Fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man en route to greatness Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Young Rembrandt
On the opening wall of Young
Rembrandt at the Ashmolean, a small self-portrait of the 23-year-old artist gazes out anxiously from under a tangle of wiry hair. His face is just about recognisable – the mirror he set up in a corner of his studio catches only a part of his cheek, the back of his neck and the end of his familiar, bulbous nose – though deep shadow engulfs the rest.
It might seem an odd pose for an ambitious young painter, but the picture was almost certainly not intended to be a self-portrait in the way we understand them today. Rembrandt was less interested in depicting a likeness than in practising the way that sunlight moulded the shape of his upper lip and glowed on the bleach-white collar of his shirt.
That drive to explore, refine and perfect the possibilities of his art never left him. It is surely the reason why Rembrandt made so many selfportraits – far more than any known artist before him. This exhibition includes two dozen of them: six paintings, the others tiny drawings and etchings that show him surprised, gloomy, or fearful. He screws up his eyes, lowers his brows. These are not real moods, they reveal a young artist developing a repertoire – learning how to depict the subtleties of human expressions.
When his own image wouldn’t do, Rembrandt turned to other nearby, free models. Several pictures here reveal his fascination with his mother’s ageing face, along with his father, and perhaps his brother. He also made a remarkable series of sketches and etchings of street beggars. Most of these date from the late 1620s, when Rembrandt was still working in his home town of Leiden.
The same faces, postures and expressions are repeated in Rembrandt’s early paintings. The figure of St Joseph leaning on his staff, for instance, which appears in several versions of The Flight into Egypt, is surely modelled on one of the beggars.
We see, too, evidence of Rembrandt’s rivalry with his brilliant fellow apprentice, Jan Lievens, as they emulate and spark off each other, along with Rembrandt’s early failures of perspective and his experiments with (and swift rejection of) a rather sugary colour palette. And, once his confidence and competence increase, we follow him to Golden Age Amsterdam, with some of the paintings that began to cement his reputation as the rising artistic star of his generation.
Be warned: there are few great Rembrandt paintings on show here. But it is a rare opportunity to witness a great artist in the making.