55

1 Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise. The studio and the market, London

1988.

Copies

In our own time too we are often confronted with this dilemma when dealing with a possibly dubious oldpainting in Rembrandt’s style - such as 19 , 36 and 251 , all cases where both the prototypes and copiesafter those prototypes have survived. Is it a literal copy after a lost original or a non-autograph creation by somebody from his workshop or, after all, ‘a principael’ by Rembrandt himself ?

What is certain is that in Rembrandt’s own timecopies were produced after his works, and mostly in his own workshop. It was, after all, an integral part of Rembrandt’s training method, that his pupils should copy his works; for pupils who came to him expressly to learn how to make his style and technique theirown, this was an instructive exercise (figs. 2 and 3).It was at the same time a lucrative practice for the master since, as several contemporary texts indicate, Rembrandt sold the works of his pupils to his own

Chapter II

What is a non-Rembrandt?

While Rembrandt is generally considered to be a unique artist, the exceptional nature of his work has been questioned by occasional public announcementsof problems of attribution, usually treated sensation-ally by the press and whenever possible hyped to the level of a scandal. One thinks, for example, of the Saul and David 212 , The Polish Rider 236 , or the Man with the golden helmet (fig. 12). These problems mostly stem tfrom Rembrandt’s teaching in which pupils imitated the work of the master as part of their training. This was normal practice in Rembrandt’s time, as was theassociated practice of combining teaching with com-mercial production, and should not be seen as detract-ing from Rembrandt’s uniqueness as an artist, as Svet-lana Alpers did in her book Rembrandt’s Enterprise(1988)1. As a result of this workshop practice, the large production of works in Rembrandt’s style, works actu-ally painted by his pupils, can certainly lead to confu-sion. As indicated in Chapter I and in many of the Notes to the Plates in this book, this confusion, which tends to undermine the beholder’s experience of Rembrandt’s unique originality, will only be overcome when the all-too-easily pronounced judgments basedon subjective connoisseurship are tested thoroughly and objectively before potentially mistaken opinions reach the lay public as ‘breaking news’.

Questions as to whether a particular painting is or is not from Rembrandt’s own hand may well have arisen already during his own lifetime. In the Municipal Archive in The Hague a list has been preserved with paintings to be auctioned in 1647 which includes a‘prin‘ (cipael) van Rembrant’ (fig. 1). ‘Pincipael’ was a term then current for an autograph painting (literally, a prototype) by a particular master. In this case, howev-er, the description was crossed out by an other handand replaced by ‘naer Rembrant’ (after Rembrandt).’

What is not clear in this case is whether this correc-tion was specifically introduced to indicate that the painting was in fact considered to be a more or less faithful copy after an existing Rembrandt, since it is also possible that whoever altered the attribution thought, or actually knew that it was painted in Rem-brandt’s style by some other member of his workshop.

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2. Fig. 3. Copy after fig. 2 (Br. 6).

E. Wetering, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

WHAT IS A NON-REMBRANDT CHAPTER II

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vanced pupils. It was also lucrative for Rembrandt – unless the pupil’s exercise pieces went to the proud par-ents of the pupil concerned (see Corpus II p. 48 ands Corpus Vs

pp. 277-282), although the parents could have paid for such works; after all, the master had provided the ma-terials for his pupils’ exercises. We know for certain thatamong the many 17th century non-Rembrandts there are many workshop copies – some of these are listedabove - and free variants on ‘principaelen’‘ by Rembrandt’(fig. 4). I coined the term ‘satellites’ for this latter cat-egory, referring to those paintings that have in the past

profit, although as far as is known not as works paint-ed by himself.2

‘Satellites’

However, it was also commonly part of Rembrandt’straining regime that pupils painted free variants based on the work of their master. This was similarly highly instructive, though probably reserved for the more ad-

Fig. 4. Examples of Rembrandt’s prototypes with variants based on them painted by pupils. Rembrandt’s prototypes to the left, the variants to

the right. Almost all these variants were previously thought to be originals by Rembrandt.

2 Sandraert (Peltzer p. 203).

18

136 136 fig.2

159

211a

279

150

175

218

282

149

213

220

281

39 100 130

235a 241 237

Br. 15 Br. 605

Br. 443

Br. 575

Br. 44 Br. 45

Br. 307 Br. 57 Br. 56

Br. 579

Br. 384 Br. 523

Br. 378

Br. 445 Br. 513

Br. 495

Corpus V p. 279s Corpus V p. 282s

Br. 496

CHAPTER II WHAT IS A NON-REMBRANDT

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caused the most confusion in the cataloguing of Rem-brandt’s painted oeuvre because many of these satel-lites were long thought to be earlier or later versions by Rembrandt himself of one of his own compositions (see Copenhagen 2006 pp. 106-122 and Corpus V pp. 259-311)s .

Tronies

The many heads or half-figures - tronies - that were spainted by pupils have also caused considerable con-fusion. Among these are depictions of (old) men or(old) women, sometimes as pendants, in imaginary dress (figs. 5 and 6). One cannot help thinking that such pairs painted by pupils were made for sale as

fictional portraits of ancestors for family portrait gal-leries. Other frequently occurring tronies painted by pu-pils depict, for instance, children (figs. 7 and 8), young women (figs. 9 and 10), men in armour (figs. 11, 12 and 13). As a rule, actual models posed for the tronies,often family relatives of the master or other membersof the household or the master himself (see fig. 5). They were probably painted mainly as exercises in por-trait painting, while at the same time there must have been a ready market for them, given the way many ofthese portrayed figures are dressed and the attributes that are added as allusions to such qualities as youth,beauty, piety, vanity, martial courage etc.

Br. 256

Fig. 13. Br. 287 Fig. 14. Br. 311Fig. 7. Br. 188

Fig. 11. Br. 80Fig. 6. Br. 380

Fig. 9. Br. 88 Fig. 10. Br. 105

Fig. 12. Br. 128

gFig. 8. 6 Br. 186

Tronies of young men

The many tronies of young men painted in Rems -brandt’s workshop are particularly interesting becausethe pupils may well have used each other as models, an idea suggested by the fact that the ‘young man’s tronies’ often display pronounced physiognomic fea-tures (figs. 14 and 15).

Proficiency in painting tronies after a model meant sthat pupils who acquired some experience in this areacould then be used by Rembrandt as assistants in hispainting of portraits. This may well explain why, in so many paired portraits of married couples, one spouse

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disattributed from Rembrandt – perhaps not always correctly - but most of them must certainly have been painted by pupils as exercise pieces. It would be a re-search project in itself to bring order into the mass of large and small tronies and satellites by pupils. To makesmatters more complicated, many of the small sketchy tronies are only known from reproductions. At presentthey either cannot be located or have been definitively lost.

‘Religious Portraits’

Around the period Rembrandt painted his series ofApostles 289 – 294– pupil/assistants painted a variety ofcomparable ‘religious portraits’, for instance, (figs. 20-21).

Life-size history paintings

Among the non-Rembrandts there are also large his-tory pieces with several life-size protagonists, paintings that were earlier considered to be works by Rembrandt.When one surveys the history of the cataloguing of Rembrandt’s oeuvre, one is struck by the fact that around twelve large history pieces with two or morelife-size figures, once attributed to Rembrandt, have since been disattributed (figs. 22-34). We can be quite sure that these works also originated in Rembrandt’s workshop. They must have been made by pupils.

Besides the latter disattributed history pieces with original inventions one also has to take into account anumber of large workshop copies after Rembrandt’slife-size history pieces, e.g. the copies after 136 , 140 , 148 , it seems probable that, as a rule, during their training period a number of Rembrandt’s pupils paint-ed at least one large history painting. With some of theseworks, one suspects that two young painters probably worked on them together (see, for instance, fig. 34).

Producing a painting on such a large scale is in every respect a project of a significantly different orderfrom making an easel painting. One can speculate that during the final stages of an apprenticeship, perhaps as a ‘graduation piece’, one such large painting was seen as proof of mastery of the art – or in any case as a demonstration piece to show that the young painter

was painted partly or wholly by a pupil/assistent. Judging by their style and technique and the ageing

characteristics of most of these paintings, it is almostcertain that the non-Rembrandt tronies referred to sabove mostly originated in Rembrandt’s workshop. The belief that in these particular cases we are notdealing with autograph works by Rembrandt mainly rests on connoisseurial judgment. Many of these paintings, and this is true for those illustrated here,were once considered (by Bode and Valentiner, and even by Bredius) as autograph works by Rembrandt; sometimes the museums concerned (e.g the Hermi-tage in St. Petersburg) still display them as such, notleast because they are often favourites with the widerpublic. This is certainly the case, for example, with one of the Berlin’s best loved paintings, the Man with the golden helmet, a tronie now disattributed from Reme -brandt (fig. 13) but previously one of the most famous of all ‘Rembrandts’, and one which many Berlinersfind it difficult to give up.

Small tronies

Apart from the usually life-size ‘tronies’ of various kindsdiscussed above there is a large group of much smallertronies which would appear to have been produced by spupils in Rembrandt’s workshop, probably also as ex-ercise pieces These are sometimes free partial-copiesof figures in Rembrandt’s history pieces (figs. 16, 17,18, 19). Previously they were considered to be prepa-ratory sketches by Rembrandt himself but later were

Fig. 15. Br. 230 Fig. 16. Br. 241

Fig. 18. Br. 376

Fig. 19. Br. 616 Fig. 20. Br. 618

Fig. 17. Br. 373

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(see Mystery pp. 324-331), which is probably painted overan unfinished double portrait from Rembrandt’s own hand. Among the small-scale history pieces too are found similarly confusing super-imposed paintings where the underlying painting, usually a preparatory oil sketch, is probably from Rembrandt’s own hand (see Corpus V 8 and 24 and s Corpus III B 9)s . The same is – or was– true of some of the self-portraits (see Corpus IV 6 and IVs

pp. 616-626). In the case of the latter self-portrait, the superimposed tronie has been removed from the under-lying genuine self-portrait 122 .

Non-Rembrandts produced after Rembrandt’s

death

In the foregoing discussion, examples of paintings from Rembrandt’s workshop are cited whose existence has contributed to the constantly recurring commo-tion over the question of whether a Rembrandt is or isnot from Rembrandt’s own hand. However, there are also many later paintings made in Rembrandt’s style,with subjects that are familiar from Rembrandt’s ownworks, which could not possibly have arisen in his workshop but which, to a lesser degree, may also have contributed to the doubts that afflict attempts to estab-lish Rembrandt’s autograph oeuvre.

In dealing with works in the style of Rembrandt which originated after his death, it is much easier to be certain over questions of authenticity. Nevertheless,there are always hopeful owners of such paintings who dream that they possess or may have discovered a genuine Rembrandt simply, because it looks like one. Up to the mid-20th century, countless copies after Rembrandt’s paintings or after paintings from his workshop were produced with various functions. Forinstance, in the many cases of copies after Rem-brandt’s self-portraits, they may have served as an ef-fffigy of Rembrandt in a collection containing works by him. One example of this is the copy after Corpus IV 11s(itself a workshop variant by a pupil) that was dis-played in Düsseldorf along with the Passion series forFrederik Hendrik (reproduced on p. 178) (Corpus IV 11s

Copies 1). Similarly there were countless copies made after a painting in the Uffizi, for a long time consid-ered one of the most attractive self-portraits by Rem-

Fig. 22. Wallace Collection

Fig. 23. Br. 351 Fig. 24. X-ray of fig. 23. Fig. 25. The underlying

woman’s portrait.

Fig. 21. Br. 595

was now also capable of producing a large-sized paint-ing. As far as we know, the guilds of St. Luke in the Netherlands in Rembrandt’s day no longer demandedthe previously obligatory production of proof of mas-tery, although this was still often the case in the sur-rounding countries. The large paintings referred to above may have had a similar function within Rem-brandt’s teaching practice.

Superimposed paintings

Among the tronies and other paintings by pupils there sare a few complicated cases which can neither bestraight-forwardly spoken of as ‘non-Rembrandts’, nor at present can they be catalogued as Rembrandts. The Man with a sword sold in 2013, for example, is indmy view largely painted over a man’s portrait (whether ((completed or not is uncertain) painted by Rembrandt(see 191a figs. 2 and 3). The same is also true of a so-called Sybille in Los Angeles, painted over a portrait ofa woman (Corpus III C 115) (figs. 35, 36, 37). And sagain it holds for the Eli and Samuel in the Getty Mul -seum, not without reason attributed to Gerard Dou

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pistenspritzer’ (copyists’ splashes of paint). Almost allthese copies eventually found their way into the hands of private owners or on the art market and were not infrequently considered by hopeful owners to be au-thentic works by Rembrandt. With the substantial growth of our knowledge of Rembrandt’s oeuvre, ofhis use of materials and his painting technique, suchpaintings are these days identified without difficulty aslater copies.

Forgeries

The same also holds for the very occasional forgery that turns up (figs. 23 and 24). In the case of Rem-brandt it was – and still is – hardly necessary to intro-duce forgeries on to the market. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, so many pupillary works were produced in Rembrandt’s style and technique inhis workshop that it was no problem to provide such a workshop product with an easily imitated ‘Rembrandt’

signature and to place it on the market as a work by the master. This occurred especially when the de-mand for Rembrandts increased. It was above all thisactive market mechanism which, particularly around1900, contributed to the fact that even today the im-age of Rembrandt’s painted oeuvre can still some-times shift. (In this connection, see also Chapter I p. 8).For this reason, the question ‘what is a Rembrandt?’ and its correlate ‘what is a non-Rembrandt?’ are still relevant.

brandt (Corpus III B. 11)s , but which may in fact be a young man’s tronie from Rembrandt’s workshop. e

When it comes to 18th-century copies after Rem-brandt, these are in general readily identifiable asoriginating in this period on the basis of stylistic andobvious painting-technical grounds alone. Over thecourse of the 19th century there was a dramatic in-crease in the production of ever more faithful copies,partly due to the growth of art history as an academicdiscipline and the related increase in the number of art museums, engendering art tourism. In a time when other techniques of reproduction were still quite primitive, there was a growing need for faithful, life-size (and consequently hand-painted) colour repro-ductions of certain paintings. (Around this time one also witnesses the creation of museums exclusively for the exhibition of painted copies of famous master-works3 as such; there were also sections of museums for casts of famous sculptures). The production ofcopies by art academy students and professional paint-ers who wanted to master a particular style or tech-nique was also more often seen, while professionalcopyists satisfied the need for ‘old’ paintings for theinteriors of the wealthier burghers.

Registration of copyists

It was not unusual for museums to keep registers of requests for permission to copy particular paintings. Thanks to this documentation, for example in theGemäldegalerie in Kassel and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, we can get an idea of the frequency withwhich particular Rembrandts were copied. As a result of Julia Gierse’s analysis of the registers in Kassel weknow that around 40 percent of the many requests to allow a painting from the collection to be copied con-cerned works by or attributed to Rembrandt (Kassel

2006 pp. 65-76). Pieter van Thiel analysed the registers inthe Rijksmuseum.4

In the 19th and first half of the 20th century it wascommon to see a copyist at work in front of many a masterwork in most museums. The German painter Hans von Marees, who for some time earned his living by copying famous masterworks, spoke of ‘herum-schmierenden Kopiisten Scharen’ [‘crowds of copyistsmessing around’] in the Italian museums. Tiny ran-dom flecks of paint seen on some old paintings areoften from the brushes of copyists, the so-called ‘Ko-

3 Like that founded by Baron von Schack in Munich.

4 Pieter J.J. van Thiel, Het Rijksmuseum in het Trippenhuis 1814-

1885 (IV). Kopiisten en fotografen, in Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 30 m

(1982) pp. 63-86.

Fig. 23 and 24. Two Rembrandt forgeries probably produced

by the same (German?) forger. Both fakes are applied on 17th-

century Dutch portraits

Whereabouts unknown Collection Lurie Tel Aviv