Rembrandt Paintings at Metropolitan Museum of Art New York Are They Real

Great Works, In Focus

Rembrandt's own mortality — seen in another creative person's face

The Dutch Quondam Master died a few years later on painting Gerard de Lairesse, who suffered from built syphilis.

Rembrandt's "Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse" (1665-1667) is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Metropolitan Museum of Art; Robert Lehman Collection)

This late Rembrandt portrait, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts a man with pockmarked skin and recessed eyes. The bridge of his nose has complanate. His name is Gerard de Lairesse, and he is suffering from congenital syphilis (a disease that, incidentally, has been steadily ascension in the United States in recent years).

As the infection, inherited from his female parent, takes its ineluctable course, de Lairesse (1641-1711) volition eventually go blind. And then you could say that Rembrandt's painting, wherein shadows encroach on light, has a metaphorical, almost tautological attribute: painting equally a kind of fumbling in the nighttime, a diminution, a dying away.

But wait! De Lairesse isn't going anywhere. It volition exist 25 years before he entirely loses his sight, and more than 40 earlier his life gives out. Whereas Rembrandt (1606-1669), at the time he painted the portrait, had only a scattering of troubled years to live.

De Lairesse meets the great painter's gaze with perplexed simply unyielding dignity. Born in Liège, in today's Belgium, he was an artist himself and the son of a painter. (Venereal affliction is not the merely built condition.) He fled the urban center after entangling himself in an affair with ii sisters who had posed for his pictures. He moved to Utrecht, in holland, with another adult female, whom he after married, and they had a child in 1665.

De Lairesse's talent was noticed that yr by the art dealer Gerrit van Uylenburgh, who persuaded him to motility to Amsterdam. Van Uylenburgh's begetter, Hendrick, was the art dealer who had launched Rembrandt'southward career.

Rembrandt had moved into Hendrick's studio and married his cousin, Saskia. So when de Lairesse moved to Amsterdam xxx years later, it was about inevitable that he would meet Rembrandt — and that Rembrandt would paint him.

At first, de Lairesse was spellbound. Rembrandt was in the midst of his famous fade-out, which his late self-portraits — each i more harrowed and bewildered than the last — certificate with an exploratory intensity and honesty unmatched in the history of fine art. The problems began with financial collapse; they culminated in the deaths of his partner, Hendrickje Stoffels, and his dearest son, Titus. Within a year, Rembrandt was dead, a pauper assigned an bearding grave.

Only in 1665, the twelvemonth of this painting, he was still Rembrandt. He could paint like nobody's concern, and de Lairesse fell under his sway.

Sadly, still, the subject's sympathy for his portrayer proved short-lived. Long earlier he went blind, de Lairesse adopted a smoothen, classical mode of painting that was at odds with Rembrandt'southward roughly brushed naturalism. After, forced by his status to switch from painting to theorizing, he delivered lectures that tried to export Rembrandt to the dustbin. In an influential 1707 treatise, he compared Rembrandt's style to "liquid mud on the canvas."

De Lairesse's basic problem with Rembrandt was that he veered too far from the platonic, and in this judgment, he was past no ways alone. Rembrandt's nigh animal thirst for the real, his bohemian disregard for accepted conventions of visual beauty, stuck in the craw of quite a few fine art critics. None could refute his talent. But they could not abide his refusal to idealize. And they were at a loss to explicate his energetic interest in all the nearly abject aspects of life, from defecating women and rutting monks to saddle-nosed syphilitics.

Rembrandt's work has ever been distorted by an excess of "genius-talk." We forget too hands that his homo flaws and artistic sensibility were all of a piece. He was the great identifier. Nothing human escaped his notice. Merely every bit his self-portraits traced the arc of his own bloom and decay, this portrait of de Lairesse conveys what it feels like to be approaching the end of something. For de Lairesse, it was the eventual end of seeing; for Rembrandt, it was the imminent cease of everything.

Sebastian Smee

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of "The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Earth, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/entertainment/rembrandt-portrait-gerard-de-lairesse/

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