Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

"I debated a bit which book by Alpers I would include on my list. She really is the dominant figure in American art history working on Dutch art in recent years. She wrote this book The Art of Describing which is a more general account of 17th-century Dutch painting, and she basically concludes that book by admitting that she’s really neglected both Rembrandt and Vermeer and that she doesn’t feel that her account can fully be extended to them. And so, she follows that up with this monograph on Rembrandt, which I actually prefer. “It’s a very powerful, interesting account of how the studio operated in the 17th century” For me, it’s a very powerful, interesting account of how the studio operated in the 17th century, how artists thought of themselves as impresarios and also entrepreneurs. Again, it’s a very interesting approach to the monograph because on the one hand, you have Gowing, who’s writing, as I said, very much as a working artist—someone who is talking about the formal composition of pictures and, in a sense, brackets the surroundings of the artist, the history, the society that he lived in—and on the other hand, Alpers, who has a much more integrated account, at the same time as she attends to things like the brushwork. That, again, was another difficulty I found when I compiled the list. I could have easily suggested five books about Rembrandt or five books about Vermeer. In the 20th and into the 21st century, those have been the two really dominant figures. And so, one of the rules I set myself was that I could only have one on each, but I did think it was important to have them both represented, just because the quality of work on them is so high, and they are often the figures through which people develop a love of Dutch art. But they also are really night and day in terms of their artistic personalities and what we know about them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Rembrandt is such a flamboyant figure and we know all about his personal life, his financial woes, and his love affairs. Vermeer, to use the great cliché about him, is much more of a sphinx. We do know a lot more than we used to, thanks to archival discoveries, but none of those discoveries really illuminates his art to any great degree. His personality remains this real mystery. Whereas, with Rembrandt, as towering of a genius as he is, you do feel that you can get to know him and you see reflections of the biography in the art. He has a beautiful line in there about Vermeer being ‘well protected.’ I thought that was a wonderful characterisation of the way that Vermeer is so controlled and self-contained in his scrutiny of the world. There are different moments in that book where Gowing characterises him as a sort of voyeur, but he also points out, very astutely, how little eye contact there is between figures within Vermeer’s paintings. So, isolation and self-containment are really one of Vermeer’s greatest subjects and I think that’s a terrific insight on Gowing’s part. Alpers characterises Rembrandt as an extremely modern figure—someone who we would recognise from the contemporary artistic self-promoter. And if I had a criticism of her book, which as I say I find to be a very persuasive account, it’s that I think she overstates Rembrandt’s singularity in that period. So, she sets up figures like van Dyck as a kind of foil to him when, in fact, I think he was often learning from and emulating other artists’ practices of self-promotion and theatricality. Schama is an incredibly evocative writer. He really is painting word pictures of Dutch daily life in that book, and he makes such good use of things like inventories to show us how exactly a wealthy Amsterdam canal house was furnished. It’s a really rich descriptive feast. In a sense, I think, it relates to Ruth Yeazell’s book and this art of realist depiction in writing."