Turning a Prophet

With His Religious Paintings, Rembrandt Foresaw the Value of Branding

"Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits," a stunning exhibition opening today at the National Gallery of Art, is playing host to some powerful characters. There's Saint Paul, busy firing off letters to those Corinthians and Romans. The Apostle James, who was called Jesus's brother, is nearby. He looks like a cheery version of his holy sibling, as tradition says he should. Bavo, patron saint of the Dutch city of Haarlem, is got up like a grand medieval knight out hunting with his falcon. There's also Jesus himself, looking properly otherworldly, and Mary, deep in mourning for her son.

But despite these famous names, the most imposing presence in the show, by far, is Rembrandt van Rijn.

Before you notice any other details in the sacred characters on view, you notice the Rembrandt-ness that pulls them all together and makes them worth looking at in the first place. Here, late in life, Rembrandt sets out to assert the power of his brand.

This exhibition gathers 17 paintings from museums on both sides of the Atlantic. All of them were painted in the decade or so before the artist's death in 1669 at the age of 63. By dint of vigorous diplomacy, curator Arthur Wheelock has managed to assemble what's left from one of Rembrandt's last great bodies of work: For the first time, viewers get to see all the "portraits" of great Christian figures that Rembrandt painted in the last years of his life.

These pictures represent a large percentage of all the pictures Rembrandt made during that time -- perhaps a third of the total. The "Late Religious Portraits," when considered along with the National Gallery's six other late Rembrandts that hang in nearby galleries, can be thought of as a first draft for the kind of "Late Rembrandt" exhibition the experts have yet to organize.

What the exhibition lacks in scale it makes up for in intensity and focus. It is easy to spend the time you'd pass in a much larger exhibition on these 17 pictures, and more rewarding in the end. After viewing the show, I felt closer to understanding the aging artist than ever before.

In a controversial book called "Rembrandt's Enterprise," art historian Svetlana Alpers has made the argument that, especially later in life, Rembrandt's ideas about art and artists were wrapped up in ideas about the market and entrepreneurship. Where many of his colleagues turned to noble courts or wealthy patrons to make a living, Rembrandt, Alpers argues, chose instead to turn his art into a commodity for sale on the open market. He would supply a product good enough to stir up demand, then sit back and watch the guilders pour in.

Things didn't go exactly as planned. Rembrandt managed to become a famous name and set up a booming art production company. For a while, he also managed a lavish lifestyle. But eventually the bubble burst. His extravagant spending began to surpass a declining income. The public's tastes had changed; his product didn't. And in 1656 Rembrandt was forced into the Dutch equivalent of a reorganization in bankruptcy court. Rembrandt Inc. was restructured, with the former CEO now officially "employed" in a smaller company headed by his wife and son -- there was probably some asset-hiding involved in the dodge -- but the basic market model stayed unchanged. Instead of relying on the support of meddlesome patrons, the aging artist would continue to turn out the goods he thought worthwhile, and the market would buy them.

An early biographer said that Rembrandt "loved only his freedom, painting and money." Through the market, the artist hoped to manage all three.

The National Gallery exhibition gives us a crucial window into one aspect of Rembrandt's post-bankruptcy business plan that hasn't been fully spelled out before. In this show, we get to see him consolidating his artistic trademark. It isn't Rembrandt the man that we feel floating as a guiding force behind the artworks in the exhibition. It's "Rembrandt" the brand -- guarantee of a certain type and quality of high-end merchandise.

All of the exhibition's paintings but three -- three of the weaker ones -- are prominently signed, in the flashy first-name-only format that Rembrandt settled on early in his career. It tied him to art history's earlier Italian stars -- to first-namers like Leonardo, Raphael and Titian -- and clearly set him off from his Dutch colleagues. That signature wasn't necessarily a record of the presence of the master's hand, as we commonly imagine: Rembrandt let it be affixed to assistants' works he barely touched. It was a mark that a painting was a Rembrandt in the sense that it deserved to be priced as such.

And if Rembrandtness was the pitch line, then nothing said it like one of the self-portraits, which seem to have gotten as much attention from the artist as any big shot's portrait would. Among all the stupendous pictures in the National Gallery's current show, the best may be the one self-portrait, in which Rembrandt appears costumed as the Apostle Paul -- a favorite figure in Dutch culture.

Rembrandt's signed self-portraits, which we tend to think of as his most "personal" work, may in fact have been among his most public, market-driven images -- a kind of "signature" product that functioned as the flagship for his larger line.

A signed self-portrait, after all, gets a kind of triple marking as the artist's work: In addition to the name inscribed across its surface, it also displays the visible presence of the artist in the picture itself -- he's right there, looking out at us, as recognizable as any written name -- which is then in a sense further "authenticated" by the artist's trademark style and technique.

The sheer number of Rembrandt "self-portraits" that were in fact executed by students and imitators gives some sense of the value these pictures had out in the wider world.

The "Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul" has all the qualities collectors might look for in a great Rembrandt -- and those qualities, rather than any insight into the artist's innermost self, could be what the painter set out to put before them.

The picture has an amazing illusionism in its details: The way rough paint renders the coarse pores on the aging painter's nose is as good as painting gets.

It has an impressive liveliness as well: "If it were more real you would see it breathe" was the era's standard praise for the best in portraiture, and it's hard to imagine any picture better tailored to elicit such a compliment.

The "liveliness" of Rembrandt's portrait includes a giant share of well-conveyed emotion, another common source of praise. You may not be able to spell out what emotion the sitter is feeling at the moment captured in the painting, but there's no doubt that he's deeply able to feel.

And then, of course, there's the painting's display of Rembrandt's virtuoso touch, perfectly balanced between paint that's laid on in quantity, just for its own sake, and paint that's used to capture the subject at hand.

The "Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul" is almost a catalogue of the pictorial goods that Rembrandt had for sale. Other pictures pick and choose from all the options that it offers up.

An unusual picture of the mourning Virgin Mary, on loan to this show from a small museum in Epinal in France, begins with the brushiness of the self-portrait, then takes it about as far as such brushwork can go.

The image of Saint James the Minor shows the artist at his most tidily realistic, as he takes care to display the youthful beauty of the figure at hand.

A painting of Saint Bartholomew uses illusionism to the opposite effect, as it displays every wrinkle in the subject's flabby skin.

A second Bartholomew, like many of the best pictures in the exhibition, shows off Rembrandt's superb skills as a portraitist -- even though it's almost certainly not meant to commemorate a particular living person's face. It's a kind of demonstration of the many stunning virtues found in Rembrandt's best commissioned portraits, or in his self-portraits, but it escapes the limits that real portraiture imposes. The use of an unknown, unknowable model gives this "portrait" an extra dose of anonymity that might make it that much more likely to sell on the open market. (There may be a clue to telling which of these pictures were intended to commemorate a paying sitter who has chosen to dress as a saint -- a kind of painting known as a portrait historié -- and which were meant to represent historical figures: The two or three faces in the show whose features seem unusually individualized all have highlights in their eyes, a standard trick of fancy portraiture; in all the others Rembrandt lets the eyes go strangely matte, emphasizing mood and a certain remove from the viewer.)

Rembrandt was at his acknowledged best in portraiture. Even in his biblical dramas, the credibly expressive faces are what really make the pictures work. The late paintings of apostles and saints that are in this exhibition distill the portrait-principle in Rembrandt's art, and present it undiluted by any reference to a single paying sitter, or by the distractions of lively storytelling. Just when the spendthrift artist most needed to make sales, that is, he turned to his portrait mode at its most pure.

For all the sacred names in their titles, the pictures in this exhibition aren't most notable for how hard they try to illustrate the stories of the saints they show; they're notable for how weakly Rembrandt makes the attempt. His self-portrait, for instance, would be just like all the many others that he made, if it weren't for the glimpse of a sword hilt -- the conventional sign of a Saint Paul -- that peeks out from his shirt.

The show's two Bartholomews wouldn't be identifiable as such if it weren't for the sharpened knife that each of the figures holds, a bare reminder of the fact that the saint was killed by being flayed alive. (The emphatically loose skin on the Getty version may be intended as another tiny hint at the figure's identity.) The saintly narrative is so barely present in these pictures that the Getty canvas was for years described as "Rembrandt's Cook."

Many of the other paintings in the show got similarly modest titles attached to them in earlier days. Most of their sacred subjects were only identified at all by modern scholars -- Rembrandt's well-known "Falconer" became "Saint Bavo" only in the 1970s -- and a few are still in some debate. Another picture in this exhibition, said to be of an "Evangelist," may simply be a standard portrait of some man with a book. Researchers have only recently begun to claim that a gorgeous, informal portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt's last companion, may be meant to depict her as the mother of Christ. That's the identification that gets her into this show of "religious portraits," but it may not be the one that survives in the long run.

My point isn't that the religious labels are wrong for these pictures. It's that Rembrandt made such a meager effort to make them stick. I would say that the religious subjects, pretty standard for the era, are a pretext Rembrandt used to craft a pile of portrait-style pictures with broad market appeal.

Please don't get me wrong: By insisting on Rembrandt's interest in the market and sales, I'm not for a moment implying that he's any less great an artist than everyone has always said he was, or that the pictures in this show are less than wonderful.

For one thing, in Rembrandt's own day the market value of art was considered a sure sign of its importance and excellence.

In a fictional boasting match between a painter and a number of other Dutch professionals, published in a treatise on art in 1642, the painter asserts his superiority by insisting that no poet can earn as much as he, and that no wealthy merchant can control his commodity's supply the way a painter can.

As Alpers has suggested, Rembrandt's goal was to identify art with capitalism's new, freewheeling values, based on merit and worth rather than a fixed order of established prestige. The market would let him leave behind the old model of the painter as a servant, however honored, working at the bidding of a wealthy or aristocratic patron. In the newly mercantile society of 17th-century Holland, believing in the virtues of pure profit and trade put you out on society's cutting edge.

It's not as though Rembrandt was selling out, glutting the market with fast-moving pap that any hack could have churned out. He based his sales strategy on his ability to craft a product unrivaled by his peers -- or by almost any other artist before his day or since. The brand that he was pushing was all about an ultra-rarefied, specialized, connoisseur's taste, and the supreme skill it took to satisfy it.

Just when other successful artists had abandoned brushy, expressive painting in favor of a slick high realism, Rembrandt insisted more than ever on his status as a virtuoso paint slinger. He already throws some moments of aggressive brushiness into his self-portrait as Saint Paul. But a picture such as that Epinal "Virgin of Sorrows" is almost entirely frantic brushwork, nearly at the expense of legibility. It is Rembrandtism taken almost to the point of parody -- a Hummer's deluxe branding used for an absurd stretch limo.

One art theorist of Rembrandt's day insisted that a good painting should be like a window onto the world, without a trace of the artist's hand or manner in it. That's just the road Rembrandt refused to take.

Instead, he gambled that the flourishing Dutch art market would reward his radically identifiable, independent-minded paintings -- and that the market would prove their intrinsic worth by paying fortunes for them, as Alpers has argued. His move didn't pay off for him: Capitalism was more conservative a force than he'd imagined. But in the long run, it sure paid off for us.