From the highest praise of some critics to the lowest execrations comparing his painting to “dung,” Rembrandt’s later art was provocative in the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age. Today, his status is justly assured as an exquisite and intuitive handler of light and shadow as a vehicle for the intensification of meaning and expression. This article will explore these aspects of the master’s painting of tone and will look at the pictorial evidence in four of his canvases.
Opinions on Rembrandt
Today, the canonical status of the art of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69) is assured. Artists, art historians, and critics are almost unanimous in their praise of this painter of the so-called Dutch Golden Age. However, in his own time, there were dissenting voices, and opinion was divided and fervent. The contemporary scholar Constantin Huygens—who became a friend of the artist—lauded the early work of Rembrandt to such a degree that he described him as among the best painters in history. By contrast, the classicist writer Gerard de Lairesse referred to Rembrandt’s paint as running down the canvas like so much “dung.”
Rembrandt’s work evolved from his early concern with precision to a late individualistic expressive power based on the masterful application of thick paint. His early style of the 1620s and 1630s was more linear and realist, with a concentration on the figure and object as they appear in the visible world. However, later on, Rembrandt shifted focus from the objective world to a painterly rendering of light as a vehicle for meaning and expression.
As a result, narrative, drama, and psychology were both informed by and attributes of his handling of light. Yet, throughout his career, the painting of light was the central problem with which he grappled. Remarking on the master’s Jewish Bride, Vincent van Gogh said: “One must have died several times to paint like that…Rembrandt is truly called magician.”
The Optical Versus the Tactile
From the late 19th century into the 20th, a debate emerged about the effects of Rembrandt’s paint application in isolation from the subject matter of his works. It was inarguable that Rembrandt—at least from the 1630s—painted with a very thickly laden brush. What the art historians disagreed on was the effect. The debate centred on whether the effect was optical or tactile. Art historians of the later 20th century such as Svetlana Alpers and Ernst van de Wetering have chosen the “tactile” side of the argument, Wetering writing that the thick paint gives the “impression of nearness.”
On the other hand, Benjamin Binstock relates that the German art historian of the late 19th and early 20th century, Alois Riegl, argued for the purely optical effect of Rembrandt’s paint and that it was in the service of the perception of moving bodies in space. Riegl opposed this sense of the optical to the “haptic” or tactile quality. Binstock summarises Riegl by saying that Rembrandt directed his “material paint for immaterial effects.” Riegl supports his claim by saying Rembrandt abandoned his early use of chiaroscuro (contrasting light and dark effects) and the sharp delineation of objects that he saw as provoking touch. Instead, he wrote, the painter opted for an optical and spatial composition. Riegl wrote that local colors “regain their autonomous value, although not functioning in a polychromatic, isolating sense that would disturb the mood connecting the figures and the air.”
As such, and in Riegl’s terms, he saw a move from a concern with the individual figure and object towards a unifying harmony. The “polychromatic” and “isolating sense” of color was neutralized by Rembrandt’s incorporation of the separate elements of a composition in tonality. In his later work, he did not so much paint objects and figures as paint light tempered and modified by the presence of objects and figures.
The simple fact that Rembrandt himself insisted to visitors to his studio that they should stand back at a distance from his paintings surely tells us that the artist himself saw his work as optical rather than haptic and that Riegl was, in essence if not in detail, right.
The Visual and the Tonal
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) wrote of the Dutch temperament at the time of the Golden Age, saying that they preferred “speechless sceptical contemplation” and images to literature or works of theory. Seymour Slive links this imagistic culture to the “revolutionary strides in the use of tonal painting” in the Dutch 17th century. Rembrandt’s painting is nothing if not tonal, and he is a prime exemplar of this revolution.
Perhaps detectable in this cultural preference is the influence of the earlier Reformed Protestant period of iconoclasm, which was driven by the abhorrence of the representation of the sacred figure or object with the banal materials of image-making. The pervasive concern in Rembrandt’s work as it grows and develops is with the dissolution of the independence of the object. Perhaps even the independence of the object in Rembrandt is divorced from essence, or rather, he makes light the essential character of the object which is qualified by it. Therefore, iconoclasm is potentially appeased somewhat by Rembrandt’s tonal concern with light, especially in the case of his biblical drawings, with its miraculous and immaterial connotations.
Correspondence and Criticism
As mentioned, the contemporary response to Rembrandt’s art was polarized. One of his proponents was the scholar Constantin Huygens, who wrote in glowing terms in 1630 of Rembrandt’s and Jan Lievens’s painting of movement and “the transitory quality of appearance.” Huygens opted for Rembrandt, though, as the superior of the two. He wrote his praise at the time of the early career of the artist, but his comments were to become truer as Rembrandt progressed from then onward. Writing further, Huygens singled out the artist’s painting of expression, gesture, and movement. The artist and scholar, who became friends, began a correspondence, with Rembrandt writing to Huygens that the aim of his art was a certain “beweechgelickheit.” The term has been translated roughly as “inward emotion.”
As Rembrandt aged past his early style of the precise and minute detailing of figures and objects—for example, Two Old Men Disputing (1628)—this “inward emotion” was increasingly communicated through his painting of light. For example, by the time he painted the Self-Portrait of 1659, the tonal effects of light competed on par with the materiality of the thick painted face. The tones and hues on the face are very local and varied—to such an extent that they relate in a manifold of angles to the action of light. The light conveys a three-dimensionality at least as effectively as the applied paint. The hands and the right arm are presumably formally unfinished, but in terms of their subtle grades of light and shade, they are perfectly visible down to the detail of knuckles and veins. In fact, the lack of a formal finish does not imply a lack of tonal finish. In his work on the hands, light and shade are embodied and take over, from form, the task of credible visual representation.
Slive tells us of Rembrandt’s broken and lost outlines and that he was “guided by nature, not by rules” of art. This is the nub of Sandrart’s censure of the artist. Sandrart was an advocate of the rules of classical representation, which were recently undergoing institutional codification in the academies of artists and theorists. It is this classicism that long prioritized line and the acquisition of the “rules” of draughtsmanship that Rembrandt simply avoided. His painting of inward emotion—increasingly through the effects of light—not only makes for the expressive within his pictorial worlds but is a vehicle for his own intensely personal mode of expression. No more evidence need be cited for this than the fact of his repetition of the psychologically nuanced self-portrait throughout his life. In these self-portraits, light is the prime mediator of his art. Not even Sandrart could deny what he himself called the “universal harmony” of Rembrandt’s treatment of light and shade.
Seymour Slive presents a debate on the character of the artist: was he a Realist painter of “low subjects,” or did Rembrandt use “the subject to exercise his interest in light and shadow?” Neither characterization is wholly true. Rembrandt did not only paint “low subjects,” as his oeuvre is particularly replete with biblical themes. Nor were his subjects painted with the end of light and shadow in mind. Rather, his interest in light and shadow was integrated with his subject matter and directed to elucidate narrative, intensify drama, and portray often complex psychological states.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632)
This picture is all of a piece with the early Rembrandt. The scene and figures in it are precisely delineated and well-lit. These attributes are particularly suited to the subject at hand—the bright illumination of the scientific acquisition of knowledge. The source of the light is roughly above and to the left and shines brightly on Tulp’s face and the cadaver. The faces of Tulp’s students are mostly well-lit but at least partly shadowed, perhaps indicating curiosity and the gradual process of learning. The cadaver’s pale body is brightly lit, it being the object of study and, therefore, a source of anatomical knowledge for the students. For Tulp, it is the illuminated means of an illuminating example. A shadow falls across the corpse’s eyes, a literal umbra mortis. As such, it is the state of death while at the same time speaks of the criminal life of the executed man, Aris Kindt, who was hanged for armed robbery that year.
The open textbook of the right foreground is in shadow. This work, thought to be Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica of 1543, is contrasted with the bright light on the body. Perhaps this is an extolment of the virtues of learning from nature through a confrontation with the object of study, rather than learning from the knowledge of others. This chimes also with Rembrandt’s own avoidance of the rules of art for the portrayal of human nature for the sake of a direct encounter with it.
Philosopher in Meditation (1632)
The consensus about the title of this painting by Rembrandt declares it to be Philosopher in Meditation, and its contemplative atmosphere would support this. However, a catalog entry of 1738 for the canvas calls it Tobit and Anna Waiting for Tobias, a rendition of a story from the Apocryphal Book of Tobit. This narrative tells of the blind Tobit of Nineveh in Assyria, who sends his son, Tobias, to Ectabana to retrieve a debt. While in Ectabana, Tobias defeats a curse, marries Sarah, and returns home to Nineveh, whereupon Tobit is cured of his blindness for his patience and piety. This seems more apt to what we see in the painting, and especially, would account for both the presence of the female figure and her prominent place at the fire in the right foreground—Tobias’s mother, Anna.
Tobit’s blindness accounts for his downcast face clothed in shadow. He is abstracted from the world in prayer rather than metaphysical speculation, as his clasped hands indicate. The spiral staircase is prominent in the composition. Its base and upper reaches are brightly lit, with its middle passage in darkness. This could mark the pilgrimage of the soul from the lower material world through piety, prayer, and pure faith in adversity to salvation. Perhaps it is also tied to the narrative—the wished-for return of Tobias from danger is foreshadowed.
The golden light that floods through Tobit’s window is God’s grace and is echoed by the light of the fire that designates the hearth of the family and the light of human hope. The light from the window also presages the curing of Tobit’s blindness on the return of his son. Alternatively, the contrast of natural light and the firelight—in fact, the entire room—could be a projected duality of sight and blindness. The window of light marks the sighted eye, while the fire marks both sight and blindness in that, firstly, it illuminates but, secondly, it is an artificial light of the interior of the room. Blindness is evoked not only by the shading of Tobit’s face but by a general dark gloom.
Jean-Marie Clarke has written of the complex tonal metaphorics of sight and the eye in relation to this work. For instance, Clarke has observed the repetition of ocular shapes in the composition. The arch shape of the upper window and the low passageway entrance beyond Tobit to his left are prime examples. This passageway shape with the circular form embedded in the wall above, together with their location behind the blind man, show the “eye” and vision literally and for the moment “beyond” him. Rembrandt’s use of tonal contrasts applies to the image as a whole in its theme of light as vision. Even the fire emits its ocular glow. The circular light of the window is emphasised in the upper and lower spirals of the stairs, intimating the eye and the field of vision in the composition. If we step back from the picture, as Rembrandt always recommended, the entire work assumes an overall rotund, ocular shape. He achieves this not only through form but primarily through gradations and contrasts of light and shade.
The theme of sight and its lack in the story seems intrinsic to the artist’s conceptualization of the attitudes of the two figures and to his tonal choices and their structuring of the overall composition. Furthering the case for this being Tobit and Anna Waiting for Tobias is Rembrandt’s obsessive interest in biblical subjects and Jewish myth—as well as his close friendship in Amsterdam with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel.
Belshazzar’s Feast (c. 1635-8)
“…and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” Daniel 5:5.
Again, Rembrandt takes his subject from a biblical source, this time the Old Testament. Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, is hosting a feast in his court when the hand appears to write on the wall. The king is so perturbed that “the joints of his limbs were loosed, and his knees smote against one another.” Eventually, the significance of the inscription is unravelled by Daniel, who reads it as “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” Daniel goes on to interpret this as the wrath of God against the sacrilegious and idolatrous king: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it…Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting…Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.” The story goes on to tell of Belshazzar’s violent death that night and the succession of Darius, the Median king.
As an earlier picture by Rembrandt, it makes use of chiaroscuro, or the striking contrast of light and dark. Parts of the banquet scene are in deep shadow, which symbolizes the benighted spiritual state of the reign of Belshazzar. The Book of Daniel tells of Belshazzar’s worship of the gods of silver, gold, brass, iron, wood, and stone, who are toasted during the feast. The height of the light is reserved for the illuminated script on the wall. The script’s radiance speaks of the sudden shock of the king whose face is lit to show sickly yellows that show the ailing state of his reign and spirit. The disembodied hand is a tonal contrast to the face of the king, being of a healthier, fleshly purity.
The brightness of the script also prefigures Daniel’s interpretation of the text. The script is highlighted in a gold that makes the golden vessels at the feast—the vessels that Belshazzar looted from the Temple of Jerusalem—seem mostly darkened, indicating a literal profanation, that is, the removal of the sacred vessels from the Temple and their misappropriation by the Chaldean king for idolatrous worship. The golden jug held by a wife or concubine of the king in the right foreground has prominent highlights around its fretted rim over which water is pouring out. As well as referring to the woman’s shock, the fact that this is occurring as the hand is completing the inscription makes it symbolic of a purgation and the violent end of Belshazzar’s misrule. As the water flows out, the gold of the jug increases with light.
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653)
There is general agreement that this is a portrayal of the Greek philosopher and scientist with a bust of the Greek epic poet. There is a shadow on Homer’s face, Rembrandt once again using tone to depict blindness. This shadow contrasts with highlights on the upper part of the bust that perhaps render the inner sight and light of inspiration. This inspiration seems to be shared tonally with Aristotle’s right hand that clasps the bust. A theme of transmission seems to be in play when we see the combination of the matching gold highlights of Aristotle’s face and the appearance of abstracted absorption in his eyes. Aristotle is perhaps literally “bemused,” or visited by Homeric inspiration, as he is not strictly looking at the bust.
Perhaps, as some have said, the picture juxtaposes art and science. Then, poetic inspiration and the enlightenment of knowledge, intuition, and understanding are opposed. In Rembrandt’s light, justification can be found for such an opposition. Homer’s light falls on his “cranium” and can be interpreted as intuition and inspiration. Aristotle’s light, however, mainly falls on his hands and arms. He is also, after all, the only empirical presence as a body in the image. He is the man of science of the natural and human world, of botany, the heavens, politics, and a systematic theory of art.
The light on Aristotle’s head and arms signifies the “reaching” into natural phenomena characteristic of empirical science, as well as the intellectual organization and classification of these phenomena. Rembrandt paints Aristotle richly dressed and with a gold chain as a man of the world. He also paints thick impasto on the arms—itself intuitively applied on rich, variegated gold, white, and yellows. These nuanced, delicate light effects designate the subtlety of philosophy and of Rembrandt’s skill.
In favor of Rembrandt giving art and science an equal status in the image is the fact of illumination falling on both representatives. However, certain details go against this reading. Aristotle’s abstracted eyes, the light falling on Homer’s head, Aristotle’s eyes being in shade, and the shadow falling on the books in the background argue for an elevated status for art. The books are mere relics of inspiration that are a counterpoint to our witnessing the intense but passing moment of inspiration that is necessarily poetic.
Aristotle’s eyes are abstracted in reverie, as opposed to the “clear eye” of scientific inquiry, and Rembrandt thereby claims a subtle hierarchical relation of art above science using perhaps the most intangible aspect of art, and thus closest to inspiration: the painting of light.
