Self-Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed (1630)
by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)
Self-Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed, Rembrandt (1630)
This humorous self-portrait by Rembrandt was created when he was just 24 years old. Drawn in front of a mirror, this etching was one of four self-portraits Rembrandt composed whilst still a young artist in his hometown of Leiden. We see the artist making a silly face, his lips opening and his eyes bulging in surprise. We can imagine the young Rembrandt making faces at himself as he practiced the technique of portraiture.
This surprised facial expression also features in one of Rembrandt’s earliest and most dramatic works. The supper at Emmaus (1628) shows the figure of Christ in profile, and an old man gazing at him in shock and wonder.
The scene depicted here is from a passage in the final chapter of the Gospel according to Luke (“and their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight”). The story takes places on the third day after Christ’s entombment. Two of Christ’s followers, deep in mourning, have supper on the road from Jerusalem. They’re so distracted that they don’t even realize that the man who has sat next to them at the table is none other than the messiah himself. This painting shows the dramatic moment of spiritual awakening (“are ye not blind that have eyes to see with?", to put it in the words of Mark).
Rembrandt clearly saw the artistic potential in this scene, both as a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment and as an allegory for artistic awakening. After all, the artist is the one who “wakes up” to the world and sees it in a new and different way. In the surprise on the man’s face, we can detect a similarity to Rembrandt’s self-portrait. The artist as a man who (as Kafka would later put it), never grows old because he retains the ability to see beauty.
The composition of the painting is also remarkable. Instead of illuminating Christ, Rembrandt shines a bright light on the facial features of the man encountering him. Look very closely and you’ll see that one of the men in the painting has fallen to his knees at Christ’s feet. We can see him only by the outlines of his back against the tablecloth. It’s a remarkable way to light a painting. Jesus is not glowing, he is giving off light. As the art critic Michael Taylor put it, “Christ’s head is both as clearly delineated as if it were etched in metal and so dark that it is recognizable only in profile.”1 It’s a visual paradox that makes us -in a sense- repeat the gesture of “recognizing” Christ.
Twenty years later, Rembrandt would revisit the scene in another oil painting. (1648) And yet arguably the earlier work is the more striking. It’s composition is flat in comparison, and Christ appears in full frontal profile. Perhaps the younger Rembrandt had more experimental defiance, whereas the middle-aged Rembrandt knew the importance of pleasing his patrons.
But Rembrandt remained deeply invested in the themes of seeing, and the juxtaposition between sight and blindness. Consider, for example, The Healing of the Blind Tobit (1645), in which we see a doctor leaning over an old man performing an eye-operation to restore his sight. The old man is gripping the armrests of his chair stoically, and the women are standing in focused readiness. In their strong lines and gentle faces, the young doctor and his assistant are almost reminiscent of figures from a Studio Ghibli film.
Against the “spiritual awakening” of The supper at Emmaus, we see here a scientific procedure to restore sight. Rembrandt essentially depicts an early form of cataract-surgery, in which a doctor manually uses a need to incise the lens capsule.
Some have suggested that Rembrandt’s interest in seeing and sight derived from his own “stereo blindness”, a condition that impairs depth perception. But to me it seems much more likely that Rembrandt, as an artist, perceived his work as a way of seeing and making other people see. In this sense, he was both gently boasting about the spiritual powers of art, but also making the case for the power of the gaze as a social force. Which is to say, throughout his career, Rembrandt always turned his attention to the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, and chose to dignify them with their own artistic depictions. Never afraid to portray the world as he saw it, there’s something very powerful in his lifelong commitment to “seeing” and “making seen” those who were otherwise rendered invisible. In this, then, Rembrandt’s work tacitly encourages us to undergo our own inner awakening, to look around us, and to be unafraid to see.
Julian
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Rembrandt’s Nose: of flesh and spirit in the Master’s Portraits, by Michael Taylor (p. 71).
Definitely related to this. Born cross-eyed, 'corrected' by two operations, many years a spiritual seeker, painter turned photographer. Sight, 'seeing' and sharing an integral aspect of my life. Thanks for the post.