Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Self-portrait as the Apostle Paul, 1661, Oil on canvas, 91 × 77 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
In the summer of 1654, Hendrickje Stoffels (1626–1663), visibly pregnant, was summoned before the council of the Amsterdam Reformed Church to answer for her relationship with Rembrandt. The official record is blunt: she confessed to ‘fornication with Rembrandt the painter,”‘was admonished to penitence, and barred from the Lord’s Supper. Rembrandt himself received no censure. Seven years later, he painted himself as the Apostle Paul, the theologian of grace, the man who argued that salvation comes through faith and not through the keeping of laws. It is worth pausing on that coincidence. Did Rembrandt see something of himself in Paul’s insistence that divine mercy operates outside the apparatus of institutional righteousness? Or is it simpler than that, a bankrupt artist in his mid-fifties reaching for the dignity of a role that fit?
The painting is signed ‘Rembrandt.f./1661’ near the sitter’s left shoulder. It belongs to a broader group of half-length religious portraits that Rembrandt produced from the late 1650s into the early 1660s, depicting apostles, evangelists, Christ, and the Virgin in brooding, close-up compositions. Scholars have debated for over eighty years whether these were intended as a programmatic series, though none of the surviving canvases can be assembled into a conventional roster of twelve disciples or four evangelists. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. brought seventeen of these paintings together for the first time in the 2005 exhibition Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and it remains striking how resistant they are to neat categorisation. Some appear to be portraits of contemporary sitters in sacred guise (the portrait historié convention), while others use studio models or imaginative invention. The Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul is the only work in the group, and indeed the only painting in the whole of Rembrandt’s career, in which the artist cast himself in a biblical role.
That choice was deliberate. Models were plentiful in Amsterdam, and Rembrandt had depicted Paul before, beginning with the Saint Paul in Prison of 1627, where the apostle appears as an elderly bearded figure quite unlike the artist. Thirty-four years later, the face in the painting is unmistakably Rembrandt’s own: heavy, lined, fifty-five years old, the eyebrows raised with a quizzical directness the Rijksmuseum rightly draws attention to. He wears a white turban and a dark mantle from which a sword protrudes, and holds a manuscript or bundle of letters. These are Paul’s standard iconographic attributes: the epistles that form the core of his theological legacy, and the sword of his eventual martyrdom by decapitation under Nero. There is nothing rhetorical in how they are presented. The sword barely emerges from the cloak. The manuscript is half in shadow. Rembrandt does not stage the apostle; he inhabits him.
The circumstances of 1661 matter. Five years earlier, in July 1656, Rembrandt had applied to the High Court of Holland for cessio bonorum, the legal surrender of his goods to satisfy his creditors. His household effects, his celebrated art collection (which included works by or attributed to Raphael, Giorgione, and Lucas van Leyden, as well as albums of prints and drawings, armour, and curiosities from the East Indies), and eventually the house itself on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat were inventoried by the Desolate Boedelskamer, the Chamber of Insolvent Estates, and sold at auction. By February 1658 the family had moved to more modest lodgings on the Rozengracht. In December 1660, Hendrickje and Rembrandt’s son Titus van Rijn (1641–1668) established an art-dealing firm with Rembrandt as their sole employee, a legal fiction designed to protect his earnings from further creditor claims.
It is a remarkable fact, then, that 1661 produced more dated paintings by Rembrandt than any year since the early 1630s. Far from a period of withdrawal, it was a season of extraordinary concentration. In the same year he painted The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis for the new Amsterdam Town Hall, a vast and radical composition that was rejected by the city’s mayors and returned to the artist within weeks; the surviving fragment, cut down to roughly a quarter of its original size, is now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. He also produced the Saint Bartholomew (Getty Museum, LA), the Saint Matthew and the Angel (the Louvre), and the Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (Rijksmuseum), completed in 1662. The self-portrait as Paul sits within this concentrated burst of ambition.
Paul’s particular significance in Reformed theology should not be underestimated. Calvin and his successors elevated Paul above the other apostles as the principal interpreter of the Gospel and as a counterweight to Peter, whom they associated with papal authority. Paul’s epistles, with their arguments for justification by faith alone (sola fide) and their unflinching accounts of personal weakness and divine sufficiency, occupied a central place in Dutch Protestant devotional life. Rembrandt, the son of a Calvinist miller and a Catholic mother, lived in a household that had been publicly shamed by the Reformed church. Whether or not he held settled confessional allegiances (and the evidence is ambiguous), there is something pointed in his choice to assume the identity of the apostle who wrote that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”
Otto Benesch (1896–1964), writing in 1956, observed that Rembrandt’s late religious portraits “have nothing to do with confessional distinctions” and are “simply Christian, as simple, deep and human as Christian faith itself.” That is a generous reading, and perhaps a correct one. Yet it may also flatten the tension the painting holds. Rembrandt does not look serene here. The face is watchful, even unsettled, the gaze interrogative rather than resolved. Ernst van de Wetering, working on the Rembrandt Research Project, noted the technical boldness of the execution: thick impasto in the turban set against wet-on-wet modelling elsewhere, the pages of the manuscript slightly curled to catch the light, the bluish-grey tones of the rolled leather binding standing apart from the dominant brown and ochre palette. The paint is handled with absolute confidence, but the expression it serves is anything but comfortable.
There is, finally, something to be said about the painting as a claim. A self-portrait is always an assertion: here I am, this is how I wish to be seen. A self-portrait historié goes further: it asks the viewer to hold two identities in suspension, the historical figure and the living artist, and to consider what flows between them. Rembrandt, painting himself as Paul, was aligning his own vocation with that of a man who made his case through letters, who addressed the faithful from a position of acknowledged frailty, and who expected persecution. Whether this was an act of private devotion, an intellectual conceit, or a calculated assertion of continued relevance by an artist whose expressive manner had fallen from fashion, the painting does not settle. It holds the question open, and in that refusal to settle into a single reading, it may come closer to Paul’s own insistence that certain things remain beyond full comprehension.
References
Benesch, O. (1956) ‘Worldly and Religious Portraits in Rembrandt’s Late Art’, Art Quarterly, 19, pp. 338–339.
Schwartz, G. (1985) Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wheelock, A.K. et al. (2005) Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits. Exhibition catalogue. Washington: National Gallery of Art / Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, Zelfportret als de apostel Paulus, 1661. RKDimages, image no. 2947. Available at: https://rkd.nl/explore/images/2947 (Accessed: 19 March 2024).