Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Dutch; 17th-century
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)
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)