REMBRANDT, or The Inconsistencies
Rembrandt changed his painting style repeatedly over his career, developing his late, “rough” style in the early 1650s. The transition from one style to the next, one imagines, would have involved a certain amount of experimentation, and the pictures painted during the transitional periods are likely to exhibit some inconsistencies and anomalies with respect to the residual and emergent styles.
Josua Bruyn, a founding member of the Rembrandt Research Project from 1969 to 1993, assumed that, apart from the transitional periods, consistency could be assumed. The methodology he imposed on the RRP was “dominated by the idea that Rembrandt’s way of painting changed from one period to another, but very largely remained uniform within those periods, in which there occurred no radical variations”
Ernst van de Wetering, the only member of the Rembrandt Research Project from 1993 to its conclusion in 2014, challenged Bruyn’s theory of periods of consistency with an inconsistent career in the final volume of the Rembrandt Research Project’s published corpus, Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey: “There is no such thing as a typical Rembrandt; each painting is unusual in its own way ... the dating of a picture based, to whatever extent, on the possibility of a predictable stylistic development within Rembrandt’s late œuvre, is perhaps best ignored.”
Van der Wetering’s acceptance of stylistic inconsistencies within transitional works led to the re-attribution of the Old Man in an Armchair (1652) to Rembrandt. Acquired for the National Gallery of Art in 1957 as an autograph work, the picture was demoted in 1969 to a “follower” of Rembrandt by Horst Gerson on account of observed inconsistencies within the picture itself. Despite Van der Wetering’s reassessment, the National Gallery conservators, who are perhaps the best in the business, have declined to give the picture back to Rembrandt, citing the differences in brushwork used in the hands and point to the use of pure pigments in the robe as “unusual” for Rembrandt.
Controversial pictures taken from Rembrandt, such as the mutilated Saul and David in the Mauritshuis or the Man with a Golden Helmet, have been generally attributed to students in the artist’s workshop. Research concerning Rembrandt’s studio has unearthed a wealth of information which has ironically made attributions more difficult. Rembrandt’s teaching methods were highly unusual. Students were encouraged not to duplicate the master’s works, but to develop subjects of their own invention similar to his in tone and content, and then execute them in his style. Rembrandt scholars have traditionally insisted that the artist rarely collaborated with his students, and yet several paintings retouched by the master are described in the 1656 inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions: six are listed as being “retouched by Rembrandt” and two as being “painted over again by Rembrandt.”
Signatures are not conclusive evidence of authenticity. Guild regulations required the master to sign his name on student productions destined for the market. Over 700 paintings survive bearing his name, the majority of which are clearly student productions. Some of the signatures were forged by dealers over the centuries and still others have been retouched by restorers. And yet The Man with a Golden Helmet was rejected on grounds of signature inconsistency.
Rembrandt’s contemporaries would be baffled by modern assertions that pictures with Rembrandt-like subjects devised by a workshop assistants, painted in the master’s signature style, and retouched, where necessary,and signed by the master himself, are not by Rembrandt.