Under the Patronage of Her Excellency Hedda Samson, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Switzerland, and His Excell
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Under the patronage of Her Excellency Hedda Samson, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Switzerland, and His Excellency Wepke Kingma, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Germany Rembrandt’s Orient West Meets East in Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century Exhibition: Gary Schwartz Catalog: Bodo Brinkmann, Gabriel Dette, Michael Philipp, Gary Schwartz Edited by Bodo Brinkmann, Gabriel Dette, Michael Philipp, Ortrud Westheider With contributions by Bodo Brinkmann Jan de Hond Gabriel Dette Corinna Forberg Susanne Henriette Karau Michael Philipp Gary Schwartz Erik Spaans Jolanta Talbierska Roelof van Gelder Arnoud Vrolijk PRESTEL Munich · London · New York Lenders Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar Fondation Custodia/Collection Frits Lugt, Paris Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh Amsterdam Museum Residenzgalerie Salzburg Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Stadsarchief Amsterdam Mauritshuis, The Hague Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam Centraal Museum Utrecht Universitätsbibliothek Basel Albertina, Vienna The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna Szépmu˝ vészeti Múzeum, Budapest Stichting Duivenvoorde, Voorschoten Statens Museum for Kunst––National Gallery of Denmark, University of Warsaw Library Copenhagen National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Dordrechts Museum Kunst Museum Winterthur Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen York Museums Trust (York Art Gallery) Dresden Emil Bührle Collection, Zurich Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin The Earl of Derby Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf The Kremer Collection Musée de Grenoble Natan Saban Collection, Israel Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem The National Trust Leiden University Libraries, Special Collections as well as other lenders who wish to remain anonymous The British Museum, London, Department of Prints and Drawings The National Gallery, London The exhibition in Basel received generous support from: Victoria and Albert Museum, London The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Pierrette Schlettwein Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon Anonymous Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Sulger-Stiftung Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Novartis International AG Milwaukee Art Museum L. & Th. La Roche Stiftung Musée Fabre, Montpellier Annetta Grisard-Schrafl (catalog) Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, BLKB Alte Pinakothek, Munich HEIVISCH Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Karl und Luise Nicolai-Stiftung University of Oxford Stiftung zur Förderung niederländischer Kunst in Basel Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Isaac Dreyfus-Bernheim Stiftung Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Stiftung für das Kunstmuseum Basel Paris Contents 6 Foreword 8 Distant Inspiration: An Introduction to the Exhibition Gary Schwartz Essays 12 The Fascination of the East: Trade and Art in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century Erik Spaans 24 “The Exquisiteness of the Goods the Indian Gives Us”: Non-European Objects in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Lifes and Interiors Michael Philipp 40 “Utterly Artless” or “Exceedingly Noble”: Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid Art in the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Jan de Hond 56 Convention and Uniqueness: Rembrandt’s Response to the East Gary Schwartz 74 The Fear of Barbary Pirates: Privateers and Christian Slaves in the Seventeenth Century Roelof van Gelder 86 Knowledge from the East: Collecting Oriental Manuscripts in the Dutch Republic in the Age of Rembrandt Arnoud Vrolijk Catalog of Exhibited Works With contributions by Bodo Brinkmann, Jan de Hond, Gabriel Dette, Corinna Forberg, Susanne Henriette Karau, Michael Philipp, Gary Schwartz, and Jolanta Talbierska 102 Turbans and Silk Robes: Bringing the Orient Home 134 Paths to Prosperity: Trade and War 166 Understanding the World: Collections and Research 200 The Landscape of the Bible: Early Rembrandt and His Influences 228 Light in the Temple: Rembrandt in Amsterdam and His Followers 256 True to Life? Or Mere Convention? 284 Familiarizing the Exotic: Rembrandt’s Adaptation of the Orient Appendix 312 Selected Bibliography 324 Authors 327 Image Credits Convention and Uniqueness Rembrandt’s Response to the East Gary Schwartz hen Rembrandt’s artistic career began in the 1620s, a hazy form of Orientalism had already established itself among Dutch artists. Nonetheless, the suggestive play of light and shadow with which he depicted his Oriental heads and biblical costume scenes make this subgenre seem like his own invention. His self-portraits as an “Oriental” in prints (cat. 107) and paintings also contributed to this impression, so that by 1642––the year of his creative crisis following the death of his wife, Saskia––Rembrandt had made a name for himself based on his understanding of Eastern customs. Later, numerous successors continued to work on his themes, to which they added the Oriental portrait historié in a Rembrandtesque style that he had never utilized––the beginnings of the so-called Rembrandt school. In this way the image of the Orient became conflated with the Rembrandt look and assumed a life of its own. At a given moment in his later life Rembrandt van Rijn performed the most unconventional artistic deed of his career. He took the time to draw some twenty-five copies of miniature paintings by artists from half way around the globe, artists whose names he did not know and who had been studied by no other European master. He carried this out conscientiously and respectfully on expensive Asian paper that he never used before or after for drawings. This campaign was not only out of the ordinary for Rembrandt. It remained unique in European artistic practice throughout the seventeenth century. The better to understand the significance of this group of works, which stand outside the pictorial tradition in which Rembrandt was trained and worked, let us first inspect Oriental motifs in the tradition he did inherit, and his way with it. Domestic Objects and Collectors’ Items If there ever was a time in Rembrandt’s life as an artist before there was the Orient, it would have been in the studio of his first master, Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburg (1571–1638). This rather eccentric artist had spent twenty-five years in Italy. His preferred subject matter was the inferno, whether in classical mythology or Christian belief. For decors, he preferred references to Roman 56 Convention and Uniqueness: Rembrandt’s Response to the East architecture, and for armor and costumes nonspecific European fashions of past decades. What the young Rembrandt would have acquired from his master was a license to fantasize. This will have made Rembrandt’s confrontation with the East in the studio of his next master all the more striking. Pieter Lastman (1583–1633) was incapable of painting a scene from the Old Testament and certain scenes from the New Testament without dressing his figures in Eastern fashion and dropping hints that the action was taking place in the lands of the Bible (cat. 54–55). Other Amsterdam painters that Rembrandt came to know were also attached to this habit. The compositions they created were never attempts to recreate a historically or ethnographically correct image of the East. The landscapes in which they placed the scenes were imaginary mountains that were never presented in any detail. If there is architecture in the background, it tends to be Roman ruins (cat. 56). The model of Jan van Scorel (1495–1562), who in 1520 visited Jerusalem and drew its skyline and its architecture in order to later integrate them into his biblical paintings, had long faded by the seventeenth century. The main manufactured objects encountered in Amsterdam painting in the 1620s that were actually imported from the East are carpets, which came from Turkey, Persia, and Egypt. Several paintings by Lastman display Anatolian carpets (fig. 1) of the type named Lotto, after the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480–1556; fig. 2). He was, however, not the first artist to depict them in his pictures. Flemish and Italian painters of the fifteenth and even the fourteenth century included accurate renditions of Oriental carpets, especially in paintings of the Madonna, where their geometrics fed into numerological symbolism. Later in Venice Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) used colorful Oriental textiles and tapestries in his paintings, but mainly decoratively rather than iconographically, which is also true of the extremely sparse numbers of Oriental carpets in Dutch painting of the sixteenth century. Around the year 1600 a reversal took place. In the seventeenth century the overwhelming preponderance of Oriental carpets is found in Netherlandish rather than Italian painting.1 A key role in this development was played by Pieter Lastman. It is in his paintings, starting in 1608 after his return from Italy, that we find deliberate placing of Oriental attributes not only in biblical but also in historical subjects. These include carpets, but also weapons and turbans. It has been suggested that he acquired this taste from Veronese when he visited Venice about 1603.2 In paintings by Lastman we find various patterns that can only have been drawn from existing textiles, such as cartouche borders and the cloud band motif derived from Chinese models. These could have been painted from entire carpets or, as was mainly