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Rembrandt:
Self-Portraits
(Norbert Schneider)
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Self-Portrait with Lace Collar
1629
Oil on canvas, 37,7 x 28,9 cm
Mauritshuis, The Hague
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Very few artists of the modern period have left as many self-portraits as
Rembrandt. His lifelong study of his own physiognomy, his desire to keep a
pictorial record of his constantly changing physical and psychological features,
can be taken as a sign of his interest in autobiography and as proof of the
belief he nurtured, in spite of the many crises and setbacks he suffered, in the
uniqueness of the individual.
Different kinds of autobiographical narrative - memoirs, for instance, or
episodes from lived experience interspersed in fictional texts (as with
Grimmelshausen), or regular diary entries - were becoming increasingly important
in seventeenth-century literature. "Affective individualism" (Lawrence Stone),
which had begun to penetrate every aspect of bourgeois experience, had entered
poetry, too. Petrarch had anticipated this centuries before with the interest he
provoked in his biography: "You will wish to know what kind of person I was."
In the seventeenth century, this humanist motto was generally seen in a
confessional or religious light. Rembrandt is known to have maintained frequent
contact with members of many different confessions, religious groupings and
sects (Jews, Mennonites, Socinians etc.), and it is probably not far wrong to
assume that qualities which all these groups had in common - their ethical
awareness, their intensely emotional character, and even their potentially
oppositional nature - had a profound influence on Rembrandt's character.
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 Self-Portrait
1633
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Self-Portrait
1631
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On the other hand, it would be quite wrong to see Rembrandt's self-portraiture
entirely in the light of his religious introspection. Indeed, his method reveals
somewhat more affinity to doctrines of emotional expression which influenced
contemporary academic art theory. In his early self-portraits, and in a number of smaller etchings which, significantly enough, are
almost entirely devoid of ornament, allowing the artist to concentrate
exclusively on the face, Rembrandt experiments with constantly changing facial
expressions, working his way through the full gamut of human feelings and their
physiognomic equivalents until, at one end of the scale, all that remains is a
grimace. The face, the focal point of the personality, is given
symbolic status: it represents human feeling.
Rembrandt thus acts out and gives visual form to different emotional
states: alarm, worry, care, the torment of fear; or he portrays
himself as someone staring with desperate, distracted eyes, with his
hair standing on end (1630), or as a person laughing and showing his
teeth. While Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), the Director of the
Academie Royale founded in 1648, reduced the various forms of
emotional expression to a schematic code in his posthumously (1698)
published tract "Methode pour apprendre a dessiner des passions,
proposee dans une conference sur l'expression generale et
particuliere" (Method of learning how to draw the passions, proposed
during a lecture on expression in general and particular), Rembrandt
plumbed the depths of human emotion and discovered, by practical
experiment, the means of its visual representation.
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Self-Portrait as a Young Man
1634
Oil on canvas, 61 x 52 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
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Rembrandt was not, therefore, giving vent to his own feelings. He
was not interested in revealing his "innermost being", but rather in
exploiting his own mimic abilities to produce an encyclopaedia of
the human feelings. He fashioned an instrument of empirical
psychology out of his theatrical, indeed comic, ability to slip into
and simultaneously observe a wide range of emotional states: an
example of the valuable contribution made by the fine arts to the
development of a modern science whose subject was the study of
different forms of human individuality.
While the examples of his work mentioned above, especially those of
the early period, presented a range of physical reflexes or
expressive reactions to emotional states, his portraits of the
middle period go beyond spontaneous physical expressiveness to
experiment with a number of conventional poses and gestures. The
pose in his self-portrait of 1640, imitates Titian's so-called "Ariosto"
portrait, with the sitter's sidelong glance and his bent arm resting
on a parapet. Another self-portrait, executed in 1659, now in the
Mellon Collection at the National Gallery, Washington, imitates the
type of pose established by Raphael's portrait of Castiglione.
Rembrandt purports here to paint himself as a "gentiluomo"
(nobleman, gentleman), or "cortegiano" (courtier).
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Titian
Ariosto
1512
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Rembrandt
Self-portrait
1640
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Self-Portrait
1659
Oil on canvas, 84,5 x 66 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington
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A third form of self-expression explored by Rembrandt is the use
of ornamental devices, attributes and costumes to define status and
present a calculated, or desirable, image of the self. Thus
Rembrandt leaps from one role to another, constantly altering his
social position. Sometimes, he appears as a beggar with outstretched
hand, sitting on a rock (1630); there is perhaps good reason, too,
for a number of his self-portraits to turn up surrounded by sketched
scenes of beggars. At other times, we find him posing as a
sophisticated gentleman with reinforced collar, chain of honour,
precious stones or other attributes of rank; on one occasion, he
paints himself as a prince with a scimitar (1634, etching. In the
same year, interestingly enough, he portrays himself as a burgher
wearing a beret). Yet another guise is that of the oriental sultan
in a turban, executed in full-length; in this painting, the
histrionic artificiality of the scene is underlined by the presence
of an alternative costume in the shape of Roman helmets lying on a
table behind him (1631, and c. 1631).
It would, of course, be possible to interpret the enormous variety
of roles and poses in Rembrandt's self-portraiture psychologically,
seeing them as examples of megalomaniacal wishful thinking, or as
the sign of a frustrated social climber, or as a form of imaginative
compensation for the suffering he experienced during various
critical periods of his life. Some of this may well be true. Beyond
mere wish-fulfilment, however, the majority of the approximately
ninety self-portraits show Rembrandt mentally reflecting on social
structures whose new permeability, flexibility and dynamism were the
result of the bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands. Economic
aspects played an important role here, too, although not in the
superficial sense of a trademark representing the artist's business
interest in marketing his own subjectivity, as Svetlana Alpers has
suggested.153 Rembrandt's work elucidated the nature of
macro-economic structures to the individual who sought an
imaginative grasp of the new social reality.
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Self-Portrait as Zeuxis
1669
Oil on canvas, 82,5 x 65 cm
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
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Self-Portrait in Velvet Cap and Plume
1638 |
In his final self-portrait, executed in 1669 (Cologne), Rembrandt
appears stricken by age, stooping, in a state of melancholic mirth.
This reverts to the subject of his early physiognomic studies; and
yet here, for the first time, Rembrandt's imagined role appears
consistent with his real mood. Appearances are deceptive here too,
however; it would hardlv be permissible to assume the painting
represented a proclamation of Rembrandt's true state of mind. For
once again, Rembrandt presents us with a visual puzzle, disclosing
no more than he conceals. Albert Blankert has found evidence to
suggest that Rembrandt portrayed himself here as the Greek painter
Zeuxis, after an anecdote related by Karel van Mander: "It is said
that Zeuxis put an end to his own life by suffocating on his own
excessive laughter one day while painting the likeness of a funny
old wrinkled woman... It was this which the poet meant when he
wrote: 'Are you laughing too much again? Or are you trying to
emulate the painter who laughed himself to death?"
On the left of the self-portrait there is the blurred shape of a
face, probably the likeness of an old woman. The patches of light on
the shaft and pommel of the mahlstick denote a studio setting.
Considering the large number of portraits he executed of himself in
different roles, very few show Rembrandt at work, or even suggest
the nature of his profession. Apart from two self-portraits executed
in 1636 and 1648, one of which shows him from the side, drawing
(with Saskia in the background), while the other shows a frontal
view of him alone, engaged in the same activity, but standing near a
window in a dark room, only two paintings from his later period
refer to his work as an artist (1660 and 1667/68). But here, too,
the artist concentrates on rendering the face, while his painting
utensils are only vaguely suggested. In one of the paintings, in
which Rembrandt shows himself actually working at the canvas, his
utensils are just visible in the darkness of the setting; in the
other, where he seems poised between two bouts of work, his brush
and palette have been rendered immaterial to the point of
transparency by repeatedly scraping them with the brush and rubbing
in left-over paint, while the face, marked by age, is trenchantly
modelled in pastose layers of strong colour. The self-portrait in
the Frick Collection, showing him sitting majestically on his
throne, was probably conceived as a "portrait histone" (portrait
showing the sitter in significant historic costume). Here, too,
Rembrandt appears to have adopted a role: the ruler casually holding
up a sceptre in his left hand, which is resting on the armrest of
his throne. However, since the sceptre can hardly be distinguished
from a mahlstick, the impression that we are looking at a
self-portrait showing Rembrandt as a painter is probably justified.
Unlike Aert dc Gelder, who treated the Zeuxis subject (1685) as a
full historical canvas, Rembrandt's self-portrait (at Cologne), by
keeping direct allusion to the story itself to a minimum, places
emphasis on the representation of the face. The un-reflected and
disrespectful satirical treatment of deformity has vanished under
Rembrandt's treatment; what remains is a vulnerable depiction of the
ugliness age has brought to his own features. Rembrandt's laughter
does not poke fun at anybody, not even at himself. Too exhausted
even to defy his own frailty, it is an expression of the stoic
equanimity with which he resigned himself to approaching death.
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