From The Hague I (Rembrandt)

A stone's throw away from the court, where we fight for to the right to use the Dutch holiday house of my sisters and brother as tweede Woning (second dwelling) there is the famous museum "Mauritshuis". According to Marcel Proust, it contains the most beautiful painting in the world, Vermeer's View of Delft (photography on top). Facing a negative ruling from the court, we find some consolation, at least for our eyes visiting this wonderful painting with its play of light and shade, sun and rain.

The upper floor of the Mauritshuise displays a special portrait gallery these days. The paintings stem from the 17th Century, the rich and powerful period of the Dutch, their Golden Eeuw (Golden Age). The prosperity and self-consciousness of the people back then has advanced portrait painting and brought forth countless masterly works.

The most successful portraitists of these times were Rembrandt and Frans Hals. If you stand in front of the lively picture of an elderly businessman and his wife (I add a clipping, the man's name is Jan Rijcksen) whom Rembrandt has painted just as if he had surprised the couple through his appearance, you can get an idea how startled people must have been to find themselves reproduced in such a lifelike form.

I wonder for a moment whether Jan Rijcksen did agree with his portrait. I am almost sure he did. Perfectly sure is that at least the children and grandchildren of the family Rijcksen in later years would watch the painting and say "that was him!"

In spite of these qualities Rembrandt's style often remains an enigma to me. It is so little photographical, so foggy and in some details so vague, sometimes even so blurred that the images often appear as if looked upon through a veil. The style gets even more mysterious in some paintings when you walk closer and take a longer look. You will find confirmed what you have noticed at a first glance only intuitively: sections with accurate details alternate with others that look carelessly drawn and done with the left hand.

Two images at the beginning of the exhibition particularly catch one’s eye in this respect. They give a hint at a possible solution of the riddle.

The first one shows Rembrandt in a small self-portrait as a young man whose face is painted sharply and precisely in only a few parts. Other regions look like outside the range of depth - so for example the right part of the face (seen from the viewer) and nearly all of the hair. They are in the shade and therefore are only dimly visible.

Next to the self-portrait there is a bigger painting, also a self-portrait in which Rembrandt wears a fine hat with feathers. The hat is painted in exact details. Rembrandt with the hat turns to the viewer over his shoulder. He looks a little critically at the viewer, captured alive in an instantaneous pose, just as if the viewer had surprised and even annoyed him. The reproduction here is a little brownish, the colors of the original are much better.

Below the precisely painted feather hat the face again looks peculiarly vague in some parts. The red-blond mustache hangs somewhat disorganized over the mouth. I have looked at the mustache several times to find out whether the lips can be seen through the beard or not, and whether the lips are open, as you might imagine if you watch them from a certain angle.
Miraculously, you can't tell, even after a long and repeated glance. The critically looking face seems to say: don’t look at me all the time, you know already well enough who I am!

Maybe here is an approach to Rembrandt's paintings: they do not want to be looked at for long, not as a map, whose details you study slowly and gradually. They want to catch the lively impression, exactly as it arises in the eye and brain of an observer, all in a fraction of a second. The recommendation for the viewer seems to be: look - and then immediately turn away! And you've got the whole impression.

Of course it is not forbidden to stay longer in front of a Rembrandt painting like in front of every other painting, watching all its details. Each picture in the world invites us to be read exactly. But the viewer of a Rembrandt should not expect to learn much about the details of the portrayed face. He should not wait for the second glance on pores and pimples, which he might have missed at first sight. He should learn instead what "first sight" really means, learn something about seeing itself.

He will understand the mystery of the depth of field, discovered long times before the first knowledge of the optical laws. He will see the interaction between eye, brain and heart in the second when they all share this moment of the first sight, a brilliant concert of all participating senses.

In one of the paintings Rembrandt has the golden embroidery on the fine red cloak of a noble Lord done careless and with only a few yellow square strokes. One might for a moment suspect that the portrayed man, Jan Six did not completely pay the price and therefore had to accept the delivery of an only half-finished painting.

But if you look at the thoughtful, somewhat absent and yet intense look of Jan Six, you will guess that a meeting with him would make you perceive the embroidery just as vague as in the image. His gaze catches his counterpart.

Another painting shows a younger man with the still unfinished face of an only half grown-up adult. You will soon forget the face and perhaps remember only its red nose and red cheeks. The man is portrayed as a person of fresh air. The viewer is surprised to see how little one learns about this face. He will keep his look instead on the wonderfully and precisely painted leather collar of the man’s robe. With its reinforcements and rivets it seems to be part of a wearing armor or even a harness of a horse.

I assume that in former day one could recognize the man's profession by this doublet with the collar that he wears. Maybe he had a special task as policeman or a soldier. In any case, Rembrandt certainly did not offend him through the preciseness of the collar and the blurredness of the face. After all, the man or his friends paid a lot of money for the painting. There must be something deeply correct in Rembrandt’s observation that the collar says more about the man than his face.

Rembrandt painted pictures of a first, holistic impression and so remains singular among the colleagues of his era that usually tried to work out much more photographic paintings.

If you finally see Rembrandt in his self-portraits as an old man, a second veil is laid over the details of the painted face: the veil of charity. You feel the drama of a late life of bitterness, setbacks and extinguished passions. Like the other paintings these images, too are perfectly true despite of the details they are lacking. Maybe the viewer would be even hurt by the power of these details. Fortunately there is the veil and not all of the pain is disclosed.

Even through the veil the ravages of old age are clear enough to see. If there is something that
can make them bearable, it is the memory of the light that has appeared in this man's life, and his unique ability to let his paintings radiate that light.