Rembrandt Van Rijn -- 2

This is a sequel to Rembrandt Van Rijn - 1


Geniuses don't sell a dime a dozen. During their lifetimes, they usually cost much less. To be inexact, they usually command zero price, but as any economist or banker would tell you, they remain perpetual debtors. And that means, one usually puts a negative value on their heads. And Rembrandt was no exception.

Yet they are born revolutionaries. They transform mankind's vision forever. They leave humanity indebted to them for the free gift they left at its door step prior to their departure. And what was the gift that Rembrandt enriched this earth with? Once again, I find it impossible to describe it my own words, my knowledge of painting being so inadequate. So, let me go back and quote from Hendrik Van Loon's book based on Rembrandt's physician's memoirs. Rembrandt had a rather humble family background, his father having been a simple miller in a small town called Leyden. Rembrandt was sent to the university, but he performed poorly and could not finish there anyway. His mind was entirely taken up by other matters.

' "Painting ... is nothing but seeing ...

' "It did not depend so much upon what you saw as how you saw it ... a good artist could get more inspiration out of a dead bullock hanging from a ladder in some mean village butcher-shop, than a bad one out of half a dozen beautiful churches in the village where Raphael himself was born.

' "...

' "... (O)ne day in my father's mill something happened to me. I don't mean that I was painting ... In those days I was not encouraged to become an artist.

' "...

' "... (E)very afternoon after school time, my brother ... and I used to go to the mill ... and help my father with his work.

' "Have you ever been in a mill ... on a bright, sun-shiny day? ... (T)he wings do curious things to the interior ...The windows of a mill are usually very small, but when the sun is shining brightly, ... the whole inside of the mill is flooded with a curious and very brilliant light that is like nothing else I have ever seen ...

' "... (E)very time one of those wings passed by one of the windows, the light was cut off for perhaps a hundredth part of a second ... and ... the room became pitch dark.

' " (W)hen we were young, the country was suffering from a plague of rats ...

' "...(O)ne enormous wire cage full of rats was hanging by a strong chain from a rafter. Those rats ... were gnawing at the steel chain that held their cage. But through the scurrying and pattering of all these excited little bodies, ..., the cage was slowly beginning to swing and it was making a curious shadow upon the wall. And all the time, the wings of the mill kept swishing past the window and every time the room would be pitch dark and then for just one, two, three seconds, it would be filled once more with brilliant light.

' "... And then suddenly -- it really came to me just like the revelation that came to Saul -- I noticed that the cage was not merely hanging in the light or in the air, ... but that it was an object surrounded by a whole lot of different sorts of air -- all of which were of a different texture. ...

' "... (T)hat morning in the mill, there weren't any colors ... The light in front of that rat cage was different from the light behind it, which was different again from the light on the left of it and all these different sorts of light did not remain the same, but changed every moment. Of course, when I say 'light' I mean air. What I really mean is the space which fills all our rooms and all our houses and the whole world -- the stuff we breathe, and through which the birds fly. And the idea suddenly struck me ... does all this space -- this air -- really have a color in our sense of the word and is it possible to translate that color into terms of paint?

' "... I can get the sense of distance by applying the rules of perspective ... That would be enough when I use a pencil or pen and ink. But I use color, I ought to be able to create that impression of distance in some other way -- in the way nature does it, or rather, in the way I suspect that nature does it.

' "...

' "... (F)rom the moment I saw those excited rats in their wire cage ... until today I have been convinced that every object in the world is surrounded by a substance (call it light or air or space or whatever you like) which somehow or other it must be possible to express in the terms of light and shade and half a dozen primary colors.

' "Sometimes I even think that at least in a few of my pictures I have solved that problem pretty well. But I confess that I have been working backwards, painting the picture first and trying to discover afterwards why I had done what I had done. People ... whisper that I have a secret. Secret fiddlesticks. I am a mathematician who ... started out with a formula and who is now trying to prove that it works.

' "Of course, the public has no notion of what I am trying to do. Perhaps four hundred years from now, if any of my pictures are left, they will say to each other: This fellow van Rijn at least was on the right way and was going in the right direction. But my neighbors ... they sneer, "This man is a mere amateur. He does not paint things the way we ourselves see them."

' "Heaven forbid that I should ever see things the way they do! They ... may let me starve, but they can't rob me of the conviction that I am right ..."

' "I am not quite sure that I am making myself clear. But you told me that you had liked my picture of Nicolaes Tulp. Well, in that case I did not paint a learned doctor giving a lesson in anatomy. I tried to make it mean something a little more general. I tried to paint science, rather than a group of scientists. ... Do you follow me?

"...

" I shall have greater freedom than ever before and all through this picture, for, mark my words, it will make people talk."

'Rembrandt was right.

'People talked about his picture.

'As a matter of fact they have not stopped talking yet.The first result of this "new departure in artistic arrangement," of this attempt "to put an idea into colors" and "translate an emotion into lights and shades" was a gigantic roar of laughter. ... Soon the whole town laughed ...

' "What had the fool tried to do anyhow?" '

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
Rembrandt, 1632
Oil on Canvas

Friends! Do you notice the light and shade on the face of the corpse?

IAM NOT CAPABLE OF COMMENTING ANYTHING ON art. wHAT i CAN ADMIRE IS YOUR BRILLIANT STYLE OF NARRATION. yOU SEEM TO BE MORE OF SHAKEAPERE.I DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE AMATRYA SEN IN YOU.KANAKA

Originally Posted by kanaka

IAM NOT CAPABLE OF COMMENTING ANYTHING ON art. wHAT i CAN ADMIRE IS YOUR BRILLIANT STYLE OF NARRATION. yOU SEEM TO BE MORE OF SHAKEAPERE.I DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE AMATRYA SEN IN YOU.KANAKA

I am neither Shakespeare nor Amartya Sen. If I have to describe myself, I will need to fall back on T.S. Eliot:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous --
Almost, at times, the Fool.

Thanks for enjoying my post though! :)

Hello Oj,

I was eagerly awaiting this sequel! And it has been most rewarding!

Then, science was not advanced enough to explain the concepts of light and space in clear terms. It is astounding that the artist had such an understanding of the way light moved around objects, giving them an entirely new look!

The painting left me wondering why the corpse had a shadow only over the face. Your question led me to Wikipedia, and I guess that is what Rembrandt calls the 'shadow of death'!

Your analyses are just as rivetting as the excerpts from the book! Thanks a lot for this lesson on art through Rembrandt!

Regards,
Sowmya

Originally Posted by sowmyapbhat

Hello Oj,

I was eagerly awaiting this sequel! And it has been most rewarding!

Then, science was not advanced enough to explain the concepts of light and space in clear terms. It is astounding that the artist had such an understanding of the way light moved around objects, giving them an entirely new look!

The painting left me wondering why the corpse had a shadow only over the face. Your question led me to Wikipedia, and I guess that is what Rembrandt calls the 'shadow of death'!

Your analyses are just as rivetting as the excerpts from the book! Thanks a lot for this lesson on art through Rembrandt!

Regards,
Sowmya

Thanks a lot for the comment. I really don't know much about art, but this book has moved me to no end. This is why I am trying to share it with some of you. I will put up some more extracts from it. Particularly on the state of science.

All the best.