Rembrandt and the Nude

REMBRANDT AND THE NUDE Prints by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) In the naked form male or female Rembrandt was an Yet the prints show that Rembrandt understood esquimaux. His notions of the delicate forms of woman very well how to draw the nude, and we can deduce would have frightened an arctic bear. from them the importance he placed on the study of Benjamin Robert Haydon the nude in his studio. The group of male nudes of the mid-1640s show the results of drawing sessions in front This exhibition opens with a print in which a naked of a male model which also yielded a number of woman stares self-consciously out at us, seemingly drawings by his pupils of the same model in the same aware of our presence as spectators, or voyeurs. It closes pose viewed from slightly different angles. We can also with two prints in which a naked woman turns away, see this process underlying his less prosaic prints of the absorbed in a private world where we can play no part. female nude made in the last decade of his life. The These are the earliest and latest of Rembrandt’s more we look at these late prints, the more ambiguous prints of nudes, separated by some thirty years. Midway the settings become, so that a title such as W oman between them in date is a group of studies of a naked bathing her feet at a brook fails to take into account the male model, posed and observed with cool objectivity vestiges that still remain of a studio session in which the in the studio. These three groups of activity, with their model was sitting comfortably on a cushioned chair. distinct approaches to the depiction of the naked Similarly, with the last print in the exhibition, a model observed in the studio seated on a chair has been human figure, account for almost all of the prints in moved in the same pose onto the somewhat this exhibition. The remainder are those that feature the indeterminate edge of a bed. In the recesses of the bed nude in a narrative or allegorical context (excluding lurks a male companion, and the woman holds aloft an Crucifixions); in two instances the nude appears in the arrow. It is possible that there was never a clear guise of a statue. iconographical intent for these scenes, the meaning of A modern spectator, whose conception of the which has puzzled scholars for centuries. With his nude is probably as much influenced by the naturalism imaginative transmutations of these naked models of Degas as by the classicising idealism of the Rembrandt removes them to an indeterminate world Renaissance, will be touched by the humanity of which is only really made consistent by the subtly Rembrandt’s depiction of the naked body and moved observed playing of light on form and texture. And in the beauty of the prints. But in the later seventeenth the final prints the evocation of light becomes the most and eighteenth centuries Rembrandt’s treatment of the tangible thing in the picture: we are no longer presented nude was subjected to a series of fierce attacks (of with ‘the traces of the lacings of the corset on the which Haydon’s, quoted above, is only one), and the stomach’ which troubled Andries Pels in 1681. etchings were right in the firing line. As early as 1681, a Of course, the reactions over the centuries reveal Dutch commentator attacked Rembrandt’s naturalism, probably more about the attitudes and preconceptions with a barely disguised reference to the first print in this of the writers, and the age in which they lived, than exhibition: ‘He chose no Greek Venus as his model but they reveal about Rembrandt. What has mainly rather a washerwoman, or a treader of peat from the troubled people is that Rembrandt did not idealise his barn, and called this whim ‘imitation of nature’; everything else to him was idle ornament. Flabby models, or stick to Renaissance exemplars. His prints breasts, ill-shaped hands, nay, the traces of the lacings always appeal to generations more comfortable with of the corsets on the stomach, of the garters on the legs realism than classicism. Yet as recently as 1956 must be visible if nature was to get her due; This is his Kenneth Clark, in his book The Nude (1956), suggested nature which would stand no rules. No principle of that in the much abused etching of 1631 Rembrandt ‘as proportion in the human body.’ In the middle of the a sort of protest has gone out of his way to find the eighteenth century, the first cataloguer of Rembrandt’s most deplorable body imaginable and emphasise its prints wrote of his Adam and Eve (no. 8): ‘As least attractive features... We can hardly bring our eyes Rembrandt did not understand at all how to draw the to dwell on her: and that, I imagine, was exactly nude, this scene is rather incorrectly treated, and the Rembrandt’s intention.’ Yet this is surely Clark’s heads are altogether ugly.’ distaste rather than an accurate reflection of the The Fitzw illi1a m M useum reaction of Rembrandt’s contemporaries. After all, the which Rembrandt's plates were printed. A fuller ‘flabby breasts’ despised even by 1681 were not enough analysis of Rembrandt’s use of paper awaits the of a hindrance to stop Rembrandt selling his prints, or eventual completion of the conservation of the whole to stop artists such as Wenzel Hollar etching a copy of Rembrandt collection in the Fitzwilliam, and it is hoped the offending print in 1635, only a few years after that the watermarks discovered will be photographed Rembrandt etched the original plate. The wide and published so that the Fitzwilliam can contribute to dissemination of prints reproducing Rubens’ designs no the ambitious surveys of Rembrandt’s papers being doubt helped prepare an audience for females liberally undertaken at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the endowed with flesh. British Museum in London, and the National Gallery of Clark’s Ruskinian distaste at Rembrandt’s choice of Art in Washington, the results of which are yet to be ‘the most deplorable body imaginable’ also informs his published. The Fitzwilliam also intends making a interpretation of the late nudes, which he sees as further analysis of various papers of oriental origin - studies of the ‘inherent pitifulness of the body’ of an Japanese, Chinese or Indian - in an attempt to identify old woman. This seems strange given his acceptance more precisely their origins and their different that the similarly depicted body in Rembrandt’s characteristics. painting of Bathsheba is that of a young woman. Visitors The Fitzwilliam Museum's collection of to the exhibition must judge for themselves, yet it Rembrandt's prints came from two major sources. The seems sad to take away from the etching Young woman first was the album compiled by the founder of the bathing her feet at a brook (which Clark entitles ‘Old Museum, Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam (1745- woman bathing her feet’) the idea that the artist ‘prefers 1816), between about 1794 and 1804. In these years the Gothic hulk of an old body to the comely several of the great 18th-century Rembrandt collections proportions of a young one.’ came on the London market, and Fitzwilliam seems to Feminists should take heart that Clark is at least as have bought extensively, often through the assiduous harsh on Rembrandt’s males as his females, but again dealer Thomas Philipe. The scholarly attention to there is a sense that this derives more from personal cataloguing and the careful description of states preference than from an objective assessment of the advocated by Philipe in his preface to the sale of John nudes from a historical perspective: ‘Just as he could Barnard’s Rembrandt collection in 1798, was exactly have found plenty of girls in Amsterdam with firm the model followed by Fitzwilliam in his album. He young bodies, so there must have been boys with well- pasted variant states and impressions on opposite developed muscles.’ pages, and, as he noted on the titlepage, everything was The book of 1991, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Arranged according to Gersaint (the first catalogue of word-image opposition, by the literary scholar Mieke Bal, Rembrandt’s prints published in 1751) and Gersaint’s has a chapter on the nudes and their relation to the numbers were written above the prints (this was later viewer, entitled ‘Between Focalization and Voyeurism: altered to a simple sequential numbering). To gain The Representation of Vision’. Again this tells us more some idea of the high reputation of this collection about the writer’s own perspective (and the critical among Fitzwilliam’s contemporaries, we can turn to jargon of the age) than it does about Rembrandt’s Thomas Dibdin’s description of the Reverend nudes. The book finds both Pels and Clark guilty of Cracherode’s famous Rembrandt collection ‘the typical conflation of representation and object that (bequeathed to the British Museum in 1799): ‘a comes with the eroticization of viewing. If matching the collection, which I believe was second to none, body constructed for the mind’s eye inspires lust, the including even that of the late Viscount Fitzwilliam’ (A painting is praised; if that body does not, the painting Biographical Decameron, 1817). or drawing is criticized.’ This is an over-simplified Fitzwilliam’s collection was considerably enhanced criticism of the two men, and even if this sort of by the transfer to the Museum in 1876 of the albums of imputation were allowed, what would we then make of prints in the care of Cambridge University Library.

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