Login Register
Follow Us

Rembrandt’s Indian portraits

Then there are the numerous self-portraits.

Show comments

BN Goswamy

Then there are the numerous self-portraits. Rembrandt would be remembered as an extraordinary self-portraitist if he had died young at, say, 45. But he lived much longer and it is the work of his old age that one most admires: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, lined and bloated features, with the light shining from the potato nose and the thick paint: the face of a master, the face of a failure and a bankrupt. Life, and his own mismanagement of life, has bashed him but no one could say it has beaten him. — Robert Hughes

In Rembrandt’s (late) great portraits we feel face to face with real people, we sense their warmth, their need for sympathy and also their loneliness and suffering. Those keen and steady eyes that we know so well from Rembrandt’s self-portraits must have been able to look straight into the human heart. — Ernst Gombrich

What I write here has nothing to do with Rembrandt’s self-portraits, or with the great Dutch painter’s masterpieces, like The Night Watch, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, The Jewish Bride: these passages I cite here simply to recall his status, the respect in which he is held as having been among the greatest painters of the western world. Shelf after shelf of books has been written on him, and on his work. And yet rarely, if ever, his connection with India, at least with works from India, is spoken of. An occasional drawing by him, based on some Mughal master-work that he had seen, might turn up in a whole book on him. But nothing more than that. Some experts on Rembrandt and his work have of course been aware of this group of his works, but for the most part the general reader interested in that remarkable painter hardly is. The veil of ignorance, one might say, has remained spread over vast spaces, from East to West.

That veil is beginning to lose some of its thickness, or density, however. At the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, recently concluded an exhibition of Rembrandt’s ‘Indian’ drawings and etchings with an accompanying publication which bore the title Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India. Stephanie Schrader at the Getty headed the small group of essayists who wrote for this volume: William Robinson, Yael Rice and Catherine Glynn. And it is through all of them that so much is brought within one’s reach. One sees nearly all of Rembrandt’s ‘Indian’ work in the volume of course, but one also gets somehow transported to the painter’s times: commissions gained and lost; failures and successes, loves and rejections, and so on. One knows that Rembrandt often ran into trouble with his debts, and once, when after a declared bankruptcy, an inventory of his household goods was made, in the list was an entry about his collection of Indian miniatures entered under the heading: ‘An album filled with curious miniature drawings’. Rembrandt lived (1606-1669) in times when, in India, Jahangir and Shah Jahan sat on the throne, but there is no mention by him of these ‘curious drawings’ being Mughal in origin. He must certainly have known of these having come from Mughal India for these had, as has been rightly guessed, ‘probably arrived in the Dutch Republic via Dutch artists who worked for the Vereinigde Ostindische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company)’, which had offices both in Agra and in Surat. But what inquiries he, as a naturally curious man, might have made is not recorded. After this inventory in any case one loses track till one comes upon another record — the earliest dated record — of these works in the 1747 sale catalogue, as William Robinson notes, of “the estate of the British portraitist Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1665-1745) in which one lot is described as ‘A Book of Indian Drawings, by Rembrandt, 25 in number’”. How or when these works had entered the Richardson collection is not known.

One can pursue this line of enquiry further, but all that would relate to matters of historical research, and one needs to turn to the ‘curious miniature drawings’, themselves. For not only is there great delight that resides in them, but also a different world swings into view. Four dervish-like characters sit in a circle, conversing; a young prince seems to be reading from a book for an elder; a rider is seen astride a spirited steed; an emperor sits at a window with a child by his side. There was probably no awareness on the painter’s part of who these people were: Sufis of different orders, favoured noblemen, Akbar or Jahangir or Shah Jahan. But Rembrandt had these miniatures and he made copies — or versions — of many of them. Why, one might ask? Was it simply, as has sometimes been suggested, that he wanted to acquaint himself with the ‘Eastern’ types — faces, groups, costumes, stances, gestures, and the like — which would be useful for incorporating elements from them — either parts or whole compositions — while rendering biblical scenes in which persons from the East naturally figured? Through these works, was he adding to his knowledge of the world? Was he intrigued by the products of a culture that was entirely different from his own? Again, could it be that he admired the quality, the studied refinement and the precision of drawing, of these Mughal works, and was inclined to learn from them in his own manner? It is obvious that he ‘did not reproduce Indian works in their exact form: he changed the medium and introduced perspective and shading’, as has been observed. But, in the process, he gave them a life which was different from their own, deftly picking up subtleties, adding or taking details out, simplifying things, making short rapier-like movements with his brush. There is a certain joy in studying every little stroke, tracking every step of the thought-process.

Clearly, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn took something from India but also gave, in return, something back to the world.

Show comments
Show comments

Top News

Most Read In 24 Hours