Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Dutch; 17th-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum
95%
Syndics of the Drapers' Guild. 1662. Oil on canvas
Perhaps Rembrandt's greatest painting. Its energy derives from the force-counterforce mechanism of its figures pushing down and out against the inward, upward thrust of their table. Simple, but Rembrandt has marshaled every element of the picture towards this end. First there's the table itself, the butt end of which is massive and smushed against the front of the image, but also shaded and imprecisely rendered, such that despite its commanding presence it nearly vanishes alongside the six lit faces of the syndics. Then there's those syndics, whose collective form is as unified as it is varied and rhythmic, locked together by the L-shape of the seated man at left and proceeding rightwards as a broken wave of head-tilts and shifting eyes. This wave crests and crashes not only on the y-axis but on the z-axis too, such that the painting seems to pulse all through its midriff, yet without threatening to rupture the sanctity of depicted space: the syndics, for all their motion, are wedged tightly between the wall behind them and the picture plane-affirming mass of the table before them. The painting manages to convey both a radical self-consciousness of its limitations and its conditions of possibility (a "modernism") and a blithe commitment to real reality (it's there in the way the figures stare out of the picture). And I haven't even mentioned the delicacy of Rembrandt's handling in, for instance, the gloves or the tassels of the tablecloth, let alone how improbable it is that this delicacy coexists with the firm rendering of the syndics shirts and the suppleness in their flesh. (TFS, 2026)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
92%
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. 1632. Oil on canvas
The paint handling here doesn't have that controlled mania to it that characterizes Rembrandt's best work. His much later Syndics group portrait is among the greatest paintings in Dutch art because, unlike this picture, its surface manages to convey this sort of detached, frenetic aliveness, but without at all undermining the fragile unity of its group of figures and their complex web of relations. What this painting does possess, however, is just such a complex web as the Syndics, maybe even a more dazzling one. It's far from unique to observe that the space between Tulp's gesturing hand and the heads of his students is a chasm whose dramatic potency is almost unrivaled in art, or that the array of glances that cluster in the left half of this painting is at once immediately grasped and impossible to describe. And apart from the internal energy and resolvedness of these dynamics, what makes these figures so beguiling and attractive is the apparent absence — or at least the extreme shallowness — of the space they're crowded into. There's a lot of volume in this painting, but it all emerges out of the relations between bodies, rather than from their placement in depth. It's men making meaning (space is the meaning of paintings) through their free and rational activity: and the whole of this action unfurls, foreshortened, from that book at bottom right. (TFS, 2026)
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
92%
Lucretia. 1666. Oil on canvas
What characterizes Rembrandt's paintings, especially his later ones, is how their surfaces ripple like a wind's blowing over them. The ones where this rippling appears superficial — a caul over the image — are typically not his best. But when, as here, the way the canvas seethes seems to come from deep inside the picture's structure rather than to hover on its face, there's little in art that can compare. It's there in Lucretia's right sleeve smudging dull whites and golds through the space beside it, or in those sidereal background blotches and their rhymes in her speckled headdress and sash, or in the ditch of black paint that's the subject's armpit, which casts off little dregs of color and shape till, steadily, a whole scene is built up around its emptiness. (It's no accident that this vortex is just to the right of the wound Lucretia's self-inflicted — the artwork's narrative and pictorial fulcra are analogous but not identical. Nor is it an accident that that plummeting collar of hers is another blade.) Here, depth and volume are functions of the palpability of Rembrandt's actual paint. Lucretia's likeness, like Lucretia herself, is creating and destroying itself by turns. (TFS, 2025)
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. Too, the chair is off: it's torqued, its back at a slightly different angle than its arm. This makes the sitter — who, as I said, is mostly an abyss leaking image — seem to possess a spatial logic all to himself. He commands the whole arrangement, apologizing for no infelicities of rendering or perspective. (TFS, 2025)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum
88%
The Vision of Zacharias in the Temple. 1633. Oil on panel
These religious pictures of Rembrandt's have an obscurity to them that's rooted somewhere deeper than his tendency to depict marginal biblical scenes, or his paintings' odd artificial appearance,* or even the literal darkness of their tones. At least in this painting of Zacharias, the obscurity is deep and structural, facilitated no doubt by the darkling, decorated field and its brash, rapid jumps in value, but not entirely reducible to these qualities. More completely it (the obscurity) pours out from impossible spaces like the dark nook in the chair behind that leaning staff, or the scar of blackness that's been cut between the heavenly light at upper right and the red-brown background behind the priest. So lively and variegated and palpably immediate is the whole of this image that these moments of quietude — of near nothingness set against the erratic presences of Rembrandt's patterned objects and planes — serve to anchor the formal relationships that surround them but also almost to ironize them, as if to point out that there's an Absolute from which all this differentiation has emerged and to which it might be obliged to return. There's a contingency to Rembrandt's lovely surfaces, an anxious quality, to that makes them so much more than decorative. (TFS, 2026)
*Rembrandt liked to costume his friends and apprentices elaborately, and then paint them from life in the studio.
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
85%
Andromeda. c1630. Oil on canvas
Rembrandt has somehow managed to make Andromeda both a void at the center of this picture, and its only truly bodied form. This is an effect of the real material substance of the paint in the foreground rocks and in the foliage above the figure. It causes Andromeda's flat pallid belly and flank to seem almost disappearingly convex, but also, the abstract physicality of these oranges and browns serves to emphasize how delicately, how almost infinitesimally drawn — just how lovely an image — she is. (The accordioned skin in her neck and pits, the shadows that walk down to her groin, the rusty shock of hair crying out to the same-colored stones at her ankles — this is unrepentant rendering.) In the 1630s, Rembrandt's jewelled surfaces were sometimes the main point of his pictures (c.f. Bellona). Here, the lavishness is peripheral, aimed, at once, at relativizing and at concretizing the representation. And so, though somewhat slight, this picture points forwards to the philosophical blacks of the painter's maturity, which serve the same purpose. (It also offers up a solution, if sidelong, to the indulgences of Rubens. Paint-pushing here is a means, not an end.) (TFS, 2026)
London, England: Kenwood House
84%
Self-Portrait with Two Circles. c1669. Oil on canvas
Hype notwithstanding, this is a lesser Rembrandt. That's because, in the top part of the painting, he cuts too ready a figure against that light tan ground — look at his shoulders and his upper arms, or the clean line that's the crest of his hat. Rembrandt's sitters ought to be wrestling themselves out of the cosmic obscurity of their backgrounds and into subjectivity. But here, there's too much that's too given. If it made sense to split artworks up into parts and judge each of them discretely, we could say that the darkling lower portion of this picture, where the whole drama of paint giving ineluctable way to an image is on view, is better than what's above it. Works of art, however, are all or nothing affairs. In the body and clothes of his subject, Rembrandt has left his paint mounded and puddled in an extraordinary way — this is Rembrandt after all, and the dollop of white on his nose is as inspired as anything he ever did. But there's just not the force of humanity in this one that there is in his best paintings. (TFS, 2025)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Museum Bredius
80%
Raising of the Cross. c1633-45. Oil on canvas (attributed to Rembrandt)
Smarter people than me have both claimed and disclaimed this as an actual Rembrandt, so I'll just go ahead believing that it could be one, and recognizing that, regardless of its attribution, it's good. It's a study, of course, so the miasmic quality of its rendering can't be read into too much, except insofar as such miasmas — more controlled, maybe, and more partial, but no less rawly emotive or disruptive of narrative clarity — are one significant aspect of Rembrandt's style. The painting's value derives from a system of diagonals that resist resolution into any coherent spatial order: the cross is the dominant line in this painting, but it's countered by the plane that’s implied by the foreshortened horse at right, rhymed (somewhat awkwardly) by the spindle of a tree at back upper left, and undermined by the spade beneath it at center, which is just barely unparallel to it. The resulting sense of balanced chaos is like a volumetric expression of the strange effect of the paint handling: despite all the flux, that spade at center (for instance) possesses as much heft and linear definition and palpable surface as any chalice in any Dutch still life. (TFS, 2026)