Postscript on young Rembrandt

Judas (in the foreground, kneeling) returns the 30 pieces of silver

Having written an earlier piece on young Rembrandt, I couldn’t help comparing what others, notably Simon Schama and Julian Bell, thought about this show. Both of them talk in reverential tones about Rembrandt’s sublime compassion (Schama calls it “empathy”), his feeling for others, particularly the elderly and beggars. I can appreciate that, and I certainly saw it; but Bell and Schama look at other works of Rembrandt’s youth and praise them extravagantly without justification, I think. Judas Repentant, Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, for example, is praised to the skies by Schama and Bell, as far as I can see because Constantijn Huygens claims it has surpassed the art of antiquity. Well, I see it as a murky, highly distorted depiction of a scene, looking as if it had been viewed through such a wide-angle lens that not a single straight vertical line is left. Combined with this melodramatic and queasy line is the young Rembrandt’s continuing fascination with shiny trinkets and moody lighting, leaving the painting more shadow than substance. It is only when Rembrandt stops dressing up and trying to demonstrate his trivial painting skills that we start to see the sublime artist’s compassion.      

As for Julian Bell, he concludes his review of the Young Rembrandt exhibition with a most curious and irrelevant observation:

Rembrandt focused on faces … he fell back less than other artists on preconceptions about the person he was observing: he leant more keenly forward to explore the complexities and corrugations that come with age. 

So far I am in complete agreement. But Bell's review continues to a very odd destination:

Yet paintings fare more than faces: they are spaces from which faces emerge, and for Rembrandt these spaces are prevailingly dark. Why then, for all the burnt umber and bone black he lays down … does his work never lower the viewer’s spirits? Because he reaches into the darkness and pulls effects out of it as he would plunge into his own mind to bring forth a bright thought, and that interior feels oceanic. It teems. It is the opposite of dead. 

I don't see these paintings either lowering or raising my spirits. I see a respect for the individuality of his sitters, something shared with Lucian Freud. But I don't see these pictures in terms of "dead" or "alive" (Bell's review is entitled "Rembrandt and the opposite of dead". If the paintings in this exhibition were all that survived of Rembrandt, I would say he is remarkable for his sensitive studies of old men and women (including his own father); but his paintings are not teeming, and they are no more alive than any other human representation.