Sometime in 1661, two men sat for Rembrandt in his studio on the Rozengracht. He was fifty-five, insolvent, and painting with a freedom and directness that his earlier, more polished manner had never quite permitted. Their names were not recorded, and the circumstances that brought them before his easel are equally obscure. What survives is a canvas that affords them a presence more substantial and more searching than almost anything else in Dutch painting of the period. And yet we know almost nothing about who they were.
Amsterdam in the middle decades of the seventeenth century drew people from across the known world. Recent archival research, above all the work of Mark Ponte in the Amsterdam notarial archives, has established that from around 1630 onwards a small free Black community took shape in the area around the Jodenbreestraat, precisely the neighbourhood where Rembrandt had lived and worked from 1639 until his insolvency forced a move in 1658. Ponte estimates this community at around eighty documented individuals at its peak in the late 1650s, many of them sailors, former servants, or people who had arrived through the networks of the VOC and WIC. Church records, marriage registers, and notarial deeds preserve their names, their debts, their disputes, and occasionally their places of origin. It is entirely plausible that Rembrandt knew some of these people as neighbours during his years on the Jodenbreestraat. His 1656 estate inventory, drawn up during the insolvency proceedings, lists among the contents of his studio a painting described as Twee mooren in één stuck [Two Moors in one painting], proof that he had painted Black sitters before, though whether that earlier work survives or relates to the Mauritshuis canvas is uncertain.
African figures in Dutch art of this period were not invisible, but their roles tended to be circumscribed. They appeared as servants in group portraits, as exotic staffage in history paintings, or as biblical figures (the Magi, the Queen of Sheba, the Ethiopian eunuch baptised by Philip). Portraits that treated Black sitters as primary subjects, with individual attention to physiognomy and expression, were rare enough to be worth pausing over. Rembrandt was not entirely alone in this (Govert Flinck and other Amsterdam painters occasionally worked from Black models), but the sustained attention and dignity of the Mauritshuis painting remains unusual in its context.
There has been occasional speculation that these men were Ethiopian diplomats or dignitaries passing through Europe, a suggestion that does not hold up well under scrutiny. Portraits of African visitors to the French and Italian courts in this period typically carry clear markers of rank: regalia, heraldic devices, Latin inscriptions identifying the sitter by title. Nothing of the sort appears here. The drapery worn by the foreground figure is not the costume of a foreign dignitary but a loose, classicising arrangement, a toga-like garment in the manner of antique sculpture. Rembrandt used this device regularly in his late portraits and tronies, clothing sitters in all’antica dress to lift them out of the particular and into something more enduring. It tells us more about his pictorial thinking than about who these men actually were.
A more plausible reading is that they were residents of the city, possibly of West African origin. But plausibility is not knowledge, and the temptation to fill that silence with a tidy story should be resisted. What can be said is that West Africa in this period was deeply enmeshed in the transatlantic slave trade, driven by European demand and conducted through commercial and military networks in which the Dutch Republic was a major participant. Whether these men arrived in Amsterdam as free agents, as formerly enslaved individuals, or through circumstances entirely different is something the painting does not and cannot tell us.
The legal situation within the Republic itself was more ambiguous than it is sometimes presented. There was no formal statute abolishing slavery on Dutch European soil, but a customary principle, frequently invoked though inconsistently enforced, held that enslaved individuals who reached the Republic could claim their freedom. In practice, the status of Black residents in Dutch cities occupied an uncertain position that historians continue to debate. It would be reassuring to state flatly that these men were free, and they may well have been. But certainty on this point outruns the evidence. The archival record, as Ponte’s work has shown, reveals a community whose members lived between slavery and freedom in ways that resist simple categorisation.
What Rembrandt does offer, and what no notarial deed or church register can replicate, is attention. The handling of the foreground figure’s face is among the most concentrated passages in his late work, built up in thick, deliberate strokes that model form and light with extraordinary directness. There is no exoticising distance here, no trace of the decorative or the curious. The second figure, set further back and less fully resolved, has led some scholars to describe the painting as unfinished. Whether this is genuinely an incomplete work or simply an instance of Rembrandt’s late manner, in which he increasingly left passages of canvas open and loosely worked, is a question worth leaving open. The effect, in either case, is of something caught mid-thought: two men whose presence is fully felt, whose identities remain just beyond the reach of what the historical record can supply. Perhaps that is part of what makes the painting so difficult to look away from. It insists on the reality of people whose lives the archive has largely failed to preserve.
References
Blakely, A. (1993) Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Bindman, D. and Gates, H.L. Jr. (eds.) (2010) The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. III, Part 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
De Witt, D. (2020) ‘The Black Presence in the Art of Rembrandt and His Circle’, in Kolfin, E. and Runia, E. (eds.) Black in Rembrandt’s Time. Amsterdam: WBooks
Kolfin, E. and Runia, E. (eds.) (2020) Black in Rembrandt’s Time. Amsterdam: WBooks
Ponte, M. (2018) ‘”Al de swarten die hier ter stede comen”: Een Afro-Atlantische gemeenschap in zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam’ [‘All the blacks who come to this city’: An Afro-Atlantic community in seventeenth-century Amsterdam], TSEG/Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 15(4), pp. 33–62.Available at, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331717791_’Al_de_swarten_die_hier_ter_stede_comen’_Een_Afro-Atlantische_gemeenschap_in_zeventiende-eeuws_Amsterdam (Accessed 21 march 2024)
Ponte, M. (2020) ‘Black in Amsterdam around 1650’, in Kolfin, E. and Runia, E. (eds.) Black in Rembrandt’s Time. Amsterdam: WBooks, pp. 44–61
Schama, S. (1999) Rembrandt’s Eyes. London: Allen Lane