Rembrandt has many similarities to Shakespeare, whose life overlapped with his for 10 years in the early 17th century. The Dutch painter and English dramatist both came from humble beginnings, found fame during their lifetimes and are still revered today.
Yet, after four centuries and countless books, we still know little about either man’s early years.
“Rembrandt is a mystery like Shakespeare,” Onno Blom writes in Young Rembrandt: A Biography, translated from the Dutch by Beverley Jackson.
One problem with both geniuses is that little of the written record has survived from their early years. Rembrandt was not a diarist nor a letter writer. Obviously, the adult Shakespeare wrote, but not about himself. Consequently, historians have relied on secondary sources – something the courts might call hearsay evidence – to fill in some of the blanks.
Blom is a master at massaging such evidence. He has dived deeply into the known sights, sounds, municipal records, politics and social history of Rembrandt’s hometown, Leiden, leading readers into the artist’s cramped childhood home, along the streets he walked to attend school, and through the kinds of interiors and attitudes he encountered as an artist’s apprentice and in his relationship with his brilliant contemporary, Jan Lievens, an artist who was both friend and fierce competitor.
Onno Blom (courtesy Pushkin Press)
Using secondary sources about Rembrandt’s circumstances means Blom is frequently saying such and such is what the young artist “must” or “could” or “should” have seen, done or experienced. As a reader, this can be jarring at first. But Blom’s cinematic prose and vigorous research soon become so captivating that one simply goes with the flow. Blom can be very convincing in his suppositions and, by book’s end, readers can feel they have learned much about Rembrandt’s physical world. His inner world, though, remains mysterious.
The period covered in Young Rembrandt starts at birth and continues to the artist’s early career in his 20s. This is the same period covered by an exhibition organized by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ont., that has been travelling Canada for more than a year. The pandemic has played havoc with its schedule, however. Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges did make it to the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton last summer but had to bypass the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606. He was the ninth of 10 children. Only seven survived to adulthood.
Rembrandt’s father was a miller. The family was not rich, but better off than most. Their house was just six metres wide and three metres deep. There was a small extension on the outside and an out-building where an aunt lived. The toilet was an outdoor barrel covered by a plank. The inside of the house was often damp and cold, even when both hearths were lit. In winter, everyone wore several layers of clothing, which was seldom washed.
When he was seven, Rembrandt started Latin School, where lessons began at 7 a.m. His parents hoped he would become a clergyman, doctor or lawyer. But not until his teens did the boy express a strong interest in art. Lievens, by comparison, was branded as an art prodigy when he was eight.
As he walked to school, Rembrandt would pass a prison with a visible punishment yard.
“Hangings were rare in Rembrandt’s day but the city’s executioners frequently administered corporal punishment in public,” Blom writes. “Convicts were bound to a post, beaten with a stick or branded. The young Rembrandt would have been familiar with the sound of breaking bones and the hissing of scorched human flesh.”
At about 14, Rembrandt entered Leiden University, his first step to becoming an artist. He attended for just a few years before working as an apprentice-helper with Leiden artist Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburg.
“The boy had to make endless sketches, by daylight and candlelight, of plaster busts, feet and hands and anatomical prints to master the art of depicting the human body,” Blom writes.
Those works, mainly on slate, are largely lost.
Other duties included mixing different pigments, cleaning brushes, filling in the cracks of oak panels, copying brushstrokes and learning about Swanenburg’s favourite artist, Caravaggio. The Dutch were wild about Italian art at that time.
After three years, Rembrandt briefly moved to Amsterdam to study under artist Pieter Lastman, where he copied his master’s works rather than just doing menial jobs. But Rembrandt soon was back in Leiden, then in the throes of the Black Death. He opened his own studio and began his storied career, painting portraits and history scenes, including biblical stories.
Rembrandt (Harmensz. van Rijn), “Die Kreuzaufrichtung (The raising of the cross),” circa 1633
canvas, 38” x 28” (© Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
Some of Rembrandt’s paintings with groups of people include the artist’s own face. In The Raising of the Cross, circa 1633, Rembrandt’s face and blue beret are at the foot of the cross used for Christ’s crucifixion. Many of his early etchings were “selfies” in various poses as stock characters, showing his unruly hair, pockmarked skin and oversized nose. He didn’t try to improve upon what nature gave him.
Rembrandt and Lievens collaborated and competed. They often shared models, even modelling for one another, and sometimes painted the same subject to see who could do it better.
“The two friends from Leiden sought to benefit from each other’s talents: Rembrandt from Lievens’s technique and zest for experiment and Lievens from Rembrandt’s intellect, knowledge and capacity for empathy,” Blom writes.
The two were deadly serious. They did not seek out the usual youthful pursuits, terming them a waste of time. They worked like mature men who had left all trivialities behind.
“In reality, everything had yet to begin,” says Blom.
For Rembrandt, that meant returning permanently to Amsterdam, becoming the most famous Dutch artist in Europe, and finding the same everlasting fame as Shakespeare when he left Stratford-on-Avon for London. ■
Young Rembrandt: A Biography by Onno Blom, translated by Beverley Jackson. W.W. Norton & Company, 2020.
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