ART SERVICES WRITING
Written for Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services for Private Collection 6 October 1998.
Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606-1669)
Angel Leaving the Family Tobias
Original copper etching plate, 1641
6 1/8 x 4 1/4 inches
Angel Leaving the Family of Tobias
Original copper etching proof, 1641
6 1/8 x 4 1/4 inches
Rembrandt van Rijn is one of art history’s greatest painters, a talent of such proportions that three hundred years after his death many of his unique skills as portraitist and narrative painter have yet to be surpassed. This seventeenth century Dutch master expressed his towering creative vision while pushing the boundaries of painting technique to dizzying new heights. An insightful and compassionate man, Rembrandt’s penetrating genius captured the psychological and emotional states of his subjects with such eloquence and accuracy that he remains among the world’s most expressive artists.
Rembrandt was born in Leyden, Holland in 1606 at the beginning of an era of economic expansion and extended peacetime, one of the formulae that always serve creators particularly well throughout the history of art. The eighth of nine children, four of whom would survive to adulthood, Rembrandt was born into the common class of a miller’s family. At age fourteen young Rembrandt went to the University of Leyden, a rare exception for his social class and an obvious indication of his intelligence. His first apprenticeship was with a marginal local artist named Swanenburgh, who painted portraits and scenes of hell inspired by Hieronymous Bosch. In 1624, hungry for more exposure to international art trends, Rembrandt took a six month apprenticeship in Amsterdam with Peter Lastman, a talented and fashionable artist whose religious narratives, which fused Flemish Mannerism with Italian painting, had a great influence on Rembrandt. The artist completed his apprenticeship and returned to Leyden, where his career as an independent master began to take shape.
In 1629 Rembrandt met the distinguished scholar and well traveled diplomat Constantin Huygen, who championed the young artist and certainly must have had some influence on Rembrandt’s decision to return to Amsterdam in 1631, where he received his first commissioned portraits. By 1633 the artist had painted an astonishing fifty masterful portraits featuring Amsterdam’s most affluent and wealthy individuals. Celebrated as the premier portraitist of Amsterdam, showered with wealth and an endless stream of new commissions, Rembrandt had found a home in the Dutch metropolis, where he would spend the rest of his life.
One of the most important influences in Rembrandt’s developing style came from the Ultrecht School, a group of Dutch artists who employed the Italian artist Caravaggio’s style of chiaroscuro. Caravaggio had developed chiaroscuro through his study of Leonardo de Vinci’s pioneering of sfumato and chiarascuro, both of which describe the blending of colors in such a subtle fashion that the colors melt into one another with no visible lines or harsh contours, although chiaroscuro generally applies to more extreme contrasts of dark and light. Rembrandt perfected a style of his own which drew from these Italian masters, and his combination of contrasting light with the polish and finish of northern European art of the time made for a wholly original style of painting which quickly superceded many of his contemporaries. His facility with light was in no way limited to painting, as one can see so clearly in the brilliant etching plate Angel Leaving the Family Tobias.
Widely regarded as the greatest etcher who ever lived, Rembrandt could capture the wind skipping off the trees in the Dutch countryside with a quick stroke or two. His etching plate Angel Leaving the Family of Tobias is an extraordinary example of the unparalleled mastery the artist could display in both medium and subject. Rembrandt’s technical superiority and playful ease with etching glare at us in Angel Leaving the Family of Tobias.
This impressive etching reinforces the interesting fact that artists often return to certain themes, as Rembrandt had painted The Angel Leaving Tobias and his Family in 1636.
The etching’s composition is genius, and the depth made by cross-hatching creates convincing and palpable atmospherics. The space in the picture is excited and illuminated by the mystical clouds of motion that remain swirling behind the angel’s ascent to heaven, illustrated with a flurry of brilliant and quickly executed strokes. Only the angel’s fluttering feet and robed legs remain in the picture to reinforce the angel’s movement out of the composition, and the family Tobias assist the viewer’s eye with their convincing body language and astonished facial features, so perfectly captured by Rembrandt’s prodigious hand. The etching comes off as an effortless expression of an event that the artist himself had witnessed, virtuosity that Rembrandt made to seem commonplace.
Rembrandt’s growing passion for religious narratives led to financial difficulties for a number of years because of his lack of interest in the lucrative portrait business that had made him wealthy and famous. The aging artist remained undeterred in his quest to elevate narrative expression to heights of mastery that matched his portraiture, illustrating with frightening clarity his monumental capacity to embrace the boundlessness of human compassion and understanding. Through his portraits and religious narratives Rembrandt explored with delicate intensity the magic of the human condition like no other artist before him while breaking new ground as an extraordinary draftsman and painting technician. His heroic artistic contributions have secured him a permanent post as one of the world’s most unrivalled and beloved artists.
The fascinating thing about etching and ink drawings, as with chiselling, is that once the lines have been drawn they are immediately permanent, which suggests inherent danger to those who attempt an ink drawing or etching but lack the abundance of artistic fluency and confidence to make a decent picture. Any hesitation is captured, all mistakes are highlighted, frozen into the permanent surface of these very stubborn vehicles of expression.