Artistic canons are naturally constructed rather than socially constructed entities. They are not born overnight by revolutionary methods and are frequently subjected to criticisms by exponents of postmodernism, post-structuralism, multiculturalism and feminism. The artist de-personifies in his work a part of himself and it is this high craft of de-personification that separates Rembrandt from other Old Masters. Rembrandt’s life and art converged to create mythic resonance for generations of French art critics.
The ideas presented in nineteenth-century texts on Dutch art evolved in part from the precedent of eighteenth century writings by Jean-Baptiste Descamps and Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Lebrun, who published the first significant French studies devoted solely to Flemish and Dutch art. Lebrun in particular identified Dutch art as a democratic rather than aristocratic pursuit as early as 1795 when he addressed a popular revolutionary society. His characterization of Dutch art as democratic was of great interest throughout the nineteenth century as French collectors gathered increasing accounts of Dutch art and French critics sought both to fulfill and augment the demand for literature on the lives and works of Dutch artists. Although French critics diverged in their views on many elements of Dutch art, a common thread running through the growing critical discourse was the perception of Dutch art as a reflection of everyday life in the seventeenth century Netherlands.
In the first half of the eighteenth-century, Rembrandt was seen as a “Great Painter” in France but most French critics of the time thought of Peter Paul Rubens as the leader of the Old Dutch Masters. They referred to Rubens as the “Prince of the Flemish painters.” Although Rembrandt was seen as the founder of the Dutch school of painting, Rubens remained the most important Northern painter for most art critics of the time. This was difficult to accept for some art critics and who had great difficulty in distinguishing iconic religious imagery from the conventions that it shares with portraiture. Actually there is something truly profound about the turn that religious art made in the later Middle Ages towards icons that shares the palpable presence and plausible likenesses of portraits. This icon tradition, established first in Byzantine bust-length images, was exported to Italy and Flanders in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and had a long afterlife in religious art, as demonstrated in the recent (2004) major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557). Portrait-like images by the artist of Christ and various saints poses similar interpretive challenges. These are precisely the sensitive, moodily dark pictures for which Rembrandt is best known and justly celebrated. That they combine his life-long talents for portraiture with a religious agenda makes his work of art enduringly fascinating. In fact they were all painted within a few years of each other, some of them possibly conceived as a series.
In his work of art, Rembrandt attributed his religious affiliations, thereby incorporating his knowledge about the Jews of Amsterdam. When Rembrandt’s art on the heritage of apostle series in prints and paintings are compared to other Dutch Masters, including those of the Catholic Maestro Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt’s saints have a Protestant tinge in their humility. The self-identification of Rembrandt with St. Paul, embodied in a 1661 as a self-portrait from Amsterdam (no. 11), stands as a hallmark of that entire enterprise of art. In those works, Rembrandt’s apostles have been seen as “pillars of faith and witnesses of the word.”
Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky is an art critic in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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