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When Henry Clay Frick, Gilded Age industrialist and one of the real villains of American labor history, decided to play the modern Medici and fill his Fifth Avenue palazzo with masterpieces of art, he included among his purchases two extraordinary portraits by Rembrandt. Acquisitions after his death added another portrait (the 1631 Nicolaes Ruts), and today they still hang like glorious hunting trophies in the gallery of Frick’s mansion, staring out at all the other Old Masters the old man was able to bag.
The Ruts portrait is an early, patron-pleasing, strictly commercial performance. Painted shortly after Rembrandt moved from his native Leiden to Amsterdam, this image of a furrier swathed in the goods of his trade is as much an advertisement for the young painter’s skill as for the sitter’s business acumen. Richly but soberly arrayed, a serious but not stern look on his face, the successful businessman engages us and seems to make us the offer written on the slip of paper in his hand. Let’s make a deal. The nearly photographic quality of the likeness, the illusionistically painted fabrics, perhaps most of all the amazing presence of the image, the sense that Ruts is reaching out to us, making a contract with us, letting us into his world (and his business)–all of this shows us why Rembrandt went quickly to the top of the Amsterdam art world. As if by sympathetic magic, this obsessive self-portraitist painted portraits of the rich and made himself a wealthy man.
Hanging only a few paintings away from the Ruts portrait, The Polish Rider of 1655 appears to be wandering through an entirely different world. Astride a pale, skeletal horse, he strikes an aristocratic pose and gazes not at the viewer but at the forbidding landscape and twilight sky that surrounds him. The work’s overall effect is haunting, lyrical and strangely glamorous–a Romantic portrait 150 years ahead of its time. It seems to have influenced the mood and imagery of Browning’s "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and the landscape reminds me of Eliot’s Waste Land: "Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / The road winding above among the mountains..."1 (Not TSE’s best moment, perhaps, but you get the idea.) It’s an ominous painting built of loose, rough brushwork. It harbors deep mysteries and invites elaborate speculation. In mood, conception and technique, it is miles away from the smooth commercialism of Nicolaes Ruts.
But the best of the Frick Rembrandts–and one of the greatest paintings in all of Western art–is the 1658 Self-Portrait. This is the grandest and most immediately impressive of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits. He emerges out of the dark background and looms above us, a king on his throne. His garments are of rich brown fur and gold thread, and he holds in his hand the golden scepter of a king (some writers have plausibly suggested he’s portraying himself as Jupiter, king of the gods). The pose is aggressively frontal and monumental in a way that recalls Holbein’s classic portrait of Henry VIII; like Henry, Rembrandt is positioned very close to the picture plane and his form fills the canvas, making the painting seem larger than its actual size (about 4 ½ by 3 ½ feet). This strong frontal pose–very rare in Rembrandt’s self-portraiture–also suggests the hieratic frontality of Byzantine icons and mosaics, while the painting’s rich, golden palette similarly hints at the past: the intricately crafted gold of medieval decorative art and the gold ground devotional paintings of the late Middle Ages. The dark fur wrap may be yet another archaizing strategy, alluding to the animal skins worn by barbarian kings. Here is a portrait of the artist as absolute ruler, swaddled in the trappings of wealth and so secure in his position of power that he holds the scepter loosely in his hand. He need not grip it tightly, for anyone who attempts to wrest it from him will have hell to pay.
And yet this glorious, bold portrait of himself as master of the universe was painted when Rembrandt was near the nadir of his existence. He was bankrupt; he had lost his spacious home and (a more important personal loss) had been forced to sell his art collection. A few years earlier he had committed the shabbiest act of his life, conspiring to have a bothersome former mistress locked away in a women’s prison, a confinement that probably wrecked her health and led to her early death. It’s tempting to psychoanalyze Rembrandt, to assume that he saw his financial misfortunes as a kind of cosmic retribution, a tidal wave of what the Seventies called "bad karma." It’s more likely, though, that Rembrandt simply blamed fate or other people and kept moving forward, kept working, putting paint on canvas and spreading it around. The important thing is that we see this painting in the context of Rembrandt’s misfortunes. It is a message from the bottom of his life, and it is imperative that we hear it.
The strongest light falls on the right side of Rembrandt’s face, on his right hand and on his powerful barrel chest. These are the things Rembrandt wants us to notice, and most visitors look at them, pause for a few seconds or a minute, then move on to Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid. But if we look longer at the painting, our eyes are eventually drawn down to the puzzling, lightly shadowed area of his lower torso, below the red sash. Seen close up, this is a flat plane of broad brown and gold brushstrokes. Instead of describing an easily recognizable lap, Rembrandt surrenders here to the joys of pure painting. He creates a field of loose brushwork that lays upon the surface of the canvas and counteracts the representation of space. We do not see two foreshortened thighs approaching us, as we would in a similarly cropped snapshot. In place of the artist’s right thigh, there’s hardly any discernable form at all, and the approach of the left thigh is blocked by the scepter’s strong vertical. If there is a left thigh in the painting, it’s either remarkably spindly for such a large torso (note the narrow space between scepter and chair arm through which it must pass), or Rembrandt is driving the scepter straight into its flesh.
Why all this flatness and looseness at the bottom third of the painting? I think Rembrandt is intentionally creating an ambiguity between a seated and a standing portrait. The artist is clearly seated; his left wrist rests on one chair arm and his right hand curls around the other. But the lack of foreshortening in the lower torso suggests a standing position in which his kingly raiment falls straight to the floor, just as the scepter travels down and off the bottom of the canvas. It is an image of ultimate power, conflating the seated popes of Raphael and Velasquez with the standing kings of Holbein and Titian. This artist-ruler is so powerful that even when sitting he seems to stand.
There is also a deeper reason for Rembrandt’s style in these passages. Here at the bottom of his greatest self-portrait, at the base of the triangular composition, where everything is grounded and where it all begins, Rembrandt is at his most painterly. He shows us his brushstrokes, the work of his hand, in such a away that we can only read them as brushstrokes–not patches of curving and folded cloth, but streaks of paint laid on a canvas. This is the key feature of Rembrandt’s late style (and the late styles of Manet, Picasso and numerous other great painters): a joy in the materials of paint, a vigorous brushwork that refuses to resolve into form and frustrates any attempt to read it representationally. Rembrandt’s brushwork is an epiphany, a showing forth of the real stuff of painting, and it cannot be coincidental that he chooses as the site of this epiphany his own waist and pelvis, the base of his fertility, the seat of his sexuality. This place where human creation begins is depicted as a chaos out of which form arises. And just as human beings are created from the heat and thrust of sex, the power of Rembrandt’s brushwork is a quasi-sexual, generative power. Strong, decisive, back-and-forth brushstrokes create form, and one of the forms rising out of this chaos (again, not coincidentally) is the phallic scepter Rembrandt holds in his hand, a symbol that combines worldly, artistic and sexual power. This creative, even erotic, joy in materials is the truth of painting, Rembrandt says. All else is illusion.
And what a beautiful illusion it is. The scepter, moving upward from vague, wavering flatness at the bottom to shining golden form where it passes through the hand, encapsulates the progression of the entire painting. In contrast to the shadowy scepter hand, the right hand is an organic thing, strongly lighted and startlingly "real" in this context. Its white highlights, accentuated knuckles and firm grip on the chair arm suggest a more active power than is communicated by the slacker left hand. This is the hand he paints (and punches) with. The hand’s realism is set off by the broad painterliness of the sleeve immediately above it–the greatest passage of bravura painting on the entire canvas. With a few loose, curving strokes of white paint (thicker in front and thinner as the sleeve recedes into shadow), Rembrandt creates a gorgeously tactile illusion of light falling on gathered white fabric. Lovely in itself, the passage also reminds us that Rembrandt could easily have created an analogous spatial recession at the bottom of the canvas. But instead he chose to keep the lower space ambiguous, to present the more powerful and mysterious image of a body spreading out, flattening itself against the picture plane and flowing off the bottom of the frame.
The white sleeve leads us up, by way of the warm golden garment across the chest, to the shocking reality of that great, aged face. We are immediately taken aback. The shock is equivalent to seeing the comically leering mug of Groucho Marx in the place of Lincoln on a five dollar bill. This is not what we’ve been led to expect. A king’s face, perhaps, would’ve been less jarring: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V and his Hapsburg jaw, any of the usual Renaissance suspects. Any face, really, but the face of this miller’s son, this Leiden provincial, this upstart prole, this bankrupt, disgraced, despicable painter... One can almost see the good burghers of Amsterdam shaking their heads and thinking: This Rembrandt, what are we to do with him? Always the joker, always playing dress-up, always posing, always sticking his big schnozz in our faces. And now, when he’s no longer master of his own house, he paints himself as a master of the universe. What unbelievable chutzpah!
There is much more than audacity, however, in the startling realism of Rembrandt’s lined, jowly, partly-shadowed face. The head, with its utter lack of idealization, belies the kingly costume. That familiar visage staring back at us deconstructs the regal persona that Rembrandt has so carefully built out of paint. Throughout the painting, Rembrandt stylistically shows us the work of his hand, but here his revelation is more conceptual, pointing to a meaning deeper than even the loosest brushwork could suggest. This work is as much about performing as it is about painting, and here Rembrandt lets us in on his game, reveals the self-conscious nature of his performance. When Rembrandt dresses up and paints himself as a royal personage, he is doing consciously what we all do unconsciously every day of our lives: he’s playing a role, performing an image of himself as he wishes to be seen. Like the rest of us, he’s a Shakespearean player strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage. And in the Frick Self-Portrait Rembrandt not only shows us the self he performs; he also goes deeper to show that it is performed, a mere dramatis persona in the script of a social play. This is the deep, essential truth in Rembrandt’s dishonesty. Just as he foregrounds the materials of painting to show the constructed nature of the work, he foregrounds the fact of performance to reveal the constructed nature of the self. Rembrandt says: this is all a portrait is, a thing made out of paint; this is all we are, the social roles we play.
I think Rembrandt glimpsed a dark, existential truth here: the sense of a void at the center of the self, the idea that aside from our roles we are nothing, that we have no hard core of essential being. The thought can induce a terrifying feeling of existential vertigo. Perhaps our selves are as thinly and obviously constructed as the freely brushed right sleeve in this portrait–and beneath that thin layer of paint is a deep black void. We are all performers, dancing over the darkness. What is Nicolaes Ruts doing, after all? What is the Polish Rider doing? What was Frick, the villain of the Homestead Strike, doing when he amassed this collection? What am I doing when I stand in Frick’s gallery in a black turtleneck and a black leather jacket and study this painting for hours? We are all in costume, all performing–with varying degrees of consciousness–the roles we have chosen to play. And if these roles are all we have, Rembrandt is saying, the best we can do is to choose them well and play them self-consciously. This is the truth that Rembrandt knows, and in this great self-portrait, perhaps the greatest of them all, he returns from the bottom of his life to tell us about it.
NOTES
1. Eliot, Waste Land, 66.
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