Best of Boijmans - Rembrandt? Yes, it has to be him! | ENG

This small painting behind me with Dobert and Anna waiting for the arrival His son who went to get some money somewhere and just won't come back won't come back He is very sad that he can't come his wife has just gone to spin to earn some money And there they are sitting in that house where they were once rich and suddenly they've become poor for all sorts of reasons This painting was long considered a work by Rembrandt and then it was dismissed as not by Rembrandt even by the museum's conservator They did not recognize enough of Rembrandt in that painting and therefore it was not a Rembrandt I have to say that I have understood that for a long time and it was actually when I was two years old Recently when were working on a book in which this painting had to be included I was seriously kept busy with that painting And during that research the arguments accumulated that it might well be a Rembrandt The question of how to recognize a Rembrandt among all those Rembrandt-style works is a difficult one Ask and the most obvious answer is naturally to say if it looks like A painting that we are certain is by Rembrandt will surely be by Rembrandt But of course you need to have an idea of how that brain and that hand worked together Because Rembrandt was always changing He was a true detective in search of enrichment or another way of presenting reality on a canvas There are hundreds perhaps thousands of paintings in the world that have the characteristics of a Rembrandt Focused light rough paint surface somewhat roughly executed and sometimes a bit more precise locally There are so many of them and eventually people have tried to bring some order to them Experts have tried to determine whether those Rembrandt-like works are fake or imitations or perhaps by Rembrandt himself or maybe even by one of his students And everything went wrong On Good Day the Rembrandt Research Project started to examine whether that could be done in a scientific One possible way this could happen In those years we have thanks to natural scientific research with X-rays and other techniques Have we learned so much that the painting becomes almost transparent It is becoming more transparent in that we can see the thought processes behind And for that you don't just need technical means you also have to delve deeply In what was the mental world from which Rembrandt worked and that has only recently just a few years ago become clear to us Actually one of the most essential and obvious things was that the painting was signed It is dated 1659 by Rembrandt We then took a paint sample from one of the letters in that signature and what was the signature that was stamped on it when the paint that was underneath had barely dried The log was part of the painting and wasn't a later addition But that caption was yes almost certainly set by the maker of it Also the fact that it is about Tobit and Anna and the story of Tobit Anna and Tobias their son There is no theme in Rembrandt's work or in the activities of his students that has been depicted so often dozens of times The painting is on another painting which seems strange but Rembrandt has They are mostly their own paintings but not always When the painters died the entire inventory was put up for auction and I Suppose that not sold paintings or still unfinished paintings that others Painters who cooked because they then had a cheap plank even though in our eyes there was something wrong with that A nearly museum-quality piece lay beneath it but that was only for Rembrandt But just an old-fashioned thing he couldn't do anything with The fact that it was done on a control panel also spoke somewhat in its favor Rembrandt also the fact that it was a still life that it was in his inventory when tha Bankruptcy occurs in 1656 then there is a series of still lifes and Rembrandt himself made o still lifes which Rembrandt had painted and then retouched which he therefore Something had been going on and he might eventually end up with one of them as painted closely made a new painting over it but usually we Hey hup on the painting while he still saw it in front of him he began to sketch it He painted his picture looking at it as if from the side It has been especially important for Rembrandt to use the so-called chamber light and usually a Painting the light source is not visible but if you paint the light source and tha It is a frame like in this case then you have a maximum amount of light that is Still not as if you're looking into the sun but it's still very bright light the It loses a lot of its brightness in space so you have to make sure it is done in such a way does that spatiality that spatiality and the lighting within it convince you If you then look at the X-ray of the painting and see that the window was originally added another frame so that means the light source on the left was larger and created by Rembrandt's Throughout his entire body of work you can see that he is constantly preoccupied with the amount of light up to His last self-portrait he has a white cap on he paints over it he puts a brown cap on top or something He's always fiddling with the light I don't have too much should I add more shade Erin brought it in and he did so in this painting so he removes the small window changes Look at the wall next to it making that wall darker again so you can see him therefore Working in a typically Rembrandtesque manner with light and its intensity everything in service e convincing portrayal of light That was one of his obsessions Rembrandt was truly the painter of light Something else that was typical of Rembrandt's time so we are now talking about the Later Rembrandt that is to say that Rembrandt makes very extensive use of chance It is painted in a way that is not merely cute but strangely The way in which he was truly unmatched made him increasingly casual about things arise from what already existed and what he adds to it and what he slightly removes Then you get in an odd undefined once again by the later Rembrandt an undefined image As for chance it's worth taking a closer look here because then you can see how the The head of Tobit is painted but actually you can see that it is only indicated with a few strokes You can see how that blind eye is so beautifully suggested with just a single black streak e eye has become a kind of hole the ear is like a clumsy little thing tha Light that catches from behind the neck is lit with a few key lights and from all around Few realize the image of the old sorrowful man sitting by his fire It is said that the way Anna is handling that spinning wheel is quite remarkable That's actually quite awkward look at that hand it's a strange piece and that spider wheel is a strange disc There was a debate in the 17th century that may have been a consequence of a painting Rembrandt had painted a scene in which a war chariot vanishes into the underworld at full speed And where you can count the spokes of the wheel there was discussion and then it was You said yes but actually you can't see the spokes of a moving wheel so you should paint it differently In this painting you can see how the woman is using her hand because she is actually in the process of One hand the flat hand driving the wheel do you see that wheel spinning rapidly It goes so fast that you can't even see the wheel's rim anymore it's a huge spectacle A softly painted haze in which the wheel is depicted Someone who is into details will say yes but it's all so rough and sketchy done in this painting but who knows what spiders are and how to do that and how to do it yourself They will feel it and it will immediately recognize them and also recognize those few light spots as fingertips You don't need to sit around biting your nails and so on yes the late Rembrandt did it this way The unity of the country is intended for a major political painting about it Amsterdam wants peace with Spain but the others are not yet ready If you are given the task of making something like that you will need an unlikely number of figures and occurrences symbols and little things that all need to be read political Notes are included in it you must paint them very neatly and linearly and you can certainly w light and dark that is compositional and brings things forward but that is a whole different matter Another way of thinking about light and dark than you have in this painting with its room light That's about something that in that respect is something completely different The unity of the country was achieved here in 1637 22 years before this painting you ca They really have nothing to do with each other You could say yes but it's the same man isn't it Yes but the same man thinks differently and the same man has a different goal with a work But in this painting the other thing is that the characteristic mark doesn't play a role It's precisely about how the light falls on things Whether you compare it to the Titus you are then talking about something entirely different something of A completely different scale and in a way a simpler painting in its constructio It is actually much more complex in its structure but the scale is much smaller en you cannot compare the keys you find there with the keys tha Here they sit just as mentioned Rembrandt does not use the stamp as a kind of trademark He goes about painting in different ways and you can find things each time What gradually became clear was that the relationship had failed which we had known for a long time of course I want you to know there are people who have an oeuvre of 600 paintings and others with 285 Both based on their knowledge have pointed out as many paintings as Rembrandt This acquaintance is not an exact method especially for an searching artist it simply fails The idea that you based on a few paintings you look at carefully and say now And they should also look that way that's the big misunderstanding of classical knowledge You can now better work with the arguments I have carefully built up He said yes there's really no escaping it it must be him