Master of Light & Shadow

In the university town of Leiden, The Netherlands, 350 years ago this week, a prosperous miller and his wife celebrated the birth of a son destined to tower over the painters of the northern Renaissance as Leonardo da Vinci towered over the masters of the Italian Renaissance. To mark the anniversary, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum (State Museum) is staging an exhibition of 100 of the greatest paintings and 123 etchings by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, chosen from 63 collections, including Leningrad's world-famous Hermitage (see color pages). At the same time, Rotterdam's Boymans Museum is exhibiting 268 of Rembrandt's drawings. Best testimony to Rembrandt's enduring attraction: the record-breaking crowds of more than 140,000 European and U.S. tourists who have visited the painting exhibit in its first seven weeks.

One of the reasons for Rembrandt's continuing appeal is that he inhabits a world in which modern man can still find his bearings. Leonardo da Vinci, born 154 years earlier, raised painters to the level of princes, held court while he worked to the accompaniment of music and brilliant conversation; his Venuses were meant to grace Olympian festivals. Rembrandt, whose parents saw to it that he got a good Latin-school education, plus a taste of university life, preferred the company of his sturdy Dutch countrymen. He once chose to paint his bride Saskia in the trappings of classic mythology, but the result (opposite), now owned by Leningrad's Hermitage, is basically a plain young Dutch girl, garlanded with field flowers and dressed in the rich, show-off satins and brocades that so delighted Rembrandt at Amsterdam's public auctions.

Molten Light. Rembrandt's early popularity among his countrymen (who were to spurn the full flowering of his genius) was solidly rooted in the artistic techniques of both Italy and northern Europe. His early teacher in Leiden had studied in Italy, there learned Caravaggio's trick of sharply contrasting light and shadow, to make light itself the most dramatic element in the picture. Rembrandt's painting, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, done when the artist was only 24, already shows both Rembrandt's love of Biblical subjects and the virtuoso control of light that gives his oils the intensity of molten gold.

Rembrandt also inherited a hardy tradition of Dutch portrait painting. His achievement was to take the stiff, official portrait, change it into a dramatic scene, filled with inner excitement that holds the spectator's eye even today. His first great success. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, done when he was only 26, established him as one of the foremost painters of Amsterdam, and brought him a flood of portrait commissions from the city's wealthy burghers.

To the Bible. Like many, a Dutch townsman who struck it rich, Rembrandt splurged wildly, bought up collections of armor and costumes that he could use as painting props, moved into a palatial house on the edge of Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter. His drawings and etchings spread his fame the breadth of Europe. But his years of commercial success began to wane when his masterpiece, Captain Banning Cocq's Shooting Company (known as The Night Watch before its recent cleaning revealed a late-afternoon scene), met with disapproval from patrons who found themselves lost in the parade.

Rembrandt's answer was to become increasingly absorbed in his own art, devoting himself more and more to the Biblical scenes for which there was little market.

His portrait commissions kept dwindling as he labored for months over each painting. His heavy brushstroke and thick overpainting, plus his untidy habit of cleaning brushes on his own clothing, struck his townsmen as uncouth. At 52, Rembrandt was forced to put his house and goods up for auction.

Beset by adversity, Rembrandt retreated even farther into his Bible, using his son Titus and his Jewish friends as models. Among his favorites was Hendrickjke Stoffels, the simple peasant family maid whom Rembrandt made his mistress after the death of Saskia. His Bathsheba, for which Hendrickjke posed, is ranked as one of the greatest nudes in Western art, not because of her classic beauty (in fact, Hendrickjke was squat and dumpy), but because of the unsparing yet loving eye Rembrandt cast on her flesh, recreating it against the rich fabric background. Result: a study of the quiet inner resignation with which Bathsheba received the message that would introduce her to King David and her destiny.

It was this effort to pierce through outward appearances that brought Rembrandt to his greatest insights in works such as The Denial of St. Peter. To depict the awesome moment, Rembrandt succeeded in portraying the intense inner struggle by relentlessly focusing the servant girl's light on the proud yet suffering features of Peter. In The Bridal Couple, probably painted the year before he died at 63, Rembrandt could still return boldly to another moment of drama for every man, raise it to the level of a welling symbol of devotion, acceptance and proud communion.

Painters' Painter. Ironically, the basic elements of Rembrandt's painting--his superb brush stroke and bold handling of color, his insistence on psychological insight, his dramatic use of light and shadow--long kept him in eclipse. Though in his own day Velasquez thought nothing of borrowing a pose from Rembrandt's Negress Lying Down (he used it for his own Venus), Rembrandt's reputation became primarily the custody of painters in later generations. In their hands, Rembrandt's work has become one of the richest lodes in Western art.

In the 18th and 19th centuries his landscapes influenced a whole generation of English painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds made copies of Rembrandt's paintings, and so did Gainsborough and Turner. Goya's studio had ten Rembrandt prints, to which Goya freely admitted his debt: "I have had three masters: Velasquez, Rembrandt, and nature." As the pendulum swung from classicism to romanticism in the 19th century, Delacroix seized on Rembrandt to best his classicist rival, Ingres, and wrote: "Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael."

By the 20th century, when popular taste had long since caught up and the value of a Rembrandt oil soared to the million-dollar mark, American artists like John Sloan pored over his etchings for inspiration. Russian-born Chaim Soutine sat entranced through a whole day before Rembrandt's The Bridal Couple. Even Picasso, that great imitator, once paid Rembrandt the supreme compliment of confessing one failure. Beginning an etching, he says, "I started to doodle. It became a Rembrandt. I even made another one right away, with his turban, his furs, his eye--you know what I mean, his elephant's eye. I'm still working on this plate to get his blacks. You don't get them right away."

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