<<Back

Transcript of Lecture given at the Dutch embassy, London, to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth.

The reason why I’m talking to you today is because Rembrandt, more than any other artist, has influenced my work and my views on art, and I am here to convince you that Rembrandt still has the power to move all of us. Ever since a childhood trip to the Rijks museum in Amsterdam , I have been fascinated by Rembrandt’s dark, atmospheric paintings. It was from this point that my profound interest in the communicative powers of painting began, and I decided that I wanted to become a painter. Whilst studying painting and art history at Edinburgh , I experimented, like all art students, in many different styles and media. But being half Dutch, all those family trips to Holland must have taken root in my subconscious and after four years I felt the style most natural to me was a form of figurative oil painting that has its roots in the art of the Dutch 17th Century. It was their favoured subject of real people in contemporary society that I found most exciting and challenging, and in my paintings, I try to speak to contemporary audiences through the subjects I paint. It is this above all else, that explains my deep-rooted interest in Rembrandt.

I believe that art should reflect the times in which it was created, but no work of art can be created entirely independent of history. All artists have their influences- Picasso looked back to Cezanne, Cezanne looked back to Delacroix and Delacroix looked back to Rubens. The work of our forebears is the measuring stick, the jumping off point- it inspires us and guides us and gives us the encouragement to keep on trying. Like all artists, I will take what I want from the past. I might think of Raphael when I’m drawing, but when I’m painting, Rembrandt is never far from my mind.

In 1851, in an age when Ingres declared that it was blasphemous to compare Rembrandt with Raphael, Delacroix wrote in his journal that, “Perhaps the world will discover that Rembrandt is a far greater painter than Raphael.”

Today this prophecy seems to have come true and that is because Rembrandt is an artist whose work so closely approaches our modern view of art. To our 21st century eyes, some old masters seem timeless while others remain distinctly in the past. A good case in point would be to compare Rembrandt and Raphael. Today most of us struggle to relate to a painting by Raphael- we know that they are historically significant and we can see that they are well crafted and beautiful paintings, but they also seem to miss something – they lack expression, emotion, something that makes them down to earth and modern. They are emphatically products of there own time.

Whereas a lot of Rembrandts work looks like it could have been painted yesterday. His subjects seem contemporary, and by this I don’t mean the subjects from mythology or the biblical subjects, what I mean is the real focus of Rembrandts work the people in his paintings. These aren’t the classically beautiful people of Raphael or Rubens but seem to be honest working people. In his depiction of the Dutch you get a sense that he wanted to portray the common human experience and that meant valuing truth and sincerity over beauty and harmony. Although his models lived 400 years ago you feel that you could have bumped into one them today- they are emphatically real people and it is this that gives Rembrandt’s paintings a timeless quality.

His handling of paint also seems modern to our eyes. His freely brushed late style looks forward to an expressionistic technique more that two centuries a head of its time and it is a technique that still fascinates painters the world over. You just have to see how many “paint like Rembrandt” books there are and how many websites there are claiming to reveal the secrets of his technique, to know that Rembrandt is admired, above all other old masters, for his physical handling of paint.

Of course when these works were painted, the prevailing fashion was for smooth polished surfaces in the manner of van dyke and it would be anachronistic to believe that Rembrandt meant his late rough style to give voice to his virtuosity or his individuality. In fact he is reported to have told viewers of his work not to look too closely at the paint surfaces, making the excuse that the smell of paint would offend them. As I will explain shortly, his late style was a result of his desire to create a unique kind of illusionism and to display a visual statement about humanity and the universal human spirit. Today, however, the viewer of art praises the individual markings of the brush as something that gives expression to the artist’s innermost feelings. Like handwriting it is something individual to the creator, something by which to recognise and differentiate the artist.

But just how was Rembrandt able to evoke the presence of people while others could only capture their likenesses?

I think the answer to this question lies in his ability to manipulate light and paint. The technical term most associated with Rembrandt is the Italian word, chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro, in painting, means broadly the dramatic use of light and shade. The great Italian master Caravaggio, revolutionized painting throughout Europe at the turn of the16th and 17th centuries with his dark canvases and striking naturalism, and Rembrandt would have known about his art through the Dutch followers of his work and his teacher Peter Lastman who had studied and travelled in Italy. You’ll be able to see the influence of Caravaggio first hand at the greatly anticipated Rembrandt-Caravaggio exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum next year.

Caravaggio was the first artist to use highly contrasting light and shade in order to capture and freeze a dramatic moment. This illusion of arrested motion can be compared to looking at a film noir scene paused on a DVD player at the very height of the action. And although the use of light in this theatrical way can be seen in some of Rembrandts most superficially dramatic work of the 1630’s, in most of his work and especially his late work, Rembrandt uses the technique of chiaroscuro in a subtly different way.

What Rembrandt does is to use light and shade to penetrate to the spiritual core of the person being depicted. He uses light in his portraits to spotlight the heads and the faces of the sitters. In most portraits he doesn’t seem to care about anything else apart from the individuality of the face. Not for him were the ostentatious depictions of wealth in the form of possessions and clothing like we see in portraits of his contemporaries. Rembrandt was interested in the soul, not the status of the sitter. That’s probably why there are so many hands in his work that appear unfinished. Its not that he couldn’t paint hands, he just wanted all our attention on the face. When he chooses to use hands as a vehicle of expression or sentiment, as in the Jewish bride, they are amongst the greatest painted in the history of art. But my point is that Rembrandt only focused on what mattered to him and would subordinate all other elements in the picture to this point of interest even if that meant cloaking most of the subject in shadow or leaving parts of the picture in what seems like an unfinished state. We know from the writings of a pupil that Rembrandt replied to criticism that some works were sold unfinished, by claiming, “That a painting is finished when the master has achieved his aims in it”.

Rembrandt also used light in a physical way. He knew that by painting a textural surface, real light would reflect and sparkle off the lumps of paint in much the same way as a piece of rough sandpaper will sparkle in the light. He would paint the light colours thickly and opaquely while leaving the shadows thin and transparent and in this way the light in his painting not only comes from the colours on the canvas but also from the real world, thereby doubling the glow and sparkle of his works. This technique works especially well when you want objects to advance and recede on the picture plane. For example, he would build up his paint surface on objects and people in the foreground while flattening the surface in the background. He not only used this device on large-scale compositions, like the nightwatch, but would also use the same technique on intimate subjects like his own face. In the late self-portraits he would paint his bulbous nose so thickly and opaquely that it would almost seem to physically encroach into the viewer’s space. Indeed this is the root of the famous quote by Houbraken that he once painted a portrait so thickly that you could lift the painting of the ground by the nose. It is this palpable love of paint that makes me disagree with some critics when they say that if Rembrandt were alive today he would be a photographer or a filmmaker. To him it was the substance of oil paint- its ability to be unctuously thick or transparently thin and its capacity to be smeared, brushed and troweled onto the surface that makes it an integral part of his illusionism. His paintings aren’t flat windows into another world but state their physical presence by their thick impastoed surfaces.

But this is not the only thing that differentiates his work from the work of his contemporaries. His portraits also state their psychological presence whereby they seem to capture the real essence and spirit of the subject. As van Gogh said in a letter in1883 “in Rembrandts portraits, it is more than nature, it is a kind of revelation.” Now without belittling Rembrandts amazing genius for observation and insight, I will try and explain how painting technique can also be used to this purpose. This is of course easier said than done, which as a painter I know only too well.

Rembrandts complex, time consuming technique of building up faces in broken brushstrokes, layer upon layer, creates a shimmering effect whereby the eye jumps from under layer to top layer to middle layer. And like nature there are no hard lines in his faces but blurred smudged and suggested contours. By the virtuosic use of glazes, impastos and feathered brushstrokes Rembrandt creates the subtlest hint of movement that implies the rich possibility of human expression. His faces look like they are about to change mood at any second they look like they are just about to laugh, cry, shout or engage us in conversation. In short they look like they are in the process of thinking.

It is this psychological insight- achieved through lighting and technique- that gives his work an accessibility in which we feel we can empathize with his subjects- they are real people, whose recognizable human pain and weakness give them a timeless universal validity. We all know people like this; in fact we are people like this. We all know what it is like to have hopes and dreams, to win and to lose, to love and be loved. His concerns are our concerns, what mattered to him, matters to us today. Rembrandt was, and still is, the greatest painter of what it is to be human, and ultimately the four centuries that divide him from us almost seem irrelevant.