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Rembrandt: The Late Works is the experience of a lifetime. It is the first time these astounding masterpieces have been brought together in a single show, and given their immeasurable value – from The Jewish Brideto Bathsheba, Lucretia, The Anatomy Lesson and The Syndics, from the images of sons and lovers to the inexhaustibly profound self-portraits – it may well be the last.
The Rembrandt it reveals is dark, impassioned, magnificently defiant, at the pitch of his originality – and bewilderingly unexpected. Partly this comes from the revelation of many unfamiliar loans from abroad, but mainly from the spectacle of his irrepressible power and variety. You think you know late Rembrandt from the mortally tragic self-portrait that opens the show, flown in from Washington, the face looming out of darkness in a great build-up of brushstrokes describing untold nuances from dignity to foolishness, fear, endurance and loss. It ought to be the final face, given the full sorrow it inspires and expresses. But Rembrandt is nowhere near the end: it is 1659, he is only 53 and there is still the most prolific of all decades to come.
As far the Dutch were concerned, however, Rembrandt’s glory was over. His rough magic was out of fashion as tastes changed to a smoother Flemish style. Rembrandt was wayward, abrasive, widowed, bankrupted by the purchase of a ludicrously expensive house in Amsterdam, shamed by the birth of an illegitimate child, oppressed by notorious debts. His intensely successful studio had closed, students and collectors were looking elsewhere; yet he concedes no ground, never alters his way of working to pay off the creditors.
The truth of this is shockingly apparent from a vast and confrontational painting never shown in Britain before, The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis. Commissioned to celebrate an early Dutch uprising against the Romans, the picture is a shadow play of warriors ranged along a table that resembles a giant lightbeam, illuminating their raw and primitive faces from below. Claudius Civilis towers above them, one empty eye-socket gaping in the darkness, a monstrous figure anticipating late Goya.
The picture was made for Amsterdam’s new town hall; the burghers took it down almost immediately. Numerous tactful explanations have since been proposed, but paintings are their own evidence and this one is wildly outlandish, coarse, frightening, painted in bursts of impasto that glimmer strangely in the ambient light. Rembrandt imagines the past as less heroic than fearful. He was never paid for the work.
You see this daring all through the show: Juno is a heavyweight bully of a goddess; Jesus is a winter baby, weak and cold, staring pensively out at the Christmas world; the apostle Paul is a vulnerable old veteran in a shabby cap (modelled by Rembrandt himself). His religious art is radically human, his most ethereal visions have their roots in this earthly world.
A rare and acute insight into his mind comes with a group of drawings rapidly sketched from life (and death). In 1664, Rembrandt took a boat out of town to the gallows where a teenager had been hanged for accidentally killing her landlady. Holes in her socks, young features barely formed by time, the girl dangles flaccid and forlorn from the gibbet. Rembrandt’s image is tiny but overwhelming. What took him there? The same compulsive passion for the world in all its randomness, injustice, reality and beauty, that draws him to contemplate a sleepy nude, an inquisitive child or his own ruined face, an almost militant naturalism in every painting.
Walking in the open countryside, working in the fire-lit studio, visiting friends: this show gives a far greater sense of Rembrandt moving through his life than any before. Convention has him as an artist perpetually alone in a brown study, perhaps because he comes before us this way in the self-portraits, but even at his death Rembrandt’s much-forgotten daughter Cornelia was with him. There are many late portraits of friends, and though he may have owed a fortune to the elderly man in the eponymous portrait from the Hague, the brushwork is so tender, so goodly in its affectionate appraisal of the man’s plump and rubicund face, one can only feel the mutual empathy.
We see Rembrandt as the outstanding chronicler of the human face, daily altered by experience. Jacob Trip, industrialist, appears as a wizened but hawkish potentate in his 80s; not a spent force so much as a figure of terrific authority, given stature by his pose, but also by the intense massing of paint in the shrewd face. His wife Margarethe, sober and old, quietly rising above the harsh ruff encasing her neck, is a portrait of extraordinary dignity.
Tenderest of all is The Jewish Bride, the man and woman whose names are lost but whose love survives. One sees them as distinct individuals, profoundly observed with their generous faces, but that loving gesture – his hand on her breast, hers gently covering it – seems to exceed portraiture so that the picture becomes a secular altarpiece, an inspiration to patience, humility and kindness.
The man’s sleeve, with its heavy jewellery of impasto nubs catching the light, is one of the most famous passages of painting in art and to see it here is to understand why people crossed Europe to witness the way Rembrandt turned paint into gold. You see this everywhere, in the thick traceries that make embroidery seem to glitter, in the way he makes paint mimic the nap of velvet, the soft weight of flesh, the elusive haar of fine hair. He uses the brush handle to etch tendrils into still-wet paint, smears the pigment with his fingers to make hands, scumbles and smudges it to get the tangible surface of life. Rembrandt fashions our human clay, and he shows the workings of his art.
This is put to exceptional effect in the self-portraits, of course, but also in the late parables and legends, particularly the version of Lucretia from Washington. Lucretia, raped by an Etruscan nobleman, would rather stab herself than live with dishonour. Rembrandt paints her, knife in hand, in a kind of fugue state as fate comes towards her. The picture has two radically different registers: a smooth pale haziness for the hallucination in which she finds herself; and the thick, black, heavily worked shiv sharpened to its horrifying tip, as if to pierce both the dream and the sleepwalking body.
The picture is intensely moving; so are they all. Rembrandt’s imagination can get into the heart of any human life. He paints the darkest deeds and the deepest emotions, the highest grace and the worst sorrow, and he finds mercy for all, including himself. Rembrandt in the dying months, the last light in his eyes, still makes himself felt in the astonishing brushwork – distressed, perfunctory, thickening in skeins or wearing fine as skin, slow, pensive, or majestically resurgent, always rising to meet the human condition.
The final paintings are monuments of truth. Dark and knotted images that close in on many faces, they make you feel you are seeing these saints and martyrs and humble people in person as well as in paint. From them we learn what it is to be alone, broken-hearted, stricken, contemplative, if we don’t already know it; the connection is deep and immediate, the sense of intimacy as profound as when Rembrandt paints himself. It hardly seems possible that the cathartic power of the opening self-portraits could be sustained through the show but so it continues to the very end.
