“Are you looking at me? I certainly hope so.” If pictures could speak, these would be the words delivered by a small bust-length ink drawing of a youngish man with a big nose, small eyes, the ghost of a mustache and artfully tousled hair, at the Morgan Library & Museum. He frowns a little, as if wary of attention, but you can tell he’s kidding-serious, trying out a pose of artist as prodigy.
The drawing is a self-portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn, a quickie done around 1628-29, when he was in his early 20s, still living in Leiden, his hometown, and gearing up for the big time, an Amsterdam career. His pose wasn’t just bluff. He really was prodigious, and he knew it, because he’d been told so by smart people, and because he had already produced, or was about to, an exceptional painting, which is the center of a rich, salon-size show at the Morgan called “Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece.”
Born to a prosperous mill owner in 1606, he studied art in Leiden, a university town, and looked closely at what the local talent, past and present, had to offer. His initial model for printmaking was the 16th-century engraver Lucas van Leyden, some of whose compositions, blending classical poise and real-world detail, he repeated, with tweaks. He briefly studied painting with a contemporary artist, Pieter Lastman, who had been to Rome, where he may have met Caravaggio, and whose example brought Rembrandt as close to Italy as he would ever get.
Finally, in 1627, his apprenticeships done, Rembrandt buddied up with a fellow Lastman student, Jan Lievens, to share a studio, and there began to sort out a mature style. Luckily for history, someone was on hand to document the early results. In 1629, the roving diplomat and connoisseur Constantijn Huygens dropped in on the Lievens-Rembrandt workshop and recorded the visit in his autobiography. (The original manuscript, on loan from the Royal Library in The Hague, is in the Morgan show.)
In it, Huygens reviews both artists at length, judiciously noting their flaws and considerable strengths. Then when he comes to a particular, fresh-off-the-easel painting by Rembrandt, he loses his cool and just raves, astonished that “a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller” could produce a work that compares to “all the beauty that has been produced through the ages.” The picture is the one around which the Morgan show turns.
Titled “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” it depicts a scene that appears in only one of the four gospels, and then as a mere footnote to the Passion narrative. At the Last Supper, Jesus announces that one of his disciples would betray him into enemy hands. The culprit is Judas, who has already been paid by the chief priest and elders of the Jerusalem temple to lead soldiers to the doomed man and identify him by a kiss. Once the deed is done, however, Judas is crushed by remorse. He rushes to the temple and throws the payment money down in front of those who hired him, as if that might absolve his guilt, though he is beyond believing it will. In the painting, we see him kneeling and wailing with grief, his clothes disheveled, his scalp bloody where he has torn out his hair. The elders back off in shock; the chief priest holds up one hand as if to block out the sight of the man, push him away, disappear him. Judas will leave the temple and hang himself.
The painting, on loan from a British private collection and in the United States for the first time, is powerful in ways that Rembrandt’s great work turned out to be, with its operatic, Verdian largeness of gesture, its sense for light as both specific and cosmic, and its piercing, unembarrassable instinct for human emotion. Considered beside the earlier Lastman-inspired work by Rembrandt that preceded it, the ranking of this picture as his first masterpiece seems plausible enough. (None of the Lastmanesque pictures are at the Morgan, though what may be the artist’s earliest surviving etching, a scene of the infant Jesus’ circumcision from around 1625, is.)
The picture has other distinctions, too. It is among the very few Rembrandt paintings of any period for which several preparatory drawings exist. Five are in the show, two on reverse sides of a single sheet, all joining the painting for what is believed to be the first time since they were together in Rembrandt’s studio. They include what looks like a very preliminary study, a lightly touched, barely illegible pen-and-ink sketch of the kneeling Judas and a single figure, with the flip side a fuller, more emphatically drawn version that maps out the composition’s architectural setting. The most beautiful drawing, lent by the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam, is almost entirely tonal, atmospheric: an image of a handful of the painting’s subsidiary figures dwarfed by what looks like an enveloping cloud of light, with a torrent of shadow spilling down behind them.
The curators responsible for the show — it was conceived by Per Rumberg, formerly of the Morgan and now at the Royal Academy, London, and installed by John Marciari and Ilona van Tuinen of the Morgan’s department of prints and drawings — expand its scope further by using it to demonstrate Rembrandt’s lifelong interest in biblical themes. Technically, such subjects fell into the category of “history painting,” at the time the most esteemed of genres, the one that any upwardly striving artist — and the young Rembrandt was certainly that — would want to pursue.
But for him, there must have been some other, further allure. He is not known to have been devout, though he seems to have sustained connections to a Mennonite community in Amsterdam. Most likely, the gospel narrative was attractive as a source of personal stories, vignettes of everyday people feeling their way through life, working, loving, losing, sinning, making amends, or trying to, and at some point waking up — or not — to the reality that they are participants in an epic of redemption.
And the show is really about such stories, from self-portraits in which Rembrandt is inventing a public persona to nearly two dozen drawings and prints that depict gospel scenes and that are installed in the chronological order they take in the New Testament, from the youthful “Circumcision” etching to four depictions of the “Descent From the Cross.” (The Judas painting is positioned in its logical place in the sequence.) And here we also have Rembrandt early, middle and late, erasing the line, as he consistently did, between high and low, sacred and profane, the gross and the transcendental.
Two of the “Descent From the Cross” images, both late, from around 1654, 15 years before his death, give a strong sense of his range. One is an etching in which the tableau of Jesus’ body being lowered from the cross is monumentally composed, theatrically illuminated, observed from a distance. The effect is of ritualistic gravity, Homeric weight.
The other is a small sheet of rough ink studies of individual elements of the same subject. In one sketch, we see, close up, Jesus’ descending body supported by a single male figure. Their faces touch. The contact is accidental, yet they appear to be exchanging an ever-so-tender kiss of peace. You have to look, and maybe look again, to see the touch, and a third time to take in the drama of spiritual love that’s unfolding. But making us look, and making looking a form of thinking and feeling, was this artist’s stellar, lasting gift.
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