Date: 31-03-1992
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   17th Century    

REMBRANDT was a thoroughly inconsistent and frequently inept artist. He often got things wrong in his paintings, treating the human form with a strange disregard for anatomical truth. He was forever smudging, omitting and leaving indistinct. Sometimes whole areas of a painting appear to have bored him, so he han-dled them with a disconcerting, cursory sketchiness. He often seems a different artist from one painting to the next, and the field of his concerns is so large as to seem almost indefinable. These are the most common complaints about Rembrandt, but there is also a sense in which they are not really criticisms at all. Rembrandt's inconsistency, his troubling variousness, are an integral part of his genius. They are built in, so to speak, to his greatness.

This is a source of irritation to many people, not least, perhaps, to the professional Rembrandt scholars responsible for ''Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop'', at the National Gallery. The exhibition was brought into being by a group of art historians, led by the Amsterdam-based Rembrandt Research Project, in the hope that it might justify their attempts to tidy up Rembrandt, to smooth out his rough edges and make him a more manageable and discreet artist.

The results of the Rembrandt Research Project's investigations are, by now, well known: the deattribu-tion of large numbers of so-called ''Rembrandts'', and their reassignation to artists employed in his workshop; the removal, from the presumed corpus of Rembrandt paintings, of such masterpieces as the Frick Collection's The Polish Rider. The National Gallery's exhibition was intended to demonstrate the solidity of the art historical reasoning that lies behind the curious saga of the incredible shrinking Rembrandt oeuvre. It fails, but the nature of its failure is not without interest and even a certain drama: in trying to reveal a leaner and more consistent Rembrandt, the scholars have merely reaffirmed his uncontrollable vitality, his resistance to the neat taxonomies of the art historian.

The exhibition is predicated on a notional chasm between the paintings of Rembrandt himself and those executed in his workshop under his supervision. Its first four galleries contain some 50 indubitable Rembrandts, arranged in chronological order. These are succeeded by three galleries containing works once thought to have been by Rembrandt but now given to his assistants, juxtaposed with other paintings defi-nitely known to be by those same assistants. This part of the show is rather like a public accountability exer-cise. ''See for yourself,'' the exhibition says. ''The scholars have got it right.''

In fact, the scholars' confidence in explicit, demonstrable differences between ''Rembrandt'' and ''Workshop of Rembrandt'' comes to seem a litle suspect. It may be significant that the RRP's various reattributions seem most watertight in the case of dull or evidently lifeless works that have long been believed to show minimal evidence of Rembrandt's own involvement: Jan Lievens' inert The Feast of Esther, or Carel Fabritius's workmanlike Portrait of a Seated Woman are ex- Rembrandts that few people are likely to get particularly worked up about. But when you come to the borderline cases, the nearly-but- not-quite Rembrandts, it is a different matter.

To argue that Gerrit Dou painted the version of Anna and the Blind Tobit attributed to him in this exhibi-tion seems only marginally more sensible than to argue that Walt Disney painted the Sistine ceiling. The faces and the hands of the two figures are painted in a register that seems far more congruent with the Rembrandts in the preceding galleries than with the other Dous on show; the whole tenor of the scene, its presentation of sacred legend in terms of the everyday, also seems thoroughly Rembrandtian. The National Gallery's Chief Curator Christopher Brown, in a guide written to accompany the London showing of the exhi-bition, hints that the painting may well be ''given back'' to Rembrandt. This is a tribute of sorts to the slipperiness of the artist, and it contains a lesson for the Rembrandt scholars.

Rembrandt's stubborn, persistent refusal to paint the expected means that you can never be sure what to expect of him. There is a very fine line, in his art, between what could be described as magnificent clum-siness and outright failure. This is why many of the traditional tools of art historical analysis seem peculiarly blunt when applied to Rembrandt.

One of the standard reasons given by art historians when they deattribute a work supposedly by a ma-jor painter is that some passages are too ineptly or cursorily painted for the painting to be autograph. But this is a dangerous stratagem in the case of Rembrandt, precisely because he is an artist whose greatness is inseparable from a certain unevenness of attention to detail. Rembrandt is also an artist whose inconsistency seems a mark of integrity. Consider, by way of illustration, Rembrandt's painting of hands in three works attributed to him in this exhibition: Abraham's Sacrifice, from the Hermitage, Bathsheba with King David's Letter, from the Louvre, and the late Self- Portrait from Kenwood House.

In the first painting, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole drama of the scene, the tension of that moment when the angel intervenes in Abraham's sacrifice of his son, is concentrated in the form of his vast, meaty left hand, clamped over Isaac's face. It is a small part of a single painting that seems to contain, within it, a vast area of Rembrandt's concerns: his disdain for that classicising, mostly Italianate tradition of painting within which certain proprieties of pose or gesture are always observed; his profound recognition of man's capacity for brutishness, and his ability to invest painted forms with a kind of sublime terror of this fact.

Then look at Bathsheba's left hand in the second of these paintings. It is like a limp crab, contributing nothing to the painting as a whole. Painted with almost incomprehensible cursoriness, it does not even come close to anatomical accuracy. It sticks out like a sore thumb. This may seem surprising when you consider the careful attention Rembrandt has paid to the rest of Bathsheba's nude body, to her face and the expression it registers - but is not at all surprising when you consider his creative habits. Rembrandt gives importance to what is important to him, and he is simply not interested in incidentals.

The Bathsheba may be the painting in which Rembrandt's sympathy for a certain type of specifically female predicament is most apparent. He manages to imply that Bathsheba's beauty is, also, her tragic fate. The awkward quality of the painting, which is the sign of Rembrandt's compassion, is hard to pin down but has much to do with the sense that this body, while being presented to your view, is also being witheld: the poignant inwardness of Bathsheba's expression dignifies her nakedness, armours her against the usual vul-nerability of the nude in art. Bathsheba's left hand (unlike her right hand, which holds the fateful letter and which is beautifully painted) has no role to play in any of this. Rembrandt's indifference to it signals that other things are to be looked at.

Finally, look at the hands in the Kenwood Self-Portrait (see Picture Choice, facing page). In fact, you can't, because they are not there. They ought to be there - they are not behind the painter's back, and he appears to be holding his palette and mahl-stick in one of them - but they are, simply, not. He has left them out. Yet this seems entirely natural, because the painting is so strongly focused on Rembrandt's face, with its mixed expression of resignation, weariness, wry pride and humility. The absence of the hands is a way of telling you what the painting is about: a man, alone, staring the fact of his own mortality straight in the face.

In fact there is something strangely childish, and certainly undeveloped, about the notion that artistic in-tegrity is necessarily manifest in some supposed stylistic consistency obtaining across the different periods of an entire oeuvre - and this is exposed with cruel clarity by Rembrandt. Which leads, in a roundabout way, to the strange case of Willem Drost.

Drost is the member of Rembrandt's workshop said to have been responsible for one of the few indubitable masterpieces in the later galleries of this exhibition, The Vision of Daniel. The RRP also considers him to have painted The Polish Rider and The Man with a Gilt Helmet in Berlin, once described by Jacob Rosenberg as the most affecting Rembrandt in the world. This means that Drost is either one of the great unacknowledged artists in history, or the beneficiary of one of the greatest art historical mistakes in history.

But if Drost, in Rembrandt's workshop and under his instruction, actually did execute the paintings now claimed for him, does that necessarily make him their sole author? It is certain that those paintings could not have come into existence had Rembrandt never lived. This raises another, fascinating possibility concerning Rembrandt and his workshop practice: that Rembrandt encouraged those artists whom he employed to, in a sense, become him.

Other major artists had used the workshop system to produce works of art painted in their style but executed by assistants. But in Rembrandt's case this does not seem to have operated in nearly so straight-forward a manner as it did, say, in that of Rubens. Rembrandt's style, which is so shot through with strange, sudden touches of observation for which there is no precedent, is not really a style in the same sense as that of Rubens. Rembrandt never worked from preparatory sketches in the way that Rubens did, except in the loosest and most improvisatory way: x-rays indicate that the compositions of most of his greatest works were worked out by the artist in the process of painting them. So Rembrandt's assistants, unlike those of Rubens, could not simply transfer his sketches to canvas and proceed, so to speak, to fill them in. What they had to do was to learn to think like him.

In other words, even if Drost is considered to have invented The Polish Rider, Rembrandt may be con-sidered to have invented Drost. This is not completely far-fetched. Rembrandt was an artist who decisively altered the course of painting. Looking at the National Gallery exhibition, it is impossible not be struck by the gulf that separates his works from just about all previous paintings. It also seems inconceivable that Rembrandt, himself, was not aware of just how revolutionary and singular he was.

This leads back, finally, to the real reason to visit this show. It is to experience and to celebrate the achievement and vision of an individual, and to remember why Rembrandt occupies a place at the top of hierarchy of Western art. This should not need restating, but perhaps it does. Rembrandt matters because he, more than any artist before him, realised that to paint according to preconceived rules of decorum was to tell a lie about the world. He matters because - as his Bathsheba shows - he was the most forbearing and least sentimental painter of people to have lived. He matters because he was the greatest painter, simply, of what it is to be human, to be alive and to have to die - look at his Portrait of an 83-Year-Old Woman, at the way he has painted the wrinkled skin, the rim of wetness beneath the eyes.

The scholars might have set out to shrink Rembrandt, to make him more manageable and less unruly, but they are fighting a losing battle. He grows rather than diminishes. His art seems fuller and broader and deeper, more mysteriously charged with human significance, every time you experience it.