Today marks the would-be 404th birthday of prolific Dutch painter/etcher Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, who was born in Leiden in 1606, and passed away in Amsterdam on October 4, 1669.
Cynthia Freeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. Her most recent book is Portraits and Persons, and in the excerpt below, she considers Rembrandt’s many self-portraits, and speculates as to why he was so attracted to this art form.
Rembrandt was a particularly prolific self-portrait artist. Susan Fegley Osmond informs us that,
he depicted himself in approximately forty to fifty extant paintings, about thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. It is an output unique in history; most artists produce only a handful of self-portraits, if that. And why Rembrandt did this is one of the great mysteries of art history.
There are numerous speculations about Rembrandt’s preoccupation with self-portraiture. “From youth to old age, Rembrandt scrutinized himself before the mirror, painting, etching, and drawing his changing physique and physiognomy as well as the varying psychological states that reflected the fluctuating fortunes of his life.”
A first concern that seems evident in these works, as with the previous artists I discussed, is Rembrandt’s social status and his identity as a gentleman. This concern shows up in his elegant garb, cloaks, hats, armor, and even in the poses in some of the images. Along with this is a concern with his artistic status and success.
Another conjectures about at least some of the images is that they are studies for paintings. Rembrandt used himself because he was a cheap, readily available model when he was planning certain sorts of composite history paintings or biblical portraits. This might account for the self-portraits showing extreme facial expressions, ones for instance where he is laughing or fearful. But these may also have been examples of a genre called “tronies” which were popular at the time and had a good market.
At a deeper level, we can sense that Rembrandt is seeking to formulate and reveal a conception of his own psychological identity, the unique person that he was. This fits with the view expressed by Arthur Wheelock Jr., who notes:
[Rembrandt] was a singularly complex individual, who from an early age seems to have fostered the image that he was different from other men, and that neither his talent nore his success depended upon others or upon the good fortune that came his way.
Wheelock later comments,
Rembrandt’s earliest self-portraits are of particular interest because they demonstrate that the myth of Rembrandt as isolated genius did not first emerge in the Romantic era…but was fostered and developed by the artist himself.
Along these lines, art historians compare Rembrandt to more recent artists who have used the self-portrait as a form of experimenting with self-formation by trying on various identities (Rembrandt as the Andy Warhol of the seventeenth century!).
Like Cézanne more than two centuries later, Rembrandt employed the self-portrait as part of an effort to fashion the self, a s
Cynthia Freeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, Texas. Her new book, Portraits and Persons, shows that portraits have served two fundamental fuctions throughout the ages. Firstly, they preserve identity, bringing us closer to loved ones who are either absent or dear. And secondly, they tell us something about the subject being portrayed: not just external things, but also the subject’s emotions and inner state. In the excerpt below Freeland analyzes self-portraits, specifically the work of Frida Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo (1907-54) is another artist particularly known for creating an extended series of studies of herself in her art. There are 55 self-portraits among the total of 143 of her known paintings. We can notice many of the same concerns in her work as those addressed by the previous artists: social status, artistic success, identification of a core self with key psychological traits, and concerns about mortality. There are, however, a few additional factors that arise in Kahlo’s work. For one thing, she is notably concerned with issues of national and ethnic identity. Kahlo is also concerned with her status as a women and with her troubled partnership and marriage with her teacher and fellow artist Diego Rivera. Kahlo’s concerns about mortality were intensified by her childhood polio and by the bus accident that left her damaged and in need of multiple operations. Her wounded and suffering body became a persistent theme in Kahlo’s work. Ironically, perhaps, the concern with mortality does not seem to be much reflected here by paintings that show self ageing. Frida’s face looks remarkably the same across her works (unlike the faces of Rembrandt of Cézanne.) She is always recognizable with her coal black hair, uni-brow, and intense dark gaze, even when she pictures herself as an infant suckling at her nurse’s breast!
Kahlo’s paintings, like those of the previous artists, show an awareness of art history and reflect linkages with predecessors she admired, often those from the Spanish tradition or from distinguished Italian portrait artists. For example, in her Self-Portrait with a Velvet Dress (1926), she alludes through both the red dress and the slender elegant fingers both to Botticelli and Bronzino.
Many of Kahlo’s works feature the wounded self/damaged body, which is specifically a female body. She is shown dealing with the pain and loss of miscarriage and infertility in Henry Ford Hospital, and with pain stemming from both physical and emotional wounds in paintings such as Broken Column, and Wounded Deer. Despite the female identification Kahlo can also play upon and invoke identification with male saints: with St Sebastian (in Wounded Deer), and with Christ (in Broken Column).
Kahlo’s repeated experiments in the self-portraits with clothing and accessories such as jewelry, native plants, and animals, shows a preoccupation with defining and embracing her ethnic heritage (European German-Jewish, Mexican, Indian). Writing about Kahlo’s works, Sharyn R. Udall remarks, ‘She is trying on identities, both personal and artistic: from the melancholy aristocrat of her first self-portrait, she seems to be testing an image that speaks of her mixed Euro-American and Indian heritage. She is also concerned with political and national issues about the distinctive identity of Mexico as it emerges from colonialism into independence, and in particular with its identity vis-à-vis its northern neighbor, the United States. She resists comparisons that rank the two countries by showing th progressive, industrial, wealthy northern country as superior to its poor and ‘prim
