What is the secret of Rembrandt's self-portrait, which broke the record of world auctions

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

No artist's face can be as easily recognizable as the face of Rembrandt: he captured his image in a wide variety of moods and costumes in about eighty paintings, prints and drawings, and with ruthless introspection outlined its changes: from an ambitious and self-confident youth of twenty-two years to a worn-out and prematurely aged man of sixty-three. And one of these self-portraits recently set a new world record. It was sold at auction for nearly nineteen million dollars.

Rembrandt is one of the most versatile painters of the 17th century

He was one of the most versatile painters of the 17th century, exploring a wide range of genres, including historical paintings, portraits and landscapes. Whatever the object or object, his work captures a sense of individual spirit and deep emotional expressiveness, qualities for which he was famous in his time.

Although Rembrandt's self-portraits seem to us today to be a coherent series that captures almost the entire period of his career, there is no reason to assume that they were conceived as a series, or that there was a common motive in their creation.

The artist's early pictorial, engraving, and hand-drawn self-portraits from his Leyden period are often similar explorations of character and exercises in depicting moods and incidence of light, but they nonetheless evoke an interest in introspection and self-projection.

Van Rijn must have become famous for his self-portraits early in his own career, because by the time he established his studio in Amsterdam, he was clearly writing them to sell to clients, certainly in response to demand. His release of self-portraits for sale expanded significantly in the following years, but fell rapidly after the early 1640s. Visiting an artist's studio was already a popular pastime among art lovers, and in the 1630s, Rembrandt not only painted himself, his students also painted his portraits for sale.

What is the secret of Rembrandt's paintings

Unlike his contemporaries, Rembrandt endowed his engravings with a painterly quality achieved through a suggestive treatment of light and darkness.

His style soon took a pioneering turn with his use of light, which left large areas of his paintings hidden in shadow.

Through his interpretation, the lighting quickly dimmed as it spread over the painting, creating patches of brightness and pockets of deep darkness. In one example of a self-portrait, painted when Rembrandt was fifty-four years old, the artist was merciless in depicting signs of aging on his own face, painting in high relief to convey a frowning forehead, heavy bags under the eyes and a double chin.

But as a rule, in all his self-portraits, some patterns were traced. There are many self-portraits where the viewer can see Rembrandt dressed in fashionable clothes.

Dressing up was not unusual for Dutch artists, but in van Rijn's work, the outfits were more luxurious than usual. Fashion historians, looking at some of the paintings, associate the features of his wardrobe with the clothes of the 16th century, which were usually worn in Italy and Germany.

Rembrandt's poses are inspired by several other works, including the portrait of Raphael Baldassare Castiglione (now in the Louvre), Albrecht Durer, and others.

According to some modern historians and experts, Rembrandt often imitated 16th century artists such as Titian and Durer, who painted very delicately and gracefully.

Unlike many young artists, Rembrandt signed his self-portraits only with his own name and so big that the viewer would not miss him. He saw how artists such as Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo signed their works with names, so he also decided to use this method for his self-portraits and not only.

New world record

But back to the portrait that set a new world record.

One of the few privately owned Rembrandt van Rijn self-portraits was auctioned at Sotheby's last month. The 1632 painting, created when Rembrandt was only twenty-six years old, was estimated at between fifteen and twenty million dollars.

The painting, which depicts the artist in a ruffled collar and a black hat, may have been conceived as a kind of "visiting card".

But another intriguing idea is that he created it to impress the relatives of his future wife, Saskia van Uijlenburg, a muse who would later appear in several of the artist's famous works. Some scholars believe that Rembrandt's clothing, which suggests that he has the same status as his clients, should have signaled the prosperity of the bourgeois Van Uylenburg family. It is noteworthy that the canvas was painted on a small enough scale that it could be sent across the country to the city in which she lived at the time.

When Rembrandt finished painting, he was in the midst of becoming a prodigal artist in Amsterdam. Sotheby's co-chair of Old Master Paintings, George Gordon, says the small composition was hastily done because the signature was added to the canvas while the paint was still wet. (A similar image of his signature, which Rembrandt used only for a short period of time, can be seen in the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp).

The job has a fascinating market history. The last time this self-portrait appeared at auction was in 1970, when it was bought from the anonymous collection of the Parisian collector J. O. Legenguk for only six hundred and fifty pounds sterling at a time when its authenticity had not yet been established. This time it was sold by a collector who bought the painting in 2005 from the Dutch dealer Noortman Master Paintings.

Six collectors fought for it. The final cost of the painting was double the previous record set in 2003 (almost £ 7 million). As a result, the self-portrait by Rembrandt was sold at an auction in London for almost nineteen million dollars.

As it turned out, Rembrandt became famous not only for self-portraits, but also with their realistic and emotional paintings, which are still criticized and discussed by art connoisseurs all over the world. However, in addition to van Rijn, they talk about other outstanding painters, whose names have also gone down in history.