AMBIGUITY IN REMBRANDT'S BOSTON "ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO"

Author(s): Paul Barolsky and Lawrence Goedde

Source: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 43-45
Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.
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 AMBIGUITY IN REMBRANDT'S
Paul Barolsky
So much art history is now concerned with
context—social, political, and economic—
that it is all too easy to ignore or forget the
qualities or characteristics of the works of
art that art historians seek to illuminate. In
what follows, however, we want to dwell, if
briefly, on a single painting in its own right,
a work that beguiles and enchants as it cap
tivates us.
We speak of Rembrandt's early picture,
circa 1629 and now in Boston's Museum of
Fine Arts, which depicts an artist in his stu
dio (Fig. 1). It is an image of a solitary painter
who, brushes in hand, has seemingly stepped
back to contemplate his work, which is sup
ported by an easel that we see in the fore
ground at an oblique angle. We cannot be
certain what the painter beholds on his
Some have imagined that he is looking at a
blank panel, contemplating its potential,
while others have supposed, with more prob
ability, that the painter, in medias res, has
paused (as we have already observed) to
contemplate what he has rendered thus far.
After all, he stands before his work with a
brush in his right hand! He is apparently al
ready at work.
We can see, alas, only the back of this
panel, which is in shadow, whereas the
painter stands in a brightly illuminated space,
rendered with an almost palpable, richly tex
tured impasto. Part of the painting's allure
resides in the paradoxical effects of paint
handling. We delight in the illusion of the
wood grain in the floor and the cracked and
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BOSTON ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO
and Lawrence Goedde
broken plaster of the wall. At the same time,
however, we enjoy the thick, grooved paint
for its own sake.
Contemplating Rembrandt's painting fur
ther, we become aware of a paradoxical dis
parity of scale between the picture itself,
which is very small (approximately 1 foot
in width) and the picture within the picture,
which is, relatively speaking, quite large—
perhaps as much as 4 feet wide.
What Rembrandt achieves is not alto
gether dissimilar to what we find in a differ
ent genre in Jacob van Ruisdael's various
views of Haarlem—images seen from a great
distance. Although these paintings are very
small—approximately 2 feet in height—they
render something truly grand: a vast vista
panel. of space that extends miles into the distance.
Like van Ruisdael's little paintings. Rem
brandt's picture is small relative to its sub
ject, rendering something far grander than
itself—a painting several times its own size.
We might well say that the small scale of
Rembrandt's painting intensifies our sense
of the large size of the panel that it pictures
upon the easel or, inversely, that the large
size of the picture within the picture para
doxically magnifies our sense of just how
small the Boston painting is. It is all too
easy, when recalling Rembrandt's little pic
ture, to remember it as a work far grander
than it is in fact. We delight, nonetheless, in
the tension between what is large—the
painted picture—and what is diminutive—
the picture itself. In short, Rembrandt's
 44

Fig. 1 Rembrandt, Artist in His Studio, c. 1629. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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 45
painting of a painting creates a captivating
ambiguity of scale. Moreover, because the
easel and the picture resting on it are in the
foreground and the painter is in the distance,
they almost dwarf the fictive artist. They
achieve a truly monumental, if not grandiose,
status within the modest place illustrated in
the painting.
Seeking to look beyond the painting's am
biguities and mystery, many commentators
have dwelt on the apparent factuality of
Rembrandt's pictorial illusion. His fictional
painter, it has been said, wears a slightly
out-of-fashion housecoat or overgarment
known as a tabard; others claim, however,
that the painter is dressed in a historical cos
tume. Some observers believe that we see
Rembrandt's painter in a space that has all
the characteristics of an upper room in a typ
ical Dutch row house
Rembrandt's picture nevertheless remains
something of a mystery. Who is the painter
depicted in it? Many believe it to be Rem
brandt himself, which is unlikely though not
inconceivable. Even if we cannot be certain
of the painter's identity, we can reasonably
assume that Rembrandt identified with the
fictive painter, who is in effect his very per
sona. On the other hand, since the face of
the painter is highly generalized and has
none of the features of Rembrandt himself,
some art historians insist that Rembrandt's
painter is a generalized figure in a work that
is less romantically about Rembrandt than
about the nature of painting in general. Be
that as it may, the theatricality of chiaroscuro
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in Rembrandt's picture is such that it recalls
the painter's dramatic religious pictures—
for example, his painting from the same pe
riod of Christ at Emmaus. This analogy re
inforces our sense of the Boston picture's
dramatic, almost magical, aura.
But what in the end is the painter within
the painting looking at—that is, what is the
subject of the picture he contemplates? The
shape of the picture upon which he gazes
tells us that he is not looking at his self-por
trait. It is the wrong format for such an im
age. More probably it is a history painting.
If so, what is its subject? Rembrandt's
painter surely knows, since he has painted
it. We are, however, left quite literally in the
dark. For the panel does not face us, and
what we do see is in shadow. We are entic
ingly denied access to what he beholds.
What Rembrandt's painter has wrought is
in effect a tabula rasa. It leaves us to spec
ulate, to wonder, what the painter in Rem
brandt's picture has rendered or is in the
process of rendering—what he sees. Rem
brandt has painted what for us becomes an
"unanswered question." Although we wish
to enter the fictive space of his beguiling
picture so that we, too, can see what the
painter contemplates, we will forever be de
nied access to what is concealed within that
space. The subject of the mysterious painting
within the Boston painting, whatever facts
we can muster, will always remain a mys
tery—a mystery that is part of the painting's
very charm and fascination.