Category: Rembrandt and His Pupils

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), Reclining female Nude, 1658, Etching and drypoint on tissue-thin China paper, Plate: 79 x 159 mm, Sheet:80 x 160 mm, 2/6 state, Christie’s, London, The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn – Part II, London | 5 December 2024 Sale

This rare etching emerged from life study sessions in his studio, where he and his pupils sketched directly from models. These sessions combined observation with Rembrandt’s scholarly engagement with the art of previous centuries. As one of Amsterdam’s foremost art collectors, he owned a significant collection of works on paper and closely studied pieces available on the Amsterdam art market. Scholars of Rembrandt’s legacy suggest he was likely familiar with and possibly owned prints of works such as Giulio Campagnola (c. 1482–1515)’s ‘Venus Reclining’, Hans Sebald Beham (1500–1550)’s ‘Saint John Chrysostom’, and Jacob Matham (1571–1631)’s ‘Nox’ after Karel van Mander (1548–1606). These influences are evident in his work’s classical, allegorical undertones, which he transformed into a scene of quiet intimacy.

This etching belongs to a series of works depicting women in private moments, often using the same model, including ‘The Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside Her’ and ‘The Woman with the Arrow’. The consistency in features and poses suggests a deliberate exploration of the female form over several years. Using innovative etching and drypoint on tissue-thin paper, along with dramatic chiaroscuro, Rembrandt created an intimate, atmospheric work that blends Renaissance traditions with deeply personal and emotive storytelling, confirming his role as both a scholar and innovator of art.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside her, 1658, Etching and drypoint on Japan paper,  Plate: 159 x 126 mm, Sheet: 162 × 128 mm, 2/2  state, Christie’s, London, The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn – Part II, London | 5 December 2024

‘If he came to paint a naked woman, as he sometimes did,

He took for a model, not a Greek Venus

But rather a washerwoman or a turf stomper from a shed,

Calling his fallacy the imitation of Nature

And all the rest vain adornment. Hanging breasts,

Twisted hands, even the imprint of the bands

Of the corset on the belly, the garters on the legs

It all had to be followed, or nature would be dissatisfied.’

— Andries Pels (1631–1681)

This biting critique by Andries Pels encapsulates the disdain many of Rembrandt’s contemporaries felt toward his portrayal of women. While others adhered to classical ideals of beauty, Rembrandt rejected artificial perfection, choosing instead to depict raw humanity. His art reflects the unvarnished truth of nature, with its imperfections and tactile reality—folds of flesh, sagging skin, and intimate gestures drawn from life rather than myth.

Understanding Rembrandt’s genius requires an appreciation of the Calvinist ethos that permeated Dutch culture in his time. Calvinism prioritised inner piety, humility, and a rejection of ostentation, focusing on the human soul rather than external appearances. This worldview emphasised the beauty of truth and simplicity, aligning with Rembrandt’s approach to art. He sought to capture the divine in the ordinary, presenting figures whose imperfections underscored their humanity, dignity, and spiritual depth.

By focusing on lived reality rather than idealised forms, he elevated the mundane to the sublime, creating a body of work that remains profoundly moving. The harsh criticism he received underscores the tension between Calvinist values of authenticity and the classical standards of beauty embraced by a rising bourgeois class. To fully grasp Rembrandt’s genius, one must see how his art was shaped by—and transcended—his time’s spiritual and cultural currents.

For most of the nineteenth century, this painting was known as a portrait of the Dutch painter Philips Wouwerman (1619–1668) by Rembrandt. Sir Francis Bourgeois (1753–1811) bought it under that name at Christie’s in February 1807, and the identification had already circulated since at least 1795, in the sale of Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734–1802). Nobody questioned it for over a hundred years. The style of the painting, however, pointed to a date in the 1660s, by which time Wouwerman would have been well into his forties, and the sitter is plainly a younger man. The identification as Titus van Rijn (1641–1668), Rembrandt’s only surviving child, was first proposed around 1921 (Valentiner, 1921), and it has shaped the painting’s reception ever since, though it remains far from settled.

The difficulty is partly one of age. Earlier dating placed the painting in the early 1650s, which would have made the sitter too young to be Titus. During cleaning between 1949 and 1953, fragments of a signature and date were uncovered, reading ‘R…f…63,’ but these traces have since disappeared. More recent opinion favours a date of around 1668, shortly before Titus died of plague in September of that year at the age of twenty-six. If the later dating is correct, the apparent age of the sitter, a man in his twenties, would be consistent with Titus. Yet the sitter wears a moustache, which appears in none of the other accepted portraits of Titus, whether the pensive boy at his desk in Rotterdam (1655), the young man in a monk’s habit in the Rijksmuseum (1660), or the rather different figure in the Wallace Collection (c. 1657). Either the moustache was a late addition to Titus’s appearance, or this is someone else entirely. It is a small detail, but in the business of identifying Rembrandt’s sitters, small details tend to be the ones that refuse to cooperate.

The attribution to Rembrandt himself has also been disputed. It was rejected outright in the 1880s , and doubts were raised again in the twentieth century. Most subsequent scholars have accepted Rembrandt’s authorship, and the case has been argued most fully in the monograph on the Titus portraits (Giltaij, 2018). The painting is, however, absent from Volume VI of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (Van de Wetering, 2015), an omission that leaves the question formally unresolved. Is this a deliberate exclusion or a deferral? The Corpus does not say, and the silence is hard to read. One piece of physical evidence weighs in Rembrandt’s favour: an X-ray of the canvas reveals that the sitter’s left arm and right hand were originally painted in, with the left hand holding an unidentified object, before being removed. A copyist does not revise a composition in this way; such changes are characteristic of an artist thinking through his picture as he works. Whatever doubts surround the painting, this is not the behaviour of someone reproducing a finished design.

The painting’s condition complicates matters further, and perhaps more than is generally acknowledged. The head remains in good condition and is thickly painted with the vigorous brushwork and bold impasto typical of Rembrandt’s late manner, comparable to works such as the Portrait of a White-Haired Man in Melbourne (1667) or the so-called Jewish Bride in the Rijksmuseum (c. 1665–1668). The coat, however, has been badly abraded through overcleaning in earlier restorations, exposing the ground in places and leaving extensive areas of later retouching (Jonker and Bergvelt, 2016). It is this loss of surface that has done most to feed doubts about the picture’s authorship, since the passages that would most clearly reveal the painter’s hand in the lower half of the composition are no longer fully legible. How much confidence can attribution carry when half the painting is restoration?

The books visible to the left and behind the sitter’s head have been read as suggesting that the figure was intended as a student or scholar (White, 1985). If the sitter is Titus, this would be a curious characterisation. Titus was an art dealer, and three paintings by him were already listed in the 1656 insolvency inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions, when Titus was fifteen. He and Hendrickje Stoffels (c. 1626–1663) had formed a business partnership in 1660 to manage the sale of Rembrandt’s work after the artist was declared financially incompetent. In 1670, two years after his death, Titus’s profession was recorded as painter (Giltaij, 2018). Nothing in his documented life suggests a scholarly temperament. The books may point to an intended role, a costume piece of the kind Rembrandt used throughout his career, or they may simply be a compositional convenience. But if Rembrandt was painting his own son in the last months of Titus’s life, why dress him as something he was not? Could the scholarly trappings be aspirational, a father’s quiet wish for the son he was about to lose? There is no evidence for this, but the question is difficult to set aside.

What is clear is that the style belongs to Rembrandt’s final period, painted on the Rozengracht in the modest house to which the family had moved after the forced sale of the grand property on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat in 1658. By this point Rembrandt had lost Hendrickje and was approaching the end of his own life. The thick, sculptural handling of paint in the face, built up with a palette knife and broad brush, belongs to a way of working that puzzled Rembrandt’s contemporaries and immediate followers, and which found its closest precedent in the late work of Titian (c. 1488–1576). Rembrandt owned a large album of prints after Titian, recorded in his 1656 inventory, and the engagement with Venetian surface is everywhere apparent in his final paintings, though it takes a form that is entirely his own. There is something almost defiant about the handling here, as though the painter had decided that legibility was no longer the point.

Whoever this young man is, and whoever painted him, he is vividly, stubbornly present. Two centuries of argument about names and hands have done nothing to diminish that.

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References

Giltaij, J. (2003) ‘Rembrandt, Portrait of a Young Man,’ in Rembrandt and the Golden Age, exh. cat. Frankfurt: Städel Museum, pp. 232–235.

Giltaij, J. (2018) Titus, zoon van Rembrandt. Zwolle: WBOOKS

Hofstede de Groot, C. (1915) A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. VI. London: Macmillan, pp. 297–298, no. 705.

Jonker, M. and Bergvelt, E. (2016) Dutch and Flemish Paintings: Dulwich Picture Gallery. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery in association with D. Giles Limited, pp. 168–172.

RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of a Young Man, perhaps the Artist’s Son Titus, c. 1668. RKDimages, image no. 280260. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/280260 (Accessed: 21 September 2024).

Tümpel, C. (1986) Rembrandt: Mythos und Methode. Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, p. 430, no. A 97.

Valentiner, W.R. (1921) Rembrandt: Wiedergefundene Gemälde. Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, p. xxiii.

Van de Wetering, E. (2015) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. VI. Dordrecht: Springer.

White, C. (1985) ‘Portrait of a Young Man,’ in Dulwich Picture Gallery, exh. cat. London/Washington/Los Angeles, pp. 102–103, no. 27.

 Govert Flinck (1615-1660), Rembrandt as a Shepherd with a Staff and Flute, c. 1636, Oil on canvas, 75.1× 64.4cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on loan to  Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

Flinck’s father, a cloth merchant in the German town of Cleves, had no intention of raising a painter. The boy was apprenticed to a silk mercer, and the family’s Mennonite respectability pointed toward trade, not art. It took the intervention of Lambert Jacobsz (c. 1592–1637), a fellow Mennonite who was as much an itinerant preacher as he was a painter, to persuade the elder Flinck that his son’s instincts might be worth indulging. Around 1629–1630, the young Govert followed Jacobsz to Leeuwarden, where he trained alongside Jacob Adriaensz Backer (1608–1651), seven years his senior. By 1636 or perhaps a little earlier, Flinck had entered Rembrandt’s Amsterdam studio, lodging in the house of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh (c. 1587–1661), whose family connections to the master ran deep: Uylenburgh’s cousin Saskia (1612–1642) had married Rembrandt in 1634. Houbraken, ever ready to flatter, claimed Flinck mastered Rembrandt’s manner in a single year of study, though his earliest signed works from 1636 still carry visible traces of Jacobsz’s looser handling, which makes the claim feel generous.

This tronie, one of Flinck’s first independent compositions, shows a half-length male figure crowned with a laurel wreath, holding a flute and a shepherd’s crook, with an earring in his right ear. The physiognomy bears a striking resemblance to Rembrandt’s own features, particularly as recorded in an etching of 1630, and the identification of the sitter as the master himself has held since at least the eighteenth century. It is worth pausing over what this means. A pupil, still finding his way, paints his teacher in pastoral costume, wreathed in laurel, gazing outward with an expression that sits somewhere between self-possession and gentle amusement. Is this homage? Flattery? A studio exercise with a willing model who happened to be the most famous painter in Amsterdam? The tronie genre allows all of these readings and commits to none, which is perhaps the point.

The painting was conceived as one half of a pendant pair. Its companion, a Shepherdess dated 1636, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, is modelled closely on Rembrandt’s Flora of 1634 (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). Flinck borrowed the pose and costume from his teacher’s composition, including the placement of the woman’s left hand on her protruding abdomen, a conventional sign of nature’s fecundity, though he reduced the figure to half-length and gave her a crook rather than a floral staff. The pair appeared together in an Amsterdam sale of 1700, described simply as two tronies of a shepherd and shepherdess by Flinck, and were later recorded at Schloss Salzdahlum in the collection of August Wilhelm (1715–1781), Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern. During the Napoleonic upheavals, the pendants were separated. The Shepherdess eventually returned to Braunschweig; the Shepherd vanished from the record until it surfaced at a Frankfurt sale in 1920 and passed through several dealers before the Rijksmuseum acquired it in 1942 from Paul Brandt , a controversial wartime purchase whose provenance the museum has flagged for further scrutiny.

The traditional identification of the shepherdess as Saskia van Uylenburgh is persistent but doubtful. Comparison with the only secure likeness of Saskia, Rembrandt’s silverpoint drawing of 1633, does not support it, and was firmly rejected by Van den Brink in the 1993 catalogue for The Dreamland: Pastoral Painting in the Golden Age. The Rijksmuseum’s wall text continues to call her Saskia, which is a useful reminder that institutional labels can outlive the scholarship they were once based on. Regardless of whether Rembrandt or Saskia posed for these works, they were conceived as genre types within the well-established pastoral tradition, not as formal portraits.

That tradition had its Dutch roots in the 1620s, when Utrecht painters such as Abraham Bloemaert (1566–1651) and Paulus Moreelse (1571–1638) began producing pendant pairs of shepherds and shepherdesses, often with pronounced Italianate warmth and a fair amount of exposed flesh. By the mid-1630s, Amsterdam painters had taken up the mode, Backer among them. Flinck’s pair is strikingly chaste by comparison. His shepherd is fully clothed in a thick coat, painted in broad, slightly slack strokes of purplish-blue that recall Lambert Jacobsz’s manner more than Rembrandt’s. Even the shepherdess reveals none of the generous décolletage favoured by the Utrecht school. Whether this restraint reflects Flinck’s Mennonite sensibility, his personal temperament, or simply his reading of what the Amsterdam market wanted from a young painter still working within Uylenburgh’s orbit is an open question. In 1645, Flinck married Ingeltje Thoveling (d. 1651), the daughter of a vice-admiral and director of the Rotterdam branch of the Dutch East India Company, who belonged to the Remonstrant church. After her death, Flinck had himself baptised in her faith, leaving behind his Mennonite upbringing. By then he was a different painter altogether, pursuing a Flemish Baroque manner inspired by Rubens and receiving commissions from the Amsterdam patriciate, the Elector of Brandenburg, and Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), governor of Cleves. The quiet shepherd of 1636, still half-dressed in his first teacher’s style, belongs to a world Flinck would soon leave behind.

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References

Bikker, J. (2023) ‘Govert Flinck, Shepherd, c. 1636′, in Bikker, J. (ed.) Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online collection catalogue. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.Available at:https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Rembrandt-as-a-Shepherd-with-a-Staff-and-Flute–54826461a78c38472d670ca1cdae78a4 (Accessed 27 May 2024)

Horn, H.J. and Van Leeuwen, R. (2021) Houbraken Translated: Arnold Houbraken’s Great Theatre of the Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses. RKD Studies. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: houbraken-translated.rkdstudies.nl ( Accessed 26 may 2024)

McNeil Kettering, A. (1983) The Dutch Arcadia: Pastoral Art and its Audience in the Golden Age. Montclair

Sluijter, E.J. (2015) Rembrandt’s Rivals: History Painting in Amsterdam 1630–1650. Amsterdam/Philadelphia

Sumowski, W. (1984) Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, II. New York

Van den Brink, P. (1993) in Van den Brink, P. and De Meyere, J. (eds.) Het gedroomde land: Pastorale schilderkunst in de Gouden Eeuw [The Dreamland: Pastoral Painting in the Golden Age], exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum)/Frankfurt (Schirn Kunsthalle)/Luxemburg (Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art), pp. 155–59

Von Moltke, J.W. (1965) Govaert Flinck, 1615–1660. Amsterdam

 

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Bathsheba at Her Bath with King David’s Letter, 1654, Oil on canvas, 142 cm × 142 cm, The Louvre, Paris

A Dutch poet and critic, writing twelve years after Rembrandt’s death, attacked the painter for depicting the female body without classical idealisation (cited in Schama, 1999). His complaint was specific: Rembrandt chose not a Greek Venus but a washerwoman, with sagging breasts, marks left by corset laces on the skin, garter lines at the knees. Pels meant this as condemnation. It is possible that he had this painting, or works closely related to it, in mind. If so, he saw what was there and entirely missed the point.

The subject comes from the Second Book of Samuel. David, having seen Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop, sends for her; she conceives a child, and the consequences spiral into betrayal, arranged murder, and divine punishment. Earlier treatments of the scene, particularly sixteenth-century engravings by German and Netherlandish printmakers, tended to stage the episode as spectacle: Bathsheba displayed for the viewer’s enjoyment, David watching from a window or balcony, the moral weight falling squarely on his transgression. Rembrandt strips all of that away. David is absent. The architecture is gone. There is no voyeuristic framing. What remains is a woman alone with a piece of paper and a decision she did not ask to make.

The letter is Rembrandt’s invention, or at least his elaboration of a pictorial tradition. The biblical text mentions messengers, not a written summons. By placing a letter in Bathsheba’s hands, Rembrandt converts the scene from one of obedience to one of deliberation. She has received the king’s command, and she is thinking. Her slightly turned posture and lowered gaze suggest absorption rather than display; her body, for all its luminous physicality, belongs to her in this moment. It is precisely the quality Pels objected to, the frankness of a real body rather than an idealised one, that makes the painting’s emotional argument possible. A Venus would invite admiration. This woman asks to be understood.

The attendant kneeling at Bathsheba’s feet, drying or tending to her, occupies a different emotional register entirely. Her task is practical, routine, untroubled. She does not look up. The gap between her absorption in a mundane duty and Bathsheba’s absorption in an impossible choice is where the painting’s force gathers. It is a contrast Rembrandt understood well: the way crisis visits one person in a room while life continues, undisturbed, for everyone else.

Hendrickje Stoffels (c. 1626–1663), Rembrandt’s companion, is widely believed to have sat for the figure of Bathsheba, though the identification rests on comparison with other works rather than documentary evidence. If she did, the painting acquires a further complication. In 1654, Hendrickje was summoned before the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam and admonished for living in sin with the painter. Rembrandt would have been painting a woman he loved in the guise of a woman summoned, against her will, to another man’s bed, at precisely the moment when their own domestic arrangement was under public moral scrutiny. Whether he intended that parallel, or simply could not avoid it, is something the painting does not resolve.

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References

Schama, S. (1999) Rembrandt’s Eyes. London: Allen Lane.

Schwartz, G. (2006) Rembrandt’s Universe: His Art, His Life, His World. London: Thames & Hudson.

Tümpel, C. (1993) Rembrandt. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator.

Westermann, M. (2000) Rembrandt. London: Phaidon.

 Attributed to Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn( 1606-1669) or his Studio, Young woman in fantasy costume, first half 1650s, Oil on canvas, 74.0 x 61.0 cm, The Louvre, Paris

For most of its documented life, nobody called this painting Hendrickje. It first surfaces in the collection of Jean de Jullienne (1686–1766), the Parisian silk manufacturer and print publisher best known as the greatest collector and champion of Antoine Watteau’s (1684–1721) work. Jullienne is cited as its owner in 1754 by Descamps, and the painting appeared in his posthumous sale in Paris on 30 March 1767 as lot 133. From there it passed through a sequence of distinguished French collections: to Harenc de Presle, then to the Duc de La Vallière, at whose sale in 1781 it was catalogued as Portrait d’une belle femme, portrait of a beautiful woman. Three years later it appeared in the sale of the Comte de Vaudreuil (1740–1817), a celebrated collector and intimate of Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), under the same title, where it was acquired by the dealer Alexandre-Joseph Paillet on behalf of Louis XVI (1754–1793). It entered the French royal collection as an anonymous beauty by Rembrandt. It stayed that way for almost a century.

The name arrived in 1883, when the German art historian Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929) proposed that the model was Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1626–1663), Rembrandt’s companion and the mother of his daughter Cornelia, born in 1654. The identification stuck. It has been repeated in catalogues, monographs, and wall labels ever since, and the Louvre’s own title for the painting long reflected it: Portrait de Hendrickje Stoffels au béret de velours. The painting is unsigned. No documentary evidence connects it to a specific commission, and no technical study has conclusively established which passages, if any, are by Rembrandt’s own hand.

There is something worth pausing over in that gap between what the eighteenth century saw and what the nineteenth century wanted. When this canvas was sold in 1781 and 1784 as Portrait d’une belle femme, its French owners felt no need to identify the sitter. The painting was valued for what it was: a richly painted half-length figure in costume, attributed to a celebrated Dutch master, attractive enough to hang in aristocratic interiors alongside Watteaus and Bouchers. It was the nineteenth century, with its appetite for romantic biography and its conviction that great paintings must be confessions wrung from lived experience, that required the woman to have a name and a story. Bode supplied both.

The broader question this painting raises, and which the Louvre’s quiet reclassification throws into sharper relief, is what we lose by insisting on the binary of Rembrandt or not-Rembrandt. The modern obsession with concrete attribution, with sorting every canvas into the master’s own hand or the workshop’s lesser one, is itself a historical artefact, a product of the market’s need for certainty and the museum’s need for hierarchy. Svetlana Alpers, in Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), argued that Rembrandt’s studio functioned less as a traditional master-pupil workshop and more as what she called an ‘enterprise,’ a controlled environment in which the master’s manner of painting, his touch, his way of handling models and light, became the product being sold. What the studio offered to the market was not a series of individually authored canvases but a recognisable mode of picture-making: the warm tonality, the fantasy dress, the half-length figure emerging from shadow, the face painted with greater sensitivity than the surrounding costume. Whether the master himself laid every brushstroke was, in this reading, beside the point. The enterprise produced Rembrandts.

This is not an argument for indifference. It matters, for the history of painting, to understand what Rembrandt did with his own hands and what he delegated. But the half-length female figures of the 1650s, of which this Louvre canvas is one, were produced within a studio culture where delegation was the norm, not the exception. Rembrandt’s pupils during this period, among them Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680), Govert Flinck (1615–1660), and later Arent de Gelder (1645–1727), produced their own versions of the type, sometimes close enough to the master’s manner to cause lasting attribution problems. The Rembrandt Research Project, across its six-volume A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (1982–2014), downgraded, queried, and sometimes restored the authorship of numerous such works, and the revisions introduced by Ernst van de Wetering (1942–2021) in the later volumes openly acknowledged that the rigid categories of the early Corpus (A for autograph, B for doubtful, C for rejected) had failed to capture the reality of collaborative production. What actually happened in the studio on the Breestraat, and later on the Rozengracht, was messier and more interesting than a sorting exercise. A pupil might lay in the background and costume; the master might paint the face; someone else might glaze the whole. Or none of that. Or all of it in a different order. The finished painting entered the market carrying the studio’s authority, not necessarily the master’s signature, and it was bought and sold on that basis.

So where were these paintings, and who wanted them? Amsterdam’s kunsthandel in the 1650s had a strong appetite for half-length female figures, particularly those carrying an air of poetic refinement or historical allusion. They were not portraits in any commemorative sense. They were tronies, character studies dressed in fantasy costume, and they circulated as independent pictures, collected for their painterly quality and their evocation of a generalised feminine beauty that owed something to the Venetian belle donne tradition of a century earlier (a debt I have discussed in relation to the National Gallery’s Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap and will not rehearse again here). Dagmar Hirschfelder has demonstrated that tronies occupied a distinct commercial niche in the Dutch art market, functioning simultaneously as training exercises for pupils, demonstrations of painterly skill, and saleable goods for collectors who cared more about quality of execution than the identity of the sitter. The 1656 insolvency inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions lists various heads and tronies without identifying the models, a pattern consistent with the way the market understood them. They were stock, not biography.

And yet the desire to make them biographical persists, and this painting has been particularly susceptible to it. The face that turns towards the viewer in warm half-light, the velvet beret, the suggestion of intimacy, the feeling that the painter and the model knew each other well: all of this invites the biographical reading, invites the name Hendrickje, invites the romantic narrative of the artist and his common-law wife working together in defiance of social censure. It is a seductive story, and it may even be partly true. But it is worth remembering that Bode, writing in 1883, was building his identification on resemblance to other paintings that were themselves identified on the basis of resemblance to each other. The circle is not grounded in documentary evidence at any point. The Louvre’s own catalogue description, noting that the model has been ‘convincingly’ identified as Hendrickje since Bode, registers the peculiar status of an attribution that rests on consensus rather than proof.

Perhaps the more useful question is not ‘Is this Hendrickje?’but ‘Does it matter?’ If the painting is a workshop product, made within Rembrandt’s enterprise for the Amsterdam market, dressed in costume that self-consciously recalls an older tradition of idealised female portraiture, and sold to French collectors as nothing more specific than the portrait of a beautiful woman, then the most interesting thing about it is not who sat for it but how it was made, how it was sold, and what it tells us about the economy of image-making in a mid-seventeenth-century Dutch studio. The painting does not need a name. It needs to be understood on the terms under which it was produced: collaboratively, commercially, and with a studied ambiguity about identity that was not a failure of documentation but a feature of the genre.

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References

Alpers, S. (1988) Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Bruyn, J., Haak, B., Levie, S.H., van Thiel, P.J.J. and van de Wetering, E. (1982–2015) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. 6 vols. Dordrecht: Springer

De Winkel, M. (2004) Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Hirschfelder, D. (2008) Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts [Tronie and Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Painting]. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag.

Musée du Louvre (n.d.) Portrait de Hendrickje Stoffels (1625–1662) au béret de velours, INV 1751. Département des Peintures, collections database. Available at: https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010062019 (Accessed: 3 May 2024)

Liedtke, W. (2007) Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2 vols. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Van de Wetering, E. (2017) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer

RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Attributed to Rembrandt, Young woman in fantasy costume, first half 1650s RKDimages, image no. 41222. Available at https://rkd.nl/images/41222 (Accessed 3 May 2024)

 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.

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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).

 

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.

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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