Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Dutch; 17th-century
Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
91%
Portrait of a Young Man in an Armchair. c1660. Oil on canvas
This is an above-average Rembrandt portrait, meaning it's squarely a masterpiece in overall terms. Much of its greatness has to do with the way the background of the painting is functionally a neutral surface but is actually a storm of gradations and little touches: browns and oranges reach through the dark; the lower left corner is just so much blacker than the upper right; the chairback's top is slightly aureoled, which a daub of bright paint above the subject's shoulder echoes. All this subtle liveliness to the background makes the black cloak in the foreground that much more solidly black, such that the few real bits of substance in the picture — hands, face, collar of the sitter — appear to be leaking out from an abyss. It's like the painting's surface is puddled with the raw stuff of representation coming out of this black hole. Too, the chair seems to have a perspectival problem: it's torqued, its back at a slightly different angle than its arm. This makes the mass of the sitter — which, as I said, is mostly abyss with a bit of searing image — seem to have a spatial logic all to itself, one that commands the whole picture's arrangement and has to apologize for no infelicities of rendering. (2025)