Art: Met’s Rembrandts

The finest Rembrandt show the U.S. has seen in many a year was presented last week by Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose ponderous galleries contain the Western Hemisphere’s largest general collection of important masterpieces. Unlike many a museum, the Met did not have to borrow—every painting, etching and drawing was its own.

Of its 28 more or less well-authenticated Rembrandt oils, the Metropolitan chose only the 16 finest, surrounded them with a comprehensive collection of etchings and drawings. They included the Old Woman Cutting Her Nails, the portrait of Rembrandt’s son Titus, the bulbous-nosed Self Portrait showing the artist at 54. The exhibition proved again that Rembrandt was far and away the greatest of those few painters in history who have rivaled writers like Balzac and Dostoevski in their ability to delineate the individual human soul.

At the age of 25, hearty, life-loving Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn had made himself a precocious reputation as the finest society portrait painter in rich, 17th-Century republican Amsterdam. A proud, flamboyant personality, he charged Amsterdam’s solid burghers, soldiers and surgeons high prices for his solemn, cloudy canvases, married a woman of wealth, spent money like a drunken lord on paintings, prints, armor, tapestries and pearls. Some of the ruff-necked portraits Painter Rembrandt did during this early period were as prim and vapid as their complacent cheese-eating subjects. But on the side he prowled Amsterdam’s ancient docksides and ghetto streets, drawing, painting and incessantly limning the gnarled faces and baggy clothes of rabbis, sailors and Portuguese refugees.

No churchgoer, but a profoundly religious Protestant, Rembrandt spent many an evening over his Bible, etched countless Biblical scenes, giving his tortured, tenebrous Christs and Virgins the tragic, human faces and figures of the people he found about him. Treating religion as a personal, human experience, and his bluff, crusty Amsterdam settlers as rugged individuals, Rembrandt became the greatest of Reformation painters, and the pictorial spokesman of bourgeois democracy.

In middle life, Painter Rembrandt’s fortunes changed abruptly. His wife followed three children to the grave, leaving him with a feeble-bodied only son. His commissions began to fall off—his pictures with their enveloping shadows were not clear enough likenesses to suit the trade. His magnificently furnished home was dismantled to satisfy his creditors.

Taking up with his housekeeper, an illiterate but devoted peasant girl who was ostracized from the Mennonite Church for bearing him two children out of wedlock, Rembrandt moved to dingy quarters over a ghetto junk shop, and continued to paint more intensely than ever. When his son, whom he idolized, died in 1668, aged but upright Painter Rembrandt stumped in proud sorrow to the graveyard, dressed in his best: a moth-eaten, fur-lined overcoat spattered with paint.

When, a year later, Painter Rembrandt himself died, the art salons of Amsterdam had forgotten him. His paintings (now valued as high as $1,000,000 apiece) sold for as little as 6¢ and his passing was noted only by a handful of bearded ghetto Jews who hunched their shoulders and whispered among themselves that Rembrandt van Rijn had once been a great man.