Prints that hold the gaze as if by magic - Rembrandt: Lightening the Darkness, Norwich
There’s a word that often gets bandied about when people start discussing Rembrandt: “timeless”. There it is, invoked in a label in a new exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, devoted to the Dutch master’s prodigious skill as a printmaker.
On one level, calling Rembrandt’s pictures “timeless” seems absurd. Just look at some of the almost 100 prints on display in Norwich: they couldn’t be more evocative of a specific time if they tried. A bearded man wears a large droopy fur cap, apparently of Polish origin, a style last offered for sale – when? Three centuries ago, at least. A bound but strangely serene hog is about to be slaughtered with an axe. A dishevelled rat catcher holds aloft a basket from which several rodent carcases dangle gruesomely, advertising the poison he is peddling.
This etching would have had special resonance for Rembrandt’s 17th-century audience: Amsterdam, where he worked for decades, suffered at least four outbreaks of the plague during his lifetime.
Even many of the characters in Rembrandt’s great religious dramas wear contemporary Dutch dress. In short, a strain of nubby realism streaks almost all his work.
What, then, do people mean when they call Rembrandt’s art timeless? Funnily enough, I think they are referring to another aspect of his realism. Because, as the show in Norwich reminds us, Rembrandt never, ever prettified what he saw before him. He didn’t simper or pander. He refused to alter reality to achieve a flattering effect.
Rather, ever the consummate truth-teller, he served up things straight – and it is this deeper understanding of reality, predicated upon a fundamental empathy with his subjects, a profound sense of human frailty and the predicaments that all of us are forced to endure, which ensures that his pictures still speak to us today.
To understand what I mean, consider a jaw-dropping etching and engraving, depicting a naked woman seated on a mound, which Rembrandt created in 1631. At Norwich Castle, it introduces the final section of the exhibition, devoted to the artist’s nude figures. With her hair worn loose, cascading behind her shoulders, this anonymous model swivels her head and stares straight at us, frank and friendly. Her glance, though, isn’t “Come hither” or “Let me be your fantasy”, so much as, “Love me for who I am” – imperfections and all.
With extraordinary fidelity, Rembrandt articulates every last fold, wrinkle, dimple, and stretch mark of her body. He captures the wonky curves of her high breasts, the sagging girth of her belly, the fleshy furrows created by her crooked knees.
As a result, the print vividly conveys the carnality of this woman, not sensually (although an erotic charge is detectable) but almost literally, in the sense that she, like us, is a creature of too, too solid flesh.
At the same time, Rembrandt doesn’t fixate neurotically upon her imperfections, turning her into a vision of the grotesque.
In many ways, this woman is emblematic of Rembrandt’s treatment of the human figure in general. Rarely, in his art, do we encounter bodies with the sleek, supple perfection of well-muscled Greek gods.
Yet this is precisely why we love his figures, because their weathered appearance reflects the artist’s sympathy for them. We respond to his respect for the selfhood of his subjects.
Forgive me for dwelling for so long upon one figure, but this is how the exhibition works. There isn’t much of an argument, so we are at liberty to explore and marvel at our leisure. It’s refreshing.
The reason so many Rembrandts are here is because 93 of his prints were bequeathed to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery by the art dealer and collector Percy Moore Turner (1877-1950), who was conscious of the affinity between Dutch art and the Norwich School of painters, led by John Crome.
Before the advent of the railways, it was quicker to travel from Norwich to Holland than London, and many of Rembrandt’s landscapes, with their flat fields and broad skies, could be depictions of the Norfolk countryside.
This is the first time for decades that almost all Norwich’s Rembrandts have been shown together. On this occasion, they are complemented by three paintings.
The curators organise their material in loosely thematic sections, starting, inevitably, with a series of doughy-faced self-portraits by Rembrandt, who, these days, is routinely, and wearisomely, described as the original “selfie” artist. In truth, these divisions are a little random. The power of the show derives from its individual prints. Several are not much bigger than a postage stamp – but peer closely at them at your peril, because, like a vortex, they will suck you in, holding your gaze as if by magic.
From a technical standpoint, too, Rembrandt’s etchings and engravings are superb. More than any other artist, he transformed and elevated the monochrome medium of printmaking. See the teeming fertility and invention of his mark-making, capable of summoning so many different surfaces and textures (fur, flesh, cloth, hair).
Consider his brilliant grasp of compositional rhythm, juxtaposing dark passages of, say, dense cross-hatching, with light and airy expanses of blank nothingness, formed purely by the whiteness of the paper.
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Above all, though, prepare to be bewitched by the living, breathing presence of Rembrandt’s models. It is a cliché to say that they feel as if they are about to part their lips and speak to us, but it’s true. As a result, you could even call them “timeless”.
From Oct 21 until Jan 7. Details: 01603 495897
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