Crafting Identity: Rembrandt’s Early Self-Portraiture and His Approach to the Market

Written by Will Schumer 

Edited by Nicholas Raffoul

Self-identity is ultimately self-reflexive. Identity cannot be conceived if one does not produce some image of the self. It then comes as no surprise that self-portraiture had become popular during the early-modern period, and especially in the Dutch Republic. Like any other culture, the Dutch were bound by their own cultural pre-conditions in perceiving works of art, especially those related to identity. Rembrandt’s 1628 Self-portrait (Fig. 1) is a deeply personal work, ridding itself of the formality and open emotion of many of his later portraits, and instead presenting a young, yet-to-be-famous Rembrandt. The image raises questions pertaining to Rembrandt’s intentions, as certain scholars will argue such a self-depiction was driven by market forces and the demand of buyers, while others may argue that such works are character studies, pieces meant to practice the depiction of the passions. To an extent, the Self-portrait transcends mere material motivations. Rather, it stands as Rembrandt’s attempt to understand new approaches to the self, to explore the depths of his mind and soul, and to craft his own image and self-identity as an artist in the open-market and to the public eye. 

Figure 1: Rembrandt, Self-portrait, 1628-1629, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 22.6x18.7cm

The Seventeenth century represented a crucial turning point in the Western perception of self-identity. As Adams outlines, Western individuals were defined by being “self-responsible in his or her commitments, constructing rather than inheriting the world,” [1]. As Charles Taylor points out, Western identity experiences a shift in the modern era, from the Platonic ideal of identity being found, to the Descartesian-constructivist vision Adams outlines [2]. She illustrates that, since identity can be fashioned through human interactions, it may also be constructed visually. The encoded nature of the body’s physiognomy allows elements like the face and its expressions to convey aspects of a portrait’s sitter [3]. Berger elaborates on this concept by exploring the relationship between the face and the soul in portraiture, identifying the period’s shift from a “naturalizing” to “constructivist” view of the face and soul. Improvements in representational techniques allow for the “delivering of the life of the soul in the likeness of the body,” [4]. The image of the face becomes a signifier for the soul itself, which goes on to represent the sitter’s individual identity. In a constructivist view, the art of depicting the face is the art of fashioning the identity of the sitter, and therein self-portraiture, when mimetically depicting corporeal elements like the face, is an act of self-identity development. As such it is unsurprising that the young Rembrandt may have found it pertinent to experiment in creating self-depictions as a means of building esteem.

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait faces one critical problem in analysis from the perspective of Adams and Berger: namely the obscuring of the key identifying element of the face. Regardless of material motivation, it is established that the Self-portrait works to create an image and identity for Rembrandt. In his Self-Portrait the face appears second to the more visually striking elements of Rembrandt’s image. The hair is one of the more salient aspects of the work, nearly etched into the canvas and with certain strands colored a vivid gold in the low light. The hair itself has a sense of motion, in shape, shade, and depth. Rembrandt clearly leaves his mark in the curls that almost dance in the light. The etched nature of the strands of hair reflects Rembrandt’s physical hand in production. The portrait, in this sense, constructs his identity as not just an individual, but an artist. As the viewer can see how Rembrandt physically made the work, they are reminded of his painting process. Further visual elements such as the obscuring of the face through chiaroscuro serve to build on this artistic identity with a depiction of his skill. Harsh shadows and distinct light sources become a constant in Rembrandt works, especially in his later portraiture and history paintings. Because of this, these visual elements combined become an artistic “signature” of Rembrandt.

Figure 2: Rembrandt, History Painting, 1626, Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, 89.8x121cm

The evidence of Rembrandt’s signature in his self-depictions comes through the repetition of salient bodily elements that allow the viewer to distinguish Rembrandt’s image. Scholars like White argue that Rembrandt’s Self Portrait is an example of the Dutch tronie [5]. Adams defines the tronie as usually being a head, or head and torso, depiction which does not depict a specific living character but has “specific physiognomic features,” [6]. As White states however, the work does not depict any obvious stereotypes [7]. What problematizes this argument the most is the fact that Rembrandt’s portrait draws so much attention to key physical features that allow the viewer to identify him through his portraiture and history painting. As White illuminates, the earlobe is the only feature fully highlighted by the minimal light source, which White refers to as a common feature across his portraits. The hair, in which Rembrandt “exposed the ground layer in certain strategically chosen spots,” is similar to his hair in his 1626 work History Painting (Fig. 2) [8]. The repetition of these very personal, identifiable elements across Rembrandt’s works indicate more that he was trying to create some self-image than use that image as a character study. The attention is drawn from the main aspects of the face, the emotional canvas, to the peripheral, self-identifying aspects such as the hair and ear lobe because they are distinctly Rembrandt’s. This leads to further questions regarding Rembrandt’s motivations behind crafting such a self-image.

Alpers approaches this and other self-reflexive works as attempts at self-fashioning the artistic identity for the market. Rembrandt’s self-portrayals begin as works for studio purposes, rather than the open market. Because of this, Rembrandt’s self-portraiture became an exercise in self-fashioning of identity. As Alpers notes, “the painter…defines or knows himself in or as a material object—in Rembrandt’s case…the very substantiality of the paint emphasized this condition,” [9]. This substantiality harks back to Chapman’s note of the physical imprints of Rembrandt’s brush and etching work in the Self-portrait. The material aspects of the work are key to understanding this individualizing, and therein identifying and commodifying aspect of Rembrandt’s self-depictions. The evidence of Rembrandt’s hand is part of his artistic signature, making his image a noteworthy object not just in its ability to depict human emotion, but also the skill with which Rembrandt depicts himself as an artist. As Alpers asserts, he “commodifies himself,” [10]. Rembrandt’s turn to the market is an alternative to the patronage system, which would force him to conform to specific guidelines. The market system was not simply a system in which Rembrandt participated, but one which he internalizes in his work. Alpers describes his internalization as both “canny” and “naïve,” in the sense that his works were built to the values of the market and in the sense that he “never lost his faith either in [his representations] or in the system of which they were part,” [11]. These very values are those of the shifting ideology in identity which dominated the seventeenth century.

As Adams notes, identity became self-constructive, and the market valued the act of self- construction for very material reasons. The growth of merchant capitalism placed value on self- construction not just in a ontological sense, but in an economic sense as well. The basic values of a merchant capitalist society rest in the belief that one was no longer restricted by birth, but instead could build their social standing through playing the market. The growing merchant class which grew out of this system, and which made up such a large portion of the art market in Rembrandt’s time had similarly internalized these values just as Rembrandt had. When Rembrandt would, just as he does in Self-portrait, create a personal, visual self-identity as an artist, the market sees these same values of economic self-construction within his works and thus place value in them. The image of a young Rembrandt, not yet so well known, yet visually distinct, is the foundation of this crafted identity. Once again, the public may recognize the distinction of his image through that physicality that so emphasizes those aspects of Rembrandt which we today identify as “Rembrandt self-portrait.” The curly, bright hair, the enlarged earlobe, the intensity of the face, and the depth of his chiaroscuro become a common trope in Rembrandt’s works. This, the aforementioned artistic signature, is the ‘commodified Rembrandt’ of which Alpert speaks. As Alpers writes, Rembrandt’s status as a “pictorus economicus” is not just a construction, but a self- induced construction. By creating this capitalistic market-driven identity, Rembrandt places himself in line with his buyer’s ideology [12]. However, this self-construction may not have been a mere marketing ploy.

Figure 3: Albrecht Dürer, 1491, Universitätsbibliothek, Erlangen

Furthering Alpers argument, Chapman argues that an additional internal desire for self- revelation drove Rembrandt’s early self-portraiture. Chapman is open to the effect of market forces. For one, Rembrandt approached the market valore di stima model, in which the value of the painting was related to the esteem of its artist. This is in contrast valore di fatica, or the value of labor, in which the amount of labor put in was the determiner for the price of the work. However, Chapman points out that these material approaches lead to certain portraits, like the 1628 Self- portrait being treated as character studies or tronies [13]. As was mentioned previously, the individualizing elements of Rembrandt’s image problematize such notions. Chapman’s historical counter-argument goes further, resting in the fact that the concept of the self-portrait had been well developed by 1600, especially in Germany by Albrecht Dürer. Wilson explains that Dürer’s 1491 Self-portrait (Fig. 3) “materializes the self through the bodily act of drawing, using it as an example of how the self-portrait is intended as “the image that reveals the self,” [14]. It should then come as no surprise that a similar idea may be present in Rembrandt’s self-depictions nearly a century and a half later. Moreover, the ideal painter was represented as a self-portraitist in his 1600 poem Kerck der deucht [15]. Thus it would only make sense that Rembrandt would rather draw attention to the fact that his 1628 work is depicting himself, rather than a generic character, as Chapman clearly points out that self-portraiture brought esteem in its own right.

Chapman goes on to argue that such arguments underplay the presence of self- consciousness in the mind of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist. This leads in to a rejection of Greenblatt’s famous argument for the illusionistic nature of the self in the early modern period, in which she integrates John Martin’s criticism which points out the tendency of early-modern individuals to in fact be increasingly confident in their own self-agency [16]. As Alpers states, “the Dutch trust to and privileging of portraiture, which is at the center of their entire pictorial tradition, is connected on the other hand to a desire to preserve identity of each person and thing in the world,” [17]. This same argument builds on that which Baxandall creates in “The Period Eye,” claiming paintings of the Quattrocento were bound to Renaissance cultural perception of the artist’s skill, and more importantly by their cultural understanding of the meaning of certain visual elements [18]. Chapman would be inclined to agree, arguing that Rembrandt’s “admirers” valued his ability to “plumb the depths of his mind.” Further, Chapman crucially states, “The self-portrait – not in guise, but as oneself – shifted this authenticity of emotional and intellectual presence to the likeness of the painter, and by implication, to the painter himself,” [19]. This “presence” complicates those arguments which point to the relative informality of Rembrandt’s early portraiture as evidence for their canonically assigned purposes as character studies. Chapman best addresses this when she states that their divergence from Rembrandt’s more formal, later portraits, was evidence of Rembrandt “looking for a way to distinguish himself as an artist,” [20]. Therein, this visual divergence was the key to the Dutch art markets valuation of the Self-portrait, as the individualizing elements which the Dutch valued in art were translated over visually.

It is clear that to the Dutch, the concept of self-identity was an important aspect of their emerging visual culture in the seventeenth century. The market is a system which places value on those things the ideology of its participants value, and so this newfound individualizing culture made its way into the minds of the artists who wish the participate within this capitalist system. Rembrandt was clearly a creature of the market, a “pictorus economicus” in many ways, but it was that very market that gave Rembrandt his artistic license. Instead of being forced to conform to a patronage system, in which he would have to create his works to the specifications of wealthy individuals, Rembrandt allowed himself to sink or swim. He was lucky enough to find that the burgeoning Dutch merchant class found solace in the same conceptions of identity that he did, and kept him from sinking. The crafting of a visual self-identity made Rembrandt a star of the Dutch art world in the seventeenth century because the Dutch market placed value on the individual. It was not simply material forces that drove Rembrandt to create such vivid self-portraiture, but more so the pervading ideological approach to the self and public identity which defined the period he produced in.

endnotes

[1] Ann Jensen. Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22. [2] Adams, 21. [3] Adams, 24. [4] Harry Berger, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 119–20. [5] Christopher White and Quentin. Buvelot, Rembrandt by Himself (National Gallery Publications Ltd., 1999), 95. [6] Adams, Public Faces, 5. [7] White and Buvelot, Rembrandt by Himself, 96. [8] White and Buvelot, 95. [9] Svetlana. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 117. [10] Alpers, 118. [11] Alpers, 107. [12] Alpers, 107. [13] H. Perry Chapman, “Reclaiming the Inner Rembrandt: Passion and the Early Self-Portraits,” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek Online 60, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 3. [14] Bronwen Wilson, “The Renaissance Portrait: From Resemblance to Representation,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 465. [15] Chapman, “Reclaiming the Inner Rembrandt: Passion and the Early Self-Portraits,” 5-7. [16] Chapman, 8. [17] Svetlana. Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 78. [18] Michael. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, n.d., 36. [19] Chapman, 6.

[20] Chapman, 27.