AGNES Talks: Jonathan Bikker, “Rembrandt ca. 1630: The Rebel Emerges”

2020

This talk was part of the symposium Rembrandt and Leiden: New Perspectives that took place at Agnes Etherington Art Centre on 8 November 2019. The symposium featured new research by international scholars on Rembrandt and his circle, Leiden and Dutch culture in the seventeenth century, connecting the exhibition “Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges” with new perspectives on the artist and his era.

Jonathan Bikker has worked at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam since 2001, where, as Research Curator, he is primarily responsible for cataloguing the museum’s holdings of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. He has contributed to a number of Rijksmuseum exhibition catalogues and was co-curator of the exhibitions “Late Rembrandt” (2014/15) and “High Society” (2018).This talk was part of the symposium Rembrandt and Leiden: New Perspectives that took place at Agnes Etherington Art Centre on 8 November 2019. The symposium featured new research by international scholars on Rembrandt and his circle, Leiden and Dutch culture in the seventeenth century, connecting the exhibition “Leiden circa 1630: Rem …

Chapters

View all

Intro
Intro
0:00

Intro

0:00

Passions of the Soul
Passions of the Soul
9:15

Passions of the Soul

9:15

Viewer Participation
Viewer Participation
12:49

Viewer Participation

12:49

Leaving Things Out
Leaving Things Out
15:29

Leaving Things Out

15:29

Jeremiah
Jeremiah
18:49

Jeremiah

18:49

Sculpting
Sculpting
23:19

Sculpting

23:19

Criticism
Criticism
28:37

Criticism

28:37

Conclusion
Conclusion
30:29

Conclusion

30:29

Autogenerated Transcript from YouTube (if available)

Use CTRL+F to find key words if it is a longer transcript​.

Intro

0:00

[ Background conversations ]

0:09

> Great to see this room so full. And it includes people from our community
here in Kingston, people from Queen’s,

0:18

and I also need to extend a special welcome
to several guests who are here from some

0:23

of the lending institutions that are
participating in this exhibition, including Dr. Sonia Del Re from
the National Gallery of Canada,

0:31

Dr. Kjell Wangensteen from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt from
The Leiden Collection in New York.

0:39

So, they are we have a real special opportunity
to continue our conversation about this topic

0:49

with our guests, not only our speakers, but our
also distinguished guests later this afternoon.

0:56

It was a pleasure to participate in
helping Jacquelyn to organize this exhibition and to contribute an essay to the catalogue.

1:05

And I know that she regrets very much
that she can’t be here with us today.

1:12

So, my job is just to interview,
interview, sorry, introduce,

1:18

interview would be interesting,
but we’re not going to do that, introduce our speakers, beginning
with Jonathan Bikker.

1:24

And Jonathan, since 2001, has held the post of research curator at the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

1:32

But he is a native of Canada. Specifically, Hamilton, Ontario.

1:38

And he completed his master’s degree here at
Queen’s, and almost got to the end of his Ph.D.

1:44

when he left us for Utrecht University where
he did receive his Ph.D. with a dissertation

1:51

on an important follower
of Rembrandt, Willem Drost. And that was published as a book
in 2005 by Yale University Press.

2:01

It’s still the standard monograph on that artist. He has since then published widely on Dutch art,
including on several paintings by Rembrandt.

2:12

So, now you can see what Jonathan
is going to talk to us about. At the Rijksmuseum, he has been responsible
for cataloguing and is still working

2:20

on cataloguing the museum’s holdings
of 17th century Dutch paintings. And he’s co-curated a number of important
exhibitions, including late Rembrandt

2:29

in 2014-15, which was an absolutely once in
a lifetime project that brought something

2:36

like over 400,000 visitors,
I think, to the Rijksmuseum. > 550,000.

2:41

> 550,000. Astonishing. Astonishing. And his latest publication is called
Rembrandt: Biography of a Rebel.

2:52

I’m pleased to say that we are
using it as the textbook for my Age of Rembrandt class this semester.

2:57

I don’t know why I don’t see a gaggle of
students here waiting to get your autograph. But maybe they’re just a
little oh, there we are.

3:03

Yay! Good for you. Thank you so much for being here. Yes. And that book, there are a few copies
available here at the reception desk should any

3:15

of you be interested in reading it for yourself. So, here is Jonathan Bikker. [ Applause ]

3:28

> Thank you, Stephanie. As I was already introduced, my name is
Jonathan Bikker, and I’m from the Rijksmuseum.

3:39

This is Rembrandt van Rijn
also from the Rijksmuseum. This is a very young early portrait,
self portrait from around 1628.

3:52

Rembrandt here is about 22 years old. And this is a very radical
and innovative painting.

3:59

He presents himself with
this wild doff of curly hair,

4:06

and with virtuoso brushwork
and scratching in the paint.

4:13

Of course, the most radical thing about the
painting, something that no one had done before, is to, is the lighting in the painting.

4:20

It comes, instead of coming from
the front, it comes from behind, and his face is totally cast in shadow.

4:29

Rembrandt presents himself
here as a creative genius. His contemporaries probably would have
known this even better than we do today

4:39

because they would have interpreted that
shadow across his face as a sign of melancholy.

4:47

Not the kind of melancholy that you
and I suffer from from time to time,

4:52

but the Renaissance variant creative melancholy,
which was suffered by artists in particular,

5:02

as well as poets, philosophers,
and even statesmen. They all had an excess of black
bile cursing through their bodies.

5:12

And every once in a while, this would heat up and create something called
enthusiasma.

5:19

And that’s what prompted them
to create their masterpieces. Rembrandt himself was very aware of
the phenomena of creative melancholy.

5:30

The best example of this, of course, is his
painting Aristotle with a Bust of Homer,

5:38

now in the Metropolitan Museum,
that he painted in 1653

5:44

for the Sicilian collector Don Antonio Ruffo.

5:50

This is a meditation on, on melancholy.

5:56

From the very beginning of Rembrandt’s career,
he presented himself and thought of himself not

6:03

as a follower, but as a trendsetter, someone
who bucked tradition, thumbed his nose at it.

6:13

Many of his contemporaries were very well
aware of this, and some of them appreciated it.

6:21

Others did not appreciate it at all. Most of them, the critics, most of whom wrote,
it’s true, after his lifetime, after his,

6:33

after he died in 1669, they accused
him of breaking the rules of art.

6:41

They never actually called him a rebel. One of them, however, did call
him the first heretic of art,

6:48

which is more or less the same thing. It’s interesting to note that some of
the criticism that Rembrandt received

6:58

that was directed actually at his late work
is equally applicable to his early work.

7:07

For example, Abraham Brueghel, he was
the first person to write a criticism

7:14

of Rembrandt that has been preserved. And it was a few months after his death.

7:20

And he wrote in a letter to Don Antonio Ruffo that contemporary Italian painters wouldn’t
be caught dead painting a trifling, quote,

7:32

a trifling draped figure in which the
light shows only the tip of the nose.

7:38

He was responding to Ruffo’s lament that
Ruffo was trying to find Italian painters

7:44

who would paint pendants to the Aristotle. So, he was actually talking about the Aristotle.

7:51

But, yeah, that, you know, the lighting, remark
about the lighting only on the tip of the nose,

8:00

that could, of course, also,
is also equally applicable to this 1628 self-portrait
that’s on the screen now.

8:11

While the detractors would be in the majority
after Rembrandt’s death, early in the,

8:19

in his career, the artist had a fervent admirer who appreciated the radically
innovative qualities of his work.

8:29

That admirer was Constantijn Huygens. He was the Secretary of Print for
Frederik Henrik, Prince of Orange,

8:37

and the Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic. Huygens visited Rembrandt around the time that
he painted this self-portrait on the screen

8:47

at the end of 1628, or beginning of 1629

8:53

when the artist was living
in Leiden where he was born. And his praise of the fledgling
artist knew virtually no bounds.

9:03

According to Huygens, the
greatest artists of Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy had already been
outdone by the beardless Dutch youth.

Passions of the Soul

9:15

There is one painting in particular, painting
that must have been on Rembrandt’s easel

9:23

at the time, that Huygens really appreciated.

9:29

Huygens appreciated, in particular, Rembrandt’s
ability to depict the passions of the soul,

9:36

basically what we would call
the emotions nowadays. And painting the passions of the soul, that
was the main task of the history painter.

9:49

And a history painter is a painter
of biblical or mythological scenes. And in the hierarchy of genres, history
painting was the most important.

9:59

Huygens especially appreciated
Rembrandt’s depiction of Judas’s emotions.

10:10

In this painting, Judas Repentant,
trying to return the 30 pieces of silver

10:19

that he had received for betraying Christ.

10:26

According to Rembrandt, or Huygens said about
this painting, and about the figure of Judas

10:32

in this painting, compare this figure with all
Italy, indeed, with all the wondrous beauties

10:38

that have survived from the
most ancient of days. One of Rembrandt’s early biographers
tells us that he went to great lengths

10:47

to find just the right way to render
the emotional states of his figures.

10:52

Rather than accepting existing formulas for
their depiction, he would constantly draw

10:59

and redraw and draw again these figures. An example are these three red chalk drawings
from around 1631 of an old man seated

11:11

in a chair seemingly listening
intently to someone outside

11:17

of the picture plane someone we don’t see. Rembrandt, probably about two years later,
Rembrandt chose the figure on the right then

11:29

for the figure of Jacob listening to his
young son Joseph’s telling of his dreams.

11:39

And I think if you look at the story
that’s told here, that you’ll realize

11:47

that Rembrandt made the right choice in
choosing this figure for that, for that scene.

11:56

Another way that Rembrandt practised the
emotions and depicting the emotions was in this,

12:06

well, it’s not really a series, but four etchings of himself pulling
faces in front of the mirror.

12:15

Needless to say, no one had
ever done this before, or at least published them
in the form of etchings.

12:22

We see him here in the, and
these are very small. The top one where he’s looking
surprised, that’s, there’s,

12:30

that’s in the current, in
the exhibition here as well.

12:38

So, you can look at it there. And this one, he’s laughing. And I guess he’s pretty angry in this one.

12:45

And I’m not exactly sure what’s
going on on the far right. These all kind of seem rather
superficial emotions, if you ask me.

Viewer Participation

12:56

Sometimes Rembrandt can be very profound, and
almost try and drag us into the inner depths

13:01

of a person’s thought, such as this painting,
which is also, of course, in the exhibition here

13:10

of the Head of an Old Man in a Cap from around
1630 that belongs to the Bader Collection.

13:21

We don’t know what’s going on in this painting. We don’t know what this man is thinking.

13:27

Because this is a new type of painting that
Rembrandt and Jan Lievens helped to develop.

13:35

It’s a so called tronie. Tronie is the Dutch
word for mug or face, basically.

13:43

But, yeah, Rembrandt doesn’t give us any clues. There are no attributes in this
painting that would identify this figure.

13:50

So, what Rembrandt is doing, what this
is a case of, is of viewer participation.

13:57

We have to participate in the scene. We have to imagine what this figure is.

14:03

He leaves it entirely up to us. And this is one of the most
radical things that Rembrandt did.

14:08

And he did it throughout his
career in all kinds of ways. He was always looking to
maximize viewer participation.

14:15

Sometimes he would do that why, here’s another
example where he maximizes viewer participation.

14:24

This is a late work, the so called Syndics. This is a corporation portrait.

14:30

So, a group of men sitting around a table. Hundreds of these were made in the
Netherlands in the 17th century.

14:38

This is the one and only painting
of this type by Rembrandt, and it revolutionized, revolutionized the genre.

14:46

Instead of just showing the men sitting around
a table posing basically to be portrayed,

14:54

or interacting a little bit with each other,
Rembrandt involves us in this painting.

14:59

It’s as if we’ve walked into the wrong
boardroom and disturbed them, and they’re all, you know, what are you doing here?

15:06

They’re all, the figures are reacting to us. Or perhaps we’re not, you know, we’re sitting
in the room and they’ve passed judgment

15:15

on something and we’re in total
disagreement and they’re looking at us, you know, how dare you defy our judgment.

15:23

Whatever the case, Rembrandt is, we, the
viewer, are involved in this, in this painting.

Leaving Things Out

15:31

Another way Rembrandt had
of involving us, the viewer, in the painting, was by do I have to hurry up?

15:42

A reductionary process by leaving things out.

15:48

This painting on the left, for example, of
Andromeda, usually when you showed Andromeda,

15:55

the story of Andromeda, you did it as
Joachim Wtewael did here on the right.

16:03

You showed the monster who was about to
devour her, or was intending to devour her.

16:09

And you also showed the hero,
Perseus, who was coming to her rescue.

16:14

Rembrandt leaves the monster and Perseus out. So, we focus on the figure of Andromeda, and
we identify all the more with the emotions

16:23

that she’s experiencing now, a mixture
of fear and possibly relief as well

16:30

and anticipation of being rescued by Perseus.

16:36

My favourite example, of course I’m bias,
it’s a Rijksmuseum painting, but my first,

16:41

my personal favourite of this process of leaving
things out is the so called Jewish Bride.

16:51

That’s not actually the subject
of this painting. It’s actually, it tells the
story of Isaac and Rebecca.

16:58

And because of a famine in their homeland,
they were sent by God to the land of Gerar,

17:04

which was ruled by the Philistines. And Isaac and Rebecca were newlyweds.

17:11

And so it’s a very strange story. When Isaac and Rebecca go to Gerar, the land
of the Philistines, Isaac is really worried

17:25

that if the Philistine men know that he is
married to Rebecca, that they will kill him

17:30

so that they can sleep with his wife. So, he poses as her brother. But one day, they think they’re alone,
and so they start touching each other,

17:43

not in a way that brothers and sisters
are supposed to touch each other, but it turns out they’re not alone,

17:49

and Rembrandt made a preparatory
sketch of this, for this painting.

17:56

And there, he included the figure
on a balcony of King Abimelech, and Abimelech saw Isaac and
Rebecca fondling each other.

18:06

He leaves that figure out in the painting. And some have said that he was
actually, he was painted in the painting,

18:14

but the painting has been cut down. I don’t believe that for a minute. The painting hasn’t been cut down, or it has
been cut down, but not that dramatically.

18:22

Rembrandt left out that figure so that we could
take on the role of Abimelech as the witnesses

18:30

of the marital love between Isaac and Rebecca. So, this is a very profound and radical
manner of getting us involved in the,

18:40

in the painting of viewer participation.

18:48

So, Rembrandt wasn’t, didn’t follow tradition
by sticking to the letter and including all

Jeremiah

18:55

of the figures in his, in his, in his
compositions that were supposed to be there.

19:00

Another way that he broke with
tradition was by painting subjects

19:06

that had never been the subjects,
subjects of oil paintings before.

19:12

And a wonderful example just so
happens to be in the Rijksmuseum of this is Jeremiah Lamenting
the Destruction of Jerusalem.

19:25

One of the amazing things about this
painting is that it’s another prime example

19:31

of Rembrandt taking us into the inner depths
of someone’s, the workings of someone’s mind.

19:40

Jeremiah is having a vision here. If you look at the traditional way that
visions were depicted in art, for example,

19:50

this print on the right after Domenico
Fetti, yeah, it’s very artificial, you know,

19:59

his vision is being held
up in a blanket by angels.

20:04

Rembrandt incorporates the
vision into the composition. We see in the background the
destruction of Jerusalem.

20:13

And the only way we know that this is a vision
and not the actual destruction is because of

20:21

that very abstract landscape
around the very detailed figure.

20:27

It’s very abstract, has almost
this neon kind of lighting.

20:33

And so we’re literally in Jeremiah’s
mind, in his head, in this painting.

20:40

This is one of the prime examples painted
in 1630, this is one of the prime examples

20:48

of Rembrandt’s fine style of painting. He had developed this in his early,
early career, and finally in 1630,

21:02

it’s a breakthrough year for
him in more than one way. And one of the ways is because he accomplished
this very, very fine and meticulous style.

21:12

This style would go on to inspire a whole
school of painting that existed well

21:18

into the 18th century, which was
called the Fine Painters School,

21:29

sometimes the Leiden School of Fine Painters. But anyway, even a remarkable thing about
this, it’s so, that figure of Jeremiah is

21:37

so finely and meticulously depicted. But if you look up close at his doublet, you’ll
see that some of the, some of the ornament

21:48

on his, the brocade on his
doublet that’s actually made

21:53

by scratching into the, into the paint. And we saw that already in
that early self-portrait.

22:00

Sometimes he did this with
the butt end of his brush. This is one of the radical, one of
the three radical ways Rembrandt had

22:10

of creating texture in his paintings. One of my favourite examples, also a painting
in the Rijksmuseum, I’m sorry, is the kid,

22:23

the tail of the kid, held by Anna in
Tobit and Anna with the, with the Kid.

22:31

You’ll look, you’ll have
to look in the exhibition, because there are also examples
of this technique here.

22:38

Rembrandt probably actually stole
this technique from Jan Lievens.

22:44

I don’t have an early example
of Jan Lievens for this. But at any rate, Rembrandt used
this throughout his career.

22:51

Jan Lievens stopped using it. He only used it in his early career.

22:58

But Rembrandt experiments
with it throughout his career. Here’s The Jewish Bride. And in the cape of Isaac, you can see some
very, very fine, I think he might have done it

23:09

with an etching needle actually, very fine
zigzag lines or straight vertical lines,

23:15

but they’re very, very fine scratching. A second method that Rembrandt had for
creating texture was sculpting with the paint.

Sculpting

23:25

And he would do this sculpting with
paint like the sculptor models clay.

23:32

And he would replicate the objects
in three dimensions with the paint.

23:37

An early example of this
is the Head of an Old Man, where the furrows of the brow are
replicated with very thick paint.

23:47

This is definitely, to my
mind, something that he stole, a technique that he stole from Jan Lievens.

23:55

In this painting, you can’t see
it in reproductions of course, but if you look at this painting in
real life, especially in raking light,

24:04

you can see that the fringe of this old woman’s
headscarf is, it looks like a real fringe

24:13

because the paint is so thick and
modelled like, to look like a fringe.

24:19

It’s absolutely amazing. We don’t have dated, early dated works by Jan
Lievens, but if the, art historical dating

24:27

of this painting is correct, then, then Lievens
was the inventor of this, of this method.

24:32

Again, it’s something that
Rembrandt used throughout his career. As you may or may not know, we are doing now
extensive research on the, The Night Watch.

24:43

We’ve put a glasshouse in front
of the painting, an elevator,

24:49

and we can go up and down on the elevator. I’ve had the pleasure of doing that a couple
of times and made this photograph on the right

24:58

of the embroidery on the jacket of
Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch.

25:07

And the reason I did that,
this is in raking light. One of our conservators is
holding the lamp for me there.

25:16

So, I could, I just wanted to let you see
how Rembrandt uses that method of sculpting

25:24

with the, with thick paint
to replicate, in this case, the embroidery on the jacket of van Ruytenburch.

25:34

And Rembrandt goes on to
do, using this technique. It has a high point literally,
as well as literal high point

25:46

in the sleeve of Isaac in The Jewish Bride.

25:51

This is the thickest passage of paint
in any 17th century work of art.

25:58

And you’ll have to wait until the 19th century
to find paint that is thicker than this.

26:03

And it appears all the more
thicker because the collar of,

26:10

Isaac’s collar is actually the ground, that
olive brown, that’s actually the ground layer.

26:15

So, the first layer that was put on a painting. So, you go from 0 to 100 in
something like 5, 15 centimetres here.

26:25

There’s one technique that Rembrandt did
develop himself, and only in his late career,

26:31

and that was applying the
paint with the palette knife. And The Jewish Bride is another example of that.

26:39

And you can see it, especially
well in the, in the x ray. You can see very, very straight line
edges of the, of the palette knife here.

26:53

Rembrandt got a lot of flak for using these,
these, these methods of creating texture.

27:01

And they were mostly applied to his late work. The funniest ones, the most humorous criticisms
came from Arnold Houbraken in the beginning

27:17

of the 18th century in his artist biographies. He wrote a biography, one of the, one of
the biographies was that of Rembrandt.

27:29

And, yeah, at one point, he says, when the
artist’s late pictures are viewed up close,

27:36

it looks like the paint had been
smeared on with a bricklayer’s trowel. And elsewhere, he, elsewhere, he says, he poked
fun at the artist by stating, Rembrandt’s,

27:48

Rembrandt once painted a portrait in which
the paint had been applied so thickly that one can lift the picture
up from the ground by the nose.

27:57

And supposedly, Rembrandt would, if he had
visitors in his studio, he wouldn’t allow them

28:03

to get up close to the paintings
because he would say, oh, no, you know, you’re going to pass out from
the fumes, don’t get up close.

28:10

And that’s because if you go up close to a
painting like this, you don’t see anything. It’s an abstract work of art. You have to view it from a distance.

28:18

But the point I’m trying to make is that
these techniques were thought of as radical at the time, and that they
weren’t only from the late period,

28:25

but Rembrandt already started using
them in the early period of his work.

28:31

Sometimes Rembrandt was criticized for things
that we think are, nowadays are very tame.

Criticism

28:43

One of these things is, for example,
is, were his depictions of old people.

28:49

And if you look at the exhibition,
you’ll see a hell of a lot of old people.

28:55

It’s very strange that a young man
would be so obsessed with old people.

29:01

But at any rate, critics thought this broke
the rules of art because Rembrandt chose

29:13

to depict a misshapen old wrinkled person rather
than a well formed fresh and youthful one.

29:22

Whether, yeah, we don’t know if Rembrandt
was actually trying to be provocative with these depictions of old people.

29:29

In some works of art, he was being provocative. For example, this etching of a man
urinating and etching of a woman urinating.

29:40

And if you look really good, you
can see that she’s also defecating.

29:45

Even nowadays, urinating, and definitely
defecating in public, is, is a no no,

29:52

is not socially acceptable behaviour here. There was a protest in 2017 in Amsterdam because
in Amsterdam there are a lot of public urinals

30:03

for men, of course, but there’s
nothing for women. And women were getting, women,
it’s called wild pissing in Dutch.

30:12

And women were getting fines
for urinating in public.

30:18

And to protest this, they urinated in public. So, it’s still shocking today,
even in Amsterdam.

30:25

[ Laughter ] Yeah, so, yeah, those, you know, urinating
people, those were, of course, provocative.

Conclusion

30:34

Was Rembrandt trying to be provocative
with his, with his nudes at this time?

30:40

People thought so. He was, this, he was accused of breaking
the rules of art, especially for his nudes

30:48

that he made at this time, because
Rembrandt chose no Greek Venus as his model,

30:56

but a washer woman, or treader of peat. And he, instead of choosing the most beautiful
thing nude in nature and improving on that,

31:07

instead, he depicted flabby
breasts and wrenched hands. Yes, even the marks of the corset lacings on
the stomach, and of stockings around the legs.

31:19

And as I said, yeah, Rembrandt was accused
of not hesitating to trample on our rules

31:27

of art by choosing these ugly nudes. And he was called the foremost
heretic in art because of them.

31:36

He was supposed to do what
Italian Renaissance artists did. But instead, he was accused of following nature.

31:44

I think I have to wrap up. Okay, skip that, and just end with this.

31:51

Yeah, was Rembrandt just following nature? I don’t think so. I think what Rembrandt was doing was he
realized that flabby breasts and folds of skin

32:01

and cellulite was an ideal playing
ground for the play of light and shade.

32:07

Those, those, those ideal
nudes of Renaissance art, they didn’t present a good
canvas for light and shade.

32:16

So, Rembrandt chose an ugly
model to make beautiful art. And maybe even that was his
statement with these works.

32:24

Thank you. [ Applause ]

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