SEARCHING FOR TRUTH IN REMBRANDT’S MYTHS

Julia Wolkoff

On a trip to Amsterdam during the city’s most nebulous season last month, I found myself lost in treacly thoughts. I was there to take in the many “Year of Rembrandt” exhibitions organized by the Dutch government to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the towering artist’s death.

The legendary nature of Rembrandt’s love life was at the forefront of my mind. His heart-rending reaction to his beloved first wife Saskia van Uylenburgh’s early death—the grief-stricken artist gave up painting for seven years—quickly turned from sentimental to schadenfreudian. I’m getting married this year, to a painter, and the thought that my fiancé might follow Rembrandt’s example in the event of my premature death was enticingly poetic.

My sincere intention for the trip was to glory in the passionate artworks of this art-historical crush and to walk in Rembrandt’s shoes, to uncover the man behind myths of my own making. This should have been a simple task, considering the numerous primary documents the artist left behind, and the depth of breathless scholarship that’s been written in the wake of his death. Instead, even before I stepped on the plane, I found myself lost again in a curious collision of conviction and reality.

Right before I left, my father excitedly shared with me his own late father’s belief that Rembrandt was secretly a Jew. Why else would the great painter have spent his costly pigments on lowly Jewish models, or turned to Old Testament subjects so often and with such respect? This false persuasion was not unique to him; it’s been tightly clung to by disenfranchised Jews for centuries.

I’m convinced: Rembrandt has fully ceased to be a man—he’s become a state of mind.

I wondered why my grandfather, whom I never once spoke to about art, cared about Rembrandt’s Jewishness in the first place. There’s a deep skepticism to his belief—that any form of empathy toward the Jewish people must be scrutinized for an ulterior motive—but I also recognized the same proud sense of myth and personal ownership over Rembrandt that had permeated my own artist-muse fantasies.

I returned from Amsterdam a few weeks ago; my experiences there strengthened my love for Rembrandt, and complicated his legacy. I’ve been flipping through the Polaroid photographs I took on the journey, over-exposed snaps of the artist as he appears in 21st-century Amsterdam. I’ve been gestating on them, but as the first night of Passover loomed, it all came together. Rembrandt devoted his life to an insistence on truth—emotional, physical—in his art, with a mission to involve viewers in the subtle narratives of his works. He married sacred myth and profane reality to achieve heightened, universal emotions. Today, as the artist is studied and celebrated, the attribution of his works picked apart, he remains shrouded in legend and projection. I’m convinced: Rembrandt has fully ceased to be a man—he’s become a state of mind.

When he lived in Amsterdam, from 1631 until the end of his life, in 1669, Rembrandt enjoyed—and directly contributed to—a Golden Age in the Netherlands. It was a period of economic prosperity and scientific and artistic innovation driven by the energetically independent Dutch Republic. The port city teemed with middle-class merchants, scholars, artists, and immigrants of all shades. It was an exciting and diverse place to be.

The Amsterdam of today retains much of its Golden Age vivacity and infrastructure, and when the sun sets on a clear day, the city still glows with the same pale light immortalized by Dutch masters like Rembrandt and Vermeer. That’s not to say the history of the city, the one its population chooses to remember, and its present aren’t in conflict—they are, right now.

When I landed at Schiphol in the early morning, I got in a cab and headed straight to the Rijksmuseum in the city’s center. The largest repository of the artist’s work, the museum had mounted “All the Rembrandts”—an exhibition of literally every painting, etching, and drawing by the artist in its collection. I walked into the imposing building, a 19th-century castle, under the banner of Rembrandt’s face—a national statement of cultural pride.

The museum had organized an interview with curator Jonathan Bikker, author of a new book on the artist, Rembrandt: Biography of a Rebel. Bikker mercifully allowed me to slurp several cappuccinos at the café as we engaged in a free-flowing conversation about Rembrandt, before joining the crowds to see the show. I mentioned my mawkishly romantic ideas on the artist and my grandfather’s conviction. “When you look at his work,” Bikker simply said, “you’re experiencing your own humanity.”

In the first exhibition halls, painted drab gray and my grandpa’s beloved Brooklyn Dodgers royal blue, I felt as if I was experiencing, for the first time, Rembrandt’s true self. Dense throngs of people of all kinds lingered over thumbnail-sized etchings—self-portraits of the artist made as a young man and as a seasoned one. They show him laughing maniacally, frowning, open-mouthed; in a beret, bare-headed; sword drawn or in retreat, contemplative.

Rembrandt’s elderly parents peer out from other works, wrinkled and grotesque; the artist’s young son Titus smiles from behind a crop of his father’s curly hair; quick sketches capture Saskia’s serene face, over and over, on a single page. Then there are endlessly funny and empathetic urban scenes of food vendors, scampering children, beggars, foreign travelers, Jews, and other exotic street creatures he encountered. Rembrandt the man is most present in these commission-less drawings and etchings, in which he was free to train his eye on whatever he pleased, without the painterly guises of allegory or religious narrative.

His mischievous sense of humor is often most moving in these drawings. In the swift pen-and-ink sketch The Pancake Woman (ca. 1635), a few strokes render a boy digging desperately in his pocket for change as the impatient, withholding old pancake-maker regards him suspiciously from behind her griddle. A tumble of pen marks indicate tussling youths, and the straight-lined lip and puffed-out cheek of an even younger boy show at least one character’s pancake satisfaction. The scene calcifies in the final, more detailed etching, produced after the drawing in the same year………………….

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