in Amsterdam, the young painter was a burly bachelor with a gay, stubborn face, a sociable manner. One of his first jobs was The Anatomy Lesson, for Dr. Tulp, an impressively theatrical work. He promptly became Amsterdam’s most popular and richest painter. His portraits of that time were, comparatively, the emptiest he ever did. He spent money hand over fist, on tapes tries and brocades, on good living and on the paintings of his contemporaries. He frequently opened the bidding with a price three times what any Dutch burgher ever paid for a picture, to “raise the prices for paintings in Amsterdam.” But he moved from the house of his dealer, van Uylenborch, to a canal-side warehouse where he could paint, on the side, sagging old women, ghetto characters, Biblical allegories.

In 1634 he married his dealer’s cousin, Saskia van Uylenborch, a gentle, kindly girl of excellent family with a dowry of 40,000 guilders (about $16,000). He bought a fine house in the ghetto, still preserved in Amsterdam as the Rembrandt-huis, and decked Saskia in diamonds and pearls. Because Rembrandt’s success as a portrait painter was enormous, the Company of Captain Cocq knew of no better man to do their group portrait.

Rembrandt, however, set out this time to paint a picture, not a portrait. He showed the company tumbling out of their clubhouse, the captain and his lieutenant in brilliant highlight, some of the others crowded into almost total shadow. The company were hopping mad. As they had already paid for the canvas, they accepted it but hung it in an anteroom of the clubhouse. From that job dated Rembrandt’s decline as a fashionable portrait painter. While the company were bickering about it, Saskia, who had borne four children, sickened and died.

Not long afterward Rembrandt began to paint the young nurse for his only surviving son, Titus. The girl was named Hendrickje Stoffels, had a broad, gracious face, a handsome throat, deep breasts, coarse hips and legs. By her, her employer had two children but he never married her, possibly because his wife’s will made him sole executor as long as he did not remarry. Hendrickje could not read or write but she apparently loved Rembrandt. After her first child, she was expelled from her church. Rembrandt’s Biblical subjects shifted from such as Samson Menacing His Father-in-Law to Woman Taken in Adultery. He also began to produce his magnificent landscapes, notable for their mountains, although Rembrandt never left The Netherlands, never saw a mountain.

This was his greatest period of production. He did things with paint no one has done since. He developed his amazing mastery of moted light. The faces he painted expose their surfaces of flesh like faces seen in life, but they also expose their motivations, wills, characters. Anyone could decide, on the evidence of Rembrandt’s pictures of this period, whether he would have lent his sitters money, married them or bet on their futures. They are for the most part resolute, weathered, resigned faces, expert at concealment, hav-ing the drama and depth of authentic human beings.

Rembrandt kept spending money at top speed though he was no longer getting portrait commissions. This procedure came to its inevitable finish when in 1657, at the age of 51, he was officially declared bankrupt. Saskia’s kinsmen had got in time’s nick a second mortgage on the house, to safeguard Titus’ depleted legacy. At the forced sale of Rembrandt’s collections, the prices bid were under what Dutchmen were accustomed to bid for paintings. He saved his etching plates, however, and got a little money for himself from the sale of prints.

Paying less & less attention to his material condition, Rembrandt worked faster & faster. When his son died, he wore his best to the grave, a ragged, fur-lined coat daubed with paint. A year later, a puff-eyed, firm-jawed 63-year-oldster. deserted except by a few kinswomen and the neighborhood Jews, he died. His fame as a painter had long since vanished into the attics of Amsterdam, apparently forever.

*Of the countless so-called Rembrandt paintings now extant, most authorities agree that no less than 400, no more than 700, are genuine.