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| Rembrandt van Rijn, Herman Doomer, 1640, Oil on Wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Thomas Lawrence and Workshop, John Julius Angerstein, circa 1816, Oil on Canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
I just want to alert my faithful readers (that would be me and maybe a relative or two) that I have done some much needed housekeeping on this blog. I had noticed that on other blogs about painting the images were larger and looked so much better. So after following a couple of exasperating false leads, I learned that Google had the answers for me all along in its “Customize” feature for Blogger templates. I made the sidebar width narrower so I could use extra-large images. Then I got rid of that annoying black border that was appearing around my images. Of course I should have been more attentive to such details in the first place, but I was impatient to finally get this self-indulgent blog of mine on the road. Caption spacing still needs work.
But I hate to waste a post on such mundane matters, so I’ll
tell you about two of my favorite portraits in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art: Rembrandt’s portrait of Herman Doomer, and Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait
of John Julius Angerstein.
For 15 years I was a part-time “Information Specialist” at
the museum’s Information Desk in the Great Hall. That means I told visitors where the closest
bathrooms were located and how they could get to the Roof Garden when it was
open during the warmer months. I worked
Friday and Saturday evenings, so sometimes I had to tell important visitors how
to get to the Trustee’s Dining Room for a celebratory dinner. And the string quartet then on the Balcony
Bar usually played what I called my favorite song, Jerome Kern’s “Look for the
Silver Lining.” I may be the least
likely advocate ever for the tender, hopeful message of that wonderful old song. Sometimes our evenings were enlivened when a
kid on a school trip from Kentucky got lost in the building and was left behind when the bus
took off, or someone had his wallet snatched and had absolutely no money to get
back home. On the honor system, Marty,
our kind-hearted supervisor, usually came through with a couple of bucks for
the subway. It was mostly a lot of fun –
the best part-time job I ever had. And I
had plenty of opportunities to view the two portraits.
I cannot tell you how many times I have stood in awe in
front of Herman Doomer, studying the
incredible mastery and mystery of the technique that had brought him to life
right before my eyes. I used to get so
annoyed to see visitors rushing past Herman to look at Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer
and one of his self-portraits in the same gallery.
Both those paintings are prime examples of his later exuberant, more
painterly style favored by the art historians and critics. The works are justifiably famous. In 1961, the Met paid $2.3 million to acquire
“Aristotle,” at the time a record price for a painting.
I’m personally more attracted to his earlier portraits,
which are so carefully crafted and solidly painted – you feel the actual weight
of the skull -- that they defy attempts by many artists to paint portraits in a
similar manner. His technique is
unfathomable. His sensitivity to the
expressive nuances of the human face was incredible. The copyists at the Museum often tackle Herman
Doomer because it’s such a perfect portrait to study. But copying this Rembrandt to get a fair
resemblance with your own method of paint handling misses the ineffable magic
of the original. Look a little closer at
my good friend Herman Doomer, an ebony worker and maker of fine cabinets, whose
son Lambert was Rembrandt’s pupil. Rembrandt
has captured Herman alive and breathing, his lips slightly parted, the barest
hint of a smile activating the facial muscles, as if he is ready to respond
with good humor to a comment the great Dutchman made while he was painting
him. The incredibly realistic modeling
of the pleasant, crinkly age lines around the eyes, the capturing of all the
subtle movement around the cheek and jawbone, and everything about this
portrait defies all rationale understanding. There are no flaws. None. How
did he do it? It may be the most lifelike portrait ever painted.
But let me tell you that most of the great paintings of the
past were not created with the goal of producing a flawless surface with no
brush strokes in evidence, something many of today’s painters think is essential. Drawing corrections and changes in concept
had to be incorporated in pursuit of the visual truth. The alterations were usually not “archival,”
a contemporary concern that is contributing to the decline of expressiveness in
the fine art of representational painting. It has been said that there isn’t any painting
in a museum that has not been restored at some point in its history, for better
or worse. The job for representational
painters was to get the painting to look like the real thing, using any means
at one’s disposal. Damn the consequences,
full speed ahead.
Because the surface of most oil paintings is not perfectly even
and because oil paint is a highly refractive medium, proper gallery or home lighting
is crucial to our fullest enjoyment of them.
One afternoon I sauntered over to European Paintings to say hello to
Herman. But much to my surprise, I found
he was looking terrible. The darkness
under the brim of his hat was picking up reflections from the ceiling spotlight
and showed some crazing of that thickly painted passage. This most assuredly did not go unnoticed by
the curators and, to my great relief, the angle of lighting was adjusted
properly the next time I visited him and he was again the perfect picture of
health.
Rembrandt and Lawrence understood very well that oil
paintings created indoors look best when viewed from the painter’s vantage
point and when light strikes them at the proper angle. Viewing a painting from the side is only fun
for painters who like to see evidence of the paint handling as revealed on the
reflective surface. Don’t quote my
quote, but I vaguely remember reading that Rembrandt told a patron interested
in picky details not to look too closely at his paintings because “oil paint
can be injurious to your health.” And
Sir Thomas used to visit the home of a client to determine the best place to
hang his portrait.
Lawrence’s
painting of John Julius Angerstein, a prominent financier and a founder of
Lloyd's of London, is another masterful portrait, the finest
one in the Museum representing the English school of portraiture. I guess I should mention here the famous
portrait from the Spanish school by Velazquez of his assistant Juan
de Pareja. But that painting has
gone through several conservation facelifts since coming to the Museum in 1971 at a purchase price of over
$5.5 million, at the time a record price for paintings sold at auction. At this point, who knows what it looked like originally?
As was noted by someone once, by the by, it was
Anthony Van Dyck, the brilliant Flemish painter, who taught the English
painters how to paint portraits. The
Museum’s portrait of Angerstein is one of several autograph replicas of a
portrait painted in 1816 and the Museum estimates its version was painted a few years
later. That doesn’t dim the luster of the
execution. It’s another living,
breathing masterpiece of the type known as “a speaking likeness.” The forthright gaze and the modeling of the
forehead by the subtle blending of the radiating central light is fabulous paint
handling. Lawrence
was a grandmaster of capturing subjects at their best. His portraits of women are so beautiful and charming
that you can’t help smiling when you view them.
I left the comfortable confines of New York City
a couple of years ago to take the train to New Haven
to view the Lawrence
retrospective at Yale. I was in heaven
for a couple of hours. I stared for 20
minutes at his self-portrait, pleading with him to give me some guidance in
this business of painting faces, which he excelled at. Alas, he was not forthcoming.
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| Sir Thomas Lawrence, Self-Portrait, circa 1825 |
