How Art Rose With The Dutch Republic

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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There is this initial difference between Hals and Rembrandt, that whereas Hals passed the greater part of his working life during a time of war, Rembrandt attained his maturity and executed most of his greatest works after the conclusion of peace. Hals lived in and depicted a life of action, when men must be up and doing and there was no time to think; Rembrandt’s middle years and old age were spent in an age of comparative peace and quite, when Holland had the leisure to think and to meditate not only on the greatness of her political achievements but on the problems of life. Hals expressed the gallantry of Holland in action; Rembrandt, the profundity of her thought.

One ought not to lay too much stress on a mere coincidence, yet when we remember the philosophical temper of his art it seems peculiarly appropriate that Rembrandt should have been born in the university town of Leyden, the headquarters of Dutch philosophy and learning. He came into the world on July 15, 1607, being the fifth and youngest son of Hermon Gerritzoon van Rijn, a prosperous miller who possessed a mill, several fields, and other property. The parents were ambitious for their youngest son and sent him to school ‘to learn the Latin tongue to prepare himself for the Academy of Leyden, so that in the fullness of time he might serve the city and the Republic with his knowledge.’

The boy, however, did not take kindly to book learning, but was for ever drawing and designing. At school Rembrandt is said to have been one of the idle pupils who ‘during their writing lessons, when they ought to be writing, scrawl figures of vessels and animals all over the margins of their books.’ He was at the University in 1620, but it soon became clear to his father that it was unprofitable for Rembrandt to continue his studies there. His aptitude for art was unmistakable, and accordingly he was apprenticed first to Jacob can Swanenburch, and afterwards to Pieter Lastman, of Amsterdam, a fashionable portrait painter of the day.

Six months were enough to satiate this earnest young student with the smooth and flattering trivialities of a fashionable merchant of likeness, and in 1624 he returned to Leyden to study and practise painting by himself. One of the earliest of his known and dated pictures is ‘St Paul in Prison’, painted in 1627, and now at Stuttgart. This picture shows the precise rendering of detail characteristic of his early style, but also anticipates the light effect of his later work by the way in which the light is concentrated on the head of the apostle. That the painter had already attracted some attention is clear from the fact that in the following year Gerard Dou, a promising boy of fifteen, was placed with him as a pupil.

About 1631 Rembrandt removed from Leyden to Amsterdam, an important step taken no doubt owing to the increasing number of portrait commissions he received from the rich merchants of this flourishing city. He had also made some reputation for himself as an etcher, and in 1632 Hendrik van Uylenburg, who had previously published some of his etchings, commissioned Rembrandt to paint a portrait of Saskia van Uylenburg, a young cousin of the print seller. The acquaintance thus begun soon ripened into love, and the form and face of this dainty little patrician, an orphan who had lost both her parents, suddenly becomes the prevailing theme both in the painted and etched work of Rembrandt. The attraction was mutual, and though her relatives disapproved of the attachment, considering the painter not good enough for a well-dowered young lady of quality, yet love won the day, and Rembrandt and Saskia were married in 1634. The veiled hostility shown by his bride’s relations led the painter to relieve his feelings by painting a series of pictures illustrating the life of Samson, in which Saskia is the Delilah, the artist Samson, and the Philistines, of course, are his wife’s relatives. These paintings not only express the artist’s defiance of family pride, but also his attitude towards the world at large, and his recurring amazement at his having won for himself so sweet a maid. The joyous picture of himself with Saskia on his knee, shows Rembrandt at the zenith of his happiness. Still popular as a painter, his portraits were sought after, he had a crowd of pupils, and a charming wife who brought him a moderate fortune. The young couple felt that the world was their own, and behaved like children in their utter disregard of the value of money. Rembrandt kept on buying new jewels and fine stuffs with which to deck his beloved and paint her in a new guise: he bought the works of other artists and beautiful objects of all kinds, wishing to create a fairy world around a fairy wife. But soon all this luxurious beauty was overshadowed by sorrow. Two children died one after the other, and in 1642 Saskia herself died after giving birth to the boy Titus.


How Art Rose With The Dutch Republic (continued)