Our loyal readers will certainly remember the very elaborate exhibition Rembrandt in Amsterdam which was held at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, in 2021. It was a presentation, from the Städel Museum in Germany, sprinkled with a rather disappointing postcolonial reading, not very thoughtful, pretext to put the society of the time on trial and even Rembrandt, an accomplice by association to colonialism and racism…
Now the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, in Quebec, offers us its vision of the famous Dutch artist, but, this time, without this forced critical tool. Developed by the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in the Netherlands, this exhibition is more classic, perhaps even a little too much, despite some links with contemporary art… But it proves fascinating to those who take the time to explore it.
A plastic research into the possibilities of engraving
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, son of Harmen, a miller whose mill was on the Rhine – but who also signed van Leiden at the start of his career, in connection with his hometown -, became a famous Amsterdam painter, at the age of 25, thanks to his painting Doctor Nicolaes Tulp’s anatomy lesson (1632). In this group portrait, he staged an anatomical theater where, in front of an audience, the dissection of a human body took place. A major change in the relationship with the body and medical science.
In addition to his fame as a painter and draftsman, Rembrandt was also a very prolific engraver who produced “300 engravings between 1625 and 1665”. And it is this production which is presented and explained in a very didactic way. An entire section is also devoted to the etching technique.
Until 1640, Rembrandt used etchings mainly to make reproductions of his paintings, which he thus distributed to a wider audience. But, subsequently, this means of expression became autonomous. From the same plate, he created various states, formal variations which express his desire to create atmospheres and rich visual effects. In the case of The resurrection of Lazarus (1632), he even went so far as to make nine different versions from the same metal plate.
The exhibition also covers the chisel technique, the highlight as well as works made with drypoint and even the papers and supports used by the artist to create expressive works. He used, among other things, a Japanese paper, imported by the Dutch East India Company, a paper “with a yellowish tone”, which “attenuates the contrast produced by black ink on white paper” and creates very silky effects. . He also used vellum paper, an animal skin, as well as cartridge paper, a gray wrapping paper. It is one of the great merits of this exhibition to explain all the means created by Rembrandt to develop his plastic research.
Means which allowed him to develop works that were sometimes very fine and detailed and, other times, bordering on abstraction – let’s think of The Star of Kings (1651) almost entirely black… These engravings made him even more famous, just as was the case for Dürer at the beginning of the 15th century.e century. One of these engravings, Christ blessing children and healing the sick (1648), reached the price of 100 florins, the equivalent of the monthly salary of a professor at the time!
Hoes, portraits and selfies
This exhibition is also an opportunity to briefly return to the question of portraiture and self-portraiture.
A section entitled “Tronies” will provide a better understanding of a type of creation associated with portraiture and which has been somewhat forgotten. These “character studies called tronies (heads)” or hoes, or even faces, were “then very popular on the art market” and represented archetypes such as “the peasant, the beggar, the Oriental…”. Rembrandt’s parents often posed for this purpose…
Rembrandt was also a popular portraitist and an artist who inventively explored the genre of self-portraiture. Let us recall how in the West, since at least the Renaissance, these self-portraits have been a sign that artists had elevated themselves socially. Let us cite those of Albert Dürer, Sandro Botticelli, Sofonisba Anguissola… The Baroque era was just as fond of the genre with the self-representations of Rembrandt van Rijn, Diego Vélasquez, Artemisia Gentileschi… But let us be wary of a reductive reading of the self-portrait. They were not the embodiment of a desire for realism, but rather the projection of an idea of the artist and the individual. The presentation text rightly speaks of these self-portraits as representations worthy of “a theater actor”. Not so far from what we nowadays call, with great contempt, selfies.
Rembrandt executed at least 68 pictorial self-portraits and 26 etching self-portraits. We regret that this exhibition at the MNBAQ only shows us 4 engraved self-portraits.
The visitor will note how this exhibition is punctuated with works by Quebec artists inspired by Rembrandt, a laudable initiative given the lack of presence of our artists in the exhibitions of our museums. Unfortunately, this is sometimes a little forced… A separate section explaining more significantly the influence of his art on that of Quebec would certainly have made the subject richer.
Nicolas Mavrikakis traveled to Quebec at the invitation of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.