The widely announced exhibition on the late Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum has only just ended when the Mauritshuis also comes with a late Rembrandt exhibition. Their approach is only radically different. The Mauritshuis focuses on the scientific research behind a single painting, the Saul and David, while the Rijksmuseum deliberately chose not to disclose research results. Are we being faked?
They will laugh at the Mauritshuis that the Rijksmuseum has missed this opportunity:now they have the scoop. Never before has a Dutch museum presented the scientific research behind a painting as an exhibition subject. The Saul and David turned out to be cut up, reassembled with pieces of another canvas and partly painted over. This gives a different picture of such a painting.
However, the Rijksmuseum made no mention of research during its exhibition on Rembrandt earlier this spring. While there were paintings on display that research has shown that parts were painted over later and that art-historical theories need to be overhauled.
Rembrandt laughs to death
The Rijksmuseum has chosen to keep visitors in the dark about the scientific research into these paintings, the doubts about the master's hand, and the wavering art-historical theories; and that feels like crazy farming to me. A good example is the self-portrait of Rembrandt as Zeuxis from circa 1662 (owned by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne since 1936).
According to the caption of the Rijksmuseum, we looked at the following:“The painter Zeuxis of classical antiquity is said to have selected the most beautiful part of many women and combined it into an ideal image. This was certainly not Rembrandt's method. He chose a less popular story from the life of Zeuxis:this one is said to have choked with laughter when he painted an ugly old woman. In this painting, Rembrandt did indeed follow the classics, but without painting a classical ideal!”
I am not making up the exclamation mark, nor is the certainty of Rembrandt's motivation for the subject. The painting is undoubtedly by Rembrandt, but art historians did not give this explanation until centuries later. And therein lies the problem. Recent research (2012) showed that the paint around the mouth and eyebrows of the self-portrait is newer than the paint on the chin. X-rays of the painting also show that Rembrandt initially looked much less cheerful. That crazy grin and those raised eyebrows were later painted over Rembrandt's face. The old woman on Rembrandt's canvas was also added later. This makes the motivation for Rembrandt as Zeuxis less certain than the Rijksmuseum has suggested to the visitors.
Unexpected color virtuoso
Another good example is the theory about the broken Rembrandt aging. At the end of his life, the master is said to have fallen into a depression because of the death of his beloved Hendrickje, his son Titus and his bankruptcy. Art historians deduced this from, among other things, the dark way of painting in the later years of the master.
Reasoning back, that's not a crazy theory at all, because who wouldn't be unhappy with so much misery. But scientific research shows that Rembrandt used much more color in that later period than we can still see today. The pigments in the paint have changed due to aging. The blue pigment 'Smalt', for example, loses its color over the centuries and changes to brown. However, the Rijksmuseum preferred to stick to the pathetic version and did not waste a word on scientific research into the changing paint.
Quantity over quality?
Now I can imagine that museums prefer to tell appealing stories (pathetic depressive Rembrandt, mad-mouth-pulling Rembrandt) and that they are not happy with later adjustments to their precious paintings. Fortunately, the Mauritshuis is sticking its neck out here for science. It even organizes an entire exhibition to share the research results with visitors. This was not the approach of the Rijksmuseum, with its once-in-a-lifetime retrospective of late Rembrandts from all over the world. I was told that too much information on signs is not feasible for an exhibition with more than a hundred works and more than half a million visitors. If you wanted to know more about the research behind the (own) paintings, just take a look at the website.
This does not explain Rembrandt's adamant description as smiling Zeuxis, a theory that the owner himself questions. But apart from this, a visit to a museum is more than just looking at beautiful pictures? In any case, the withheld information made me feel uncomfortable. Because what am I actually looking at? And above all:what else do they not tell?