Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669)
If you want gorgeous, warm, down to the last wrinkle detail and absolute honesty in a painting, Rembrandt is your man. One of the infamous Dutch painters of the 17th century, Rembrandt is so revered that he even has a professional brand of toothpaste named after him (and yes, I do use this particular brand of toothpaste because I am just that big of a geek.). But what did he do?
Personally, I like to think that Rembrandt was a humanist at his core, showing a love, sympathy and understanding for humans on the most basic level and illustrating that to the best of his abilities in his art. He was honest, and he let everyone see it. In his career he painted over 100 self portraits showing not an idealized image of a successful Dutch artist but rather himself and nothing but. There were wrinkles and there was grey hair, sagging skin and blotchy colors and it was human, as were the rest of his paintings.
Though, as requested, if we take a closer look at his treatment of women I feel that we can see the most honest portrayal of women of the 17th century. Not only in the visual sense, the shape of them, their wider face and paler skin, but in the subtle nuances that speak in the quietest of voices to fully round out this human portrait.
By todays standards, a size 4 dress is considered overweight but that is in a society who is all fuckered up in the head (don’t get me started) but in Europe in the 1600’s thin limbs were not ideal, they were worrisome. That meant starvation, it meant poverty, it meant illness and it meant death. I particularly love this time in art because the most basic of human instincts were still glaringly present in societies mindset, most pointedly health and ability to reproduce. You gotta keep on kickin’ and keep pumpin out babies, right? Europe’s population is down 100 million since the Black Death so there is some room to fill.
These women though are honest. There are no ‘touchups’ or smudged wrinkles, they are complete in their own bodies and faces and beautiful for it. Take ‘Hendrickje in Bed’ 1648 (first image). Unlike previous artists who were concerned with illustrating women in an overtly sexual light in an attempt to pay up their fertility and tie ins with love, Rembrandt takes the honest approach and shows not an illusion to lust and love but a snapshot of a woman, still wrapped in the sheets and caring very little for her modesty. She has a round face, full cheeks, plum arms and less than porn star-esque breasts. She’s a woman and she’s human and she is bloody honest.
My personal favorite of his would have to be ‘Hendrickje Bathing in a River’ 1654 (second image). It’s a moment in time, a woman in a night dress pulled up over her knees (a no-no in 17th century society). Her hair is less than perfect and she seems completely unaware that we are watching her. Again, to sound like a broken record, it’s honest. The calm of this moment is present in her face, in water pooled around her feet, the still air we can almost feel through the paint. She is a woman in her own skin, small breasts, thick knobby knees, pale skin and the serene comfort one can only have when alone. She is real and Rembrandt did nothing more than to make her real on canvas as she was in life.
I have heard some say that Rembrandt was the Art World’s first feminist, others just remember his bulbous nose and wiry grey hair from his self portraits but I remember him as one of the Art Worlds most honest men. Sure, he spent his money a little too fast and he never always finished a brush stroke, but the body of work he left behind paints this often painted artist as a true observer of the human race in all it’s brutal and beautiful honesty. I like to think that Rembrandt loved humans and understood the subtle way an honest and unadulterated image of one can touch the minds and hearts of thousands of others.
Also, about that toothpaste thing, I lied. I use Crest 3D Whitening.
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