Intro

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[ Background conversations ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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

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He presents himself with
this wild doff of curly hair,

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and with virtuoso brushwork
and scratching in the paint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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now in the Metropolitan Museum,
that he painted in 1653

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for the Sicilian collector Don Antonio Ruffo.

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This is a meditation on, on melancholy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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at the end of 1628, or beginning of 1629

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

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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

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

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at the time, that Huygens really appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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that he had received for betraying Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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in a chair seemingly listening
intently to someone outside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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?

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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

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

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

Leaving Things Out

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

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A reductionary process by leaving things out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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and anticipation of being rescued by Perseus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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,

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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in the painting of viewer participation.

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

Jeremiah

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

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Another way that he broke with
tradition was by painting subjects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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that very abstract landscape
around the very detailed figure.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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Rembrandt probably actually stole
this technique from Jan Lievens.

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

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

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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

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

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

Sculpting

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

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

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

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

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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,

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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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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