Expression, Temperament and Imagination in Rembrandt's Earliest Self‐portraits

Abstract

Rembrandt's initial foray into self-portraiture was entirely unprecedented. Between about 1627 and 1631, the year he left Leiden for Amsterdam, the young artist portrayed himself at least twenty times. Often more concerned with character and expression than likeness and public image, he scrutinized his features in the mirror, made faces at himself and cast his eyes in evocative shadow, paying scant attention to the conventional formalities of portraiture. At first glance, his early etchings (plates 17-20, 24 and 25) look quick, rough, sometimes careless, like trifles to be discarded, and even some of the paintings (plate 26) seem to be sketchy studio exercises, which perhaps accounts for the prevailing view of them as expression studies featuring the artist as his own model. Considered in another light, though, it becomes clear that a remarkable individuality distinguishes each of these otherwise unassuming images. In their extraordinary psychological presence we can recognize the beginning of one of the most concerted efforts at self-portrayal in the history of art. Far from being peripheral to his later, more formal, self-portraits, they were the crucial first steps. It was here that Rembrandt discovered the self. Or, put more precisely, it was here that he discovered the value of self-portrayal.Rembrandt lived during an age of self-scrutiny: his propensity to self-study was symptomatic of a broader cultural milieu that privileged the process of introspection. Put bluntly, he was deeply affected by the rising individualism of the age in which he lived. Obviously this claim, though it has often been made before, demands explanation. Especially today, mere mention of 'individualism' -by which I mean the concept of the individual human being as autonomous and self-governing that has dominated western civilization for much of the past five hundred years -invites controversy. This valuing of the individual, his uniqueness and his privacy has been variously rooted in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, the Reformation and seventeenth-century England." It has been associated with rationalism, empiricism, secularization, and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and in this century it has been brought into question by communitarian ideologies, most notably Marxism, that view human beings as constituted primarily by their social relations. Today those who view individualism on the one hand as a universal