5 - Late Rembrandt I: Texture and the Skilled Touch
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter treats the distinctive brushwork Rembrandt developed in the last two decades of his career. Inspired by the late Titian, Rembrandt reveled in richly worked surfaces with often discernable, individual brushstrokes. Unlike Titian, however, Rembrandt sometimes built up his paint into a three-dimensional structure that projected from the surface of the canvas. The chapter explores the range of purely visual effects for which Rembrandt employed textured paint. Considered as well is the relationship of the Portrait of Jan Six to ideas that developed around Titian's late style, especially the courtly ideal of sprezzatura.
Keywords: Painterly brushwork, Baldassare Castiglione, Arnold Houbraken, Karel van Mander, Samuel van Hoogstraten
From around 1650 until his death in 1669 Rembrandt painted in a new and distinctive manner. He had experimented with visible, rough, brushwork before, but in the last two decades of his life Rembrandt built up paint on the surface of his canvases such that it came to assume a radical prominence. Rembrandt's late paintings shift in narrative tone, too. In place of dramatic figural groupings ranged dynamically in space is a new, quiet introspection and close-up focus.
Scholars have puzzled over why Rembrandt insisted on pursuing such a style, especially given how unfashionable it was at a time when the clear, bright lucidity of the classical style, grounded ultimately in Raphael, was becoming de rigueur in Dutch painting. Understanding why an artist changes style is never a precise science, but this should not prevent us from drawing inferences from what is available. According to Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt's late style resulted from a crisis. For Van de Wetering this was not the crisis of the Romantic Rembrandt, struggling heroically against tides of misunderstanding, but a crisis of more narrowly defined artistic concerns.
Van de Wetering considers the painting of The Nightwatch as a key transitional moment in this process (Fig. 51). With The Nightwatch, Rembrandt famously took the static tradition of group portraiture and pushed it in the direction of history painting. The members of the militia company do not stand still and pose for a portrait.
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- Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance ArtEl Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, pp. 141 - 176Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019