Two big things happened to Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in the year 1628. His wife, Eva, died, and he was named professor of anatomy. His wife’s death was a blow, but the tradition was that one didn’t mourn long; he remarried less than two years later, to a woman he had known since they were children living in the same street. The anatomy appointment meant that henceforth he would conduct the city’s annual public dissection of a human corpse in a building on the New Market square that had originally been one of the medieval gateways into the city but that now served as both a weigh station for goods transported by ship into the city and, in its upper reaches, as the anatomical theater of the surgeons’ guild. The dissections were for the benefit of medical men, of course, but they were also open to the general public. And, again in that way the golden age had of confounding things we keep in separate compartments, the dissections were scientific but also religious and even theatrical events. Prayers were said at the beginning for the soul of the person whose body was about to be sliced into. At the end, there was a feast, and everyone got drunk. More than a few people, in their cups, must have tried to make off with body parts, for the city saw the need to issue a decree that anyone stealing bits of corpses from the public dissections would be fined six guilders.
The anatomy appointment cast Dr. Tulp as genuinely a public figure and cemented his position as the premier man of medical science in Amsterdam, perhaps in the whole Dutch Republic. It also fed into his weakness for self-promotion. During the course of his lifetime Tulp commissioned, by my count, eight full-scale portraits of himself, one life-size marble bust, and a gold and silver medallion featuring his image. An officially important subgenre of the portrait was the group portrait. It seems obvious that, on accepting the role of professor of anatomy, Tulp would back the idea of commissioning a group portrait showing him as the head of the city’s men of medicine, sagely instructing them in the miraculous inner workings of the human body. And Tulp being Tulp, it should be no common group portrait, for a number of important vectors came into alignment in it. It had to showcase the lead role the city saw itself taking in advancing science. It should also identify clearly, and flatteringly, the other scientists of the guild. And Tulp had ideas about how he himself should be portrayed. Somehow the painting had to be both deeply traditional and clearly modern. It should be a serious piece of propaganda for Amsterdam, for science, and of course for Dr. Tulp. But where could the surgeons’ guild find an artist capable of capturing all of this?
They found him in Leiden. That is to say, he had been born there, the son of a miller and a baker’s daughter: working-class parents who wanted to lift their son up a rung, even though (or perhaps because) he was the ninth of their ten children. They sent him to a prestigious school where he would study Latin and get onto the track of a civil servant. But all he wanted to do was paint and draw, and finally they gave in and apprenticed him to a local master. They had given him a name that was unusual even then (a search of Amsterdam’s burial register up to 1811, for instance, turns up only eight individuals with the name or variations thereof, and none before him). So some people may have snickered at being introduced: who calls their son Rembrandt? The last name that he began attaching to his paintings in 1632—van Rijn—reflected, of course, the river that shaped much of the country, but more particularly it referred to the name of the mill where his father made his living.
He had a hint of extra fleshiness as a young man, as well as frizzled gingery hair and, needless to say, explosive talent. He was passionate: religiously devout and hungry to understand what seemed beyond understanding, the swirling tub of human emotion. His goal, he wrote (the only time he committed himself in writing to a singular purpose), was to express “the greatest and most natural emotion.”
He developed a dexterity with what were called historical paintings. We would call them religious paintings (though some were of mythological rather than biblical subjects), but they were fundamentally different from those of Michelangelo, Raphael, and other earlier artists. Those artists were commissioned by churches and their work was installed behind altars: the artists were workers in the business, the industry, of religion. But these were different times, and this was a different place. The Dutch provinces had broken free of Catholicism and were on a new trajectory, in the service of individuals, which encouraged them in turn to be interested in individuality: their own and that of their subjects. The clients of Dutch artists were not priests and popes but herring wholesalers and flax merchants.
And yet, those merchants were pious men. They and their wives wanted paintings that helped to instruct them in the history behind the Bible: they wanted the stories in living color, to be displayed in their own homes, for themselves and their children. So they commissioned vivid, twisting depictions of the angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, the blinding of Samson, Jacob being shown Joseph’s bloody coat, and Christ driving the money changers from the temple.
Rembrandt became very good at producing such scenes, and at pouring fresh drama into the traditional molds. Along the way, he began to do something else. He started putting himself in the compositions. This in itself was not new: artists had been inserting their likenesses into canvases for centuries. Usually, though, the figure was in the back, set off from the action, gazing at the viewer, as a kind of extra signature and a way to deepen the engagement, to say: Yes, you and I both know this is a painting; I hope you like my work. Rembrandt was doing something more: retrofitting himself into the psychological action. In his Stoning of Saint Stephen, his earliest signed painting, done before he had turned twenty, at least three figures seem to be portraits of the artist as a young man: the saint himself, his principal tormenter (who holds a rock the size of a bread loaf over the martyr’s head), and a figure who, in the traditional style, looks out at the viewer.
What was going on here? From our psychological perspective, we might say the artist was making a statement or inquiry about himself, the sort of thing that most people at the threshold of adulthood do. He was wondering who he was. Am I a saint or a guilty sinner? Am I someone who violently refutes the manifestation of God’s grandeur? The third painted self, in the traditional stance of staring out at the viewer, which is tucked precisely in between the other two, seems to be posing this quandary, asking the viewer to help him figure himself out. If this is true, then the artist was doing something that is commonplace now but had rarely been done before: using his art for his own emotional needs.
This idea comes a bit further into focus when you put the triple self-portrait against the backdrop of other work Rembrandt was then doing. Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five he made at least twenty self-portraits, in an intensity of guises and techniques. In some of the etchings his face is so engulfed in shadow it all but demands you to read it as a reflection of inner darkness. The art historian H. Perry Chapman says of this series, “In their extraordinary psychological presence we can recognize the initiation of one of the most concerted efforts at self-representation in the history of art.”
Rembrandt was not the only one staring at himself. As Dutch society moved in its own direction, away from church and monarchy, portrait painting became an industry. Painters created portraits of beggars with as much care as, a generation earlier, someone like Rubens devoted to kings. Gabriel Metsu, who likewise trained in Leiden before moving to Amsterdam, specialized, as did his Delft contemporary Johannes Vermeer, in genre paintings that were less portraits than posed individuals: a woman holding a sick child on her lap, an old man selling poultry on a street corner. People loved these manicured real-world scenes, dickered for them, hung them in their homes and their workshops, as if to say: Look at us! Still lifes were part of the same trend. They were frankly not devotional art but decorative art. Maria van Oosterwijk was that rare thing: a highly successful woman artist. She specialized in richly rendered still lifes, usually of flowers, and her customers included European heads of state. A portrait of her done by Wallerant Vaillant, a French-born po
rtraitist who also worked in Amsterdam, shows an attractive, elegantly dressed woman; she is posed with paintbrushes and palette in one hand and an open book on her lap, indicating her passions. The frustration is that so little is known about her life, other than that she started her career in Delft and ended it in Amsterdam. The lack of information may have to do with her sex: as a woman, she was not allowed to join the painters’ guild.
But what made Rembrandt stand out from the rest of these highly skilled and successful artists? Why did the illustrious Dr. Tulp look to Leiden in search of the man for the job of portraying him and his fellow surgeons? Rembrandt’s fame as an artist had to do with technical brilliance and an inventive, theatrical approach. He was a master realist. But it’s fair to say that what truly struck, even stunned, his contemporaries was his seeming to have turned his subjects inside out. He didn’t just paint what they looked like; he painted who they were. This was something new, as was the desire for it. You can hear that shock of the new expressed in the slightly dazed-sounding amazement with which his friend Constantijn Huygens—poet and secretary to the current Prince of Orange, who became his early patron and booster—tried to explain Rembrandt. The artist, Huygens wrote, “gives himself wholly over to dealing with what he wants to express from within himself.” Three and a half centuries later, the art critic Robert Hughes said much the same thing: Rembrandt is “the supreme depictor of inwardness, of human thought.” This still strikes a viewer today, though we may have to excavate some layers of psychological sophistication that have built up over the centuries in order to appreciate what a revelation his painted faces would have been to the Dutch of the seventeenth century. And, once again, it’s curious to ponder the medieval/modern split of the golden age Dutch: why the staid burghers would have experienced such naked interiority not as shockingly inappropriate or indecent but as a wonder to grasp at and savor.
The man who seems to have brought Rembrandt to Amsterdam was Hendrick van Uylenburgh, an art dealer who had apparently bought paintings from the artist in Leiden. Rembrandt moved into Van Uylenburgh’s studio late in 1631 or just into the year 1632, at age twenty-five, and not long after walked three or four minutes down the wintry street to the Waag, the old gatehouse and current weigh station, whose upper floor housed the surgeon’s anatomy theater. (The city’s annual dissection was always held in winter so as to slow decay and stench.) There he observed Dr. Tulp demonstrating to his fellow surgeons upon the body of Adriaen Adriaenszoon (aka Aris the Kid), an executed thief who, coincidentally, had also emigrated from Leiden to Amsterdam. The resulting painting is one of the most admired and written-about of all time. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp has been restaged, cast into fiction, anatomized by surgeons, dissected for hidden meanings. The postures of the men depicted, the features of the corpse (its curiously elegant fingers), the hank of tendon that Tulp stretches upward with the forceps, the position of the fingers of his other hand (with which, it has been suggested, he is showing the others the finger movement that the tendons in question effect), the swaths of darkness around the perimeter of the canvas and the glow emanating from the men’s straining faces and, most of all, from the dead body, even the book that stands opened at one end of the painting: every element has been analyzed. As a whole the painting gives a frank statement of a time and place and conviction. We here in Amsterdam, it says, are committed to science.
For all the attention that has been paid to the painting over the centuries, we have no direct sources on how it was originally received. It seems safe to infer that it caused a sensation. We can guess that because immediately after the painting’s unveiling Rembrandt became famous in Amsterdam. Everyone wanted to commission him; never mind that he raised his fee to a hundred guilders a portrait, about half the annual salary of a skilled laborer. Amsterdammers were entranced by the way he had with individuals, the way he seemed to know and be able to communicate to posterity just who they were. And thanks to the fact that he could work with astonishing speed he became a masterpiece factory; in one two-year period alone he painted forty-two exquisite, fully realized portraits, not to mention creating dozens of etchings and drawings. A shipbuilder named Jan Rijksen and his wife, Griet Jans, were among those who stood in line following the unveiling of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp to pose for Rembrandt. Dirck Janszoon Pesser, a brewer, and his wife, Haesje, commissioned a pair of portraits. So did a furniture maker named Herman Doomer and his wife, Baertjen, and cloth dealer Nicolaes van Bambeek and his wife, Agatha. All of these people, and many others, are centuries dead and gone, and none made what you would call a lasting contribution. Yet they exist. They have Wikipedia entries. They live on canvases hanging in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Buckingham Palace in London, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Each of these human beings facing you as you stand in those museums has a past and present. They have interior lives. The subtitle of this book declares it to be about the subject of liberalism. I haven’t used the word in a number of pages, but this is the essence of it: the emergence of the individual, with a self-consciousness, with the freedom to do, to expand, to make money, to become, to forge a career, to win fame, to change his or her identity even. When you try to describe it in words it comes across as an abstraction: the origin of liberalism in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. But it’s actually a simple thing, which is on display in the great museums of the world.
The art historian Ann Jensen Adams relates the rise of portraits in this period of Dutch history to people’s seeing themselves in new, individual identities in a society that had thrown off the old rules, that was no longer bound by church and monarchy. There was a new social mobility. Not coincidentally there appeared in Amsterdam a new kind of literature: self-help books, telling you how to behave as a wealthy merchant, what was the appropriate form of civic-mindedness, how to be a burgher’s wife. This was a new society in the making, and its members were inventing the rules. And, sober and pious though they remained, they were fascinated by who they were becoming.
It may not be coincidental that René Descartes, the so-called father of modern philosophy and founder, in terms of philosophical underpinnings, of the modern self—whose Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) formulation reoriented all knowledge on the individual self—arrived in Amsterdam at almost the same time as Rembrandt and lived in the city for much of the next five years. I say it may not be a coincidence because Amsterdam had become a magnet for people of a modernizing bent: for liberals. Its burghers may have gone around in sober black coats with somehow even more sober white lace collars, but (again, the whiplash contrast) it was simultaneously a hotbed of reform and experimentation. While elsewhere in Europe the Catholic Church and various monarchs were inhibiting scientific tinkering, here people were grinding lenses for telescopes and perfecting the microscope. There were forty publishers in the city, and dozens more in other Dutch cities, and they were the most liberal—and the freest from constraint—in Europe. Descartes had come to the Dutch provinces to have published what would become arguably the touchstone of modernity, A Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. The manuscript of Galileo’s Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, which was too incendiary for other European countries, found a Dutch publisher in Leiden. The Blaeu family of cartographers, who served as mapmakers to the VOC, ran Europe’s biggest printing press on the Bloemgracht in Amsterdam, employing eighty men and cranking out ever-more-refined perspectives on the globe. Dutch presses published tracts written by opponents of both the English monarchy and the French king Louis XIV, literature that would have brought a death sentence to a publisher in England or France.
Descartes tramped around the city as awestruck as any tourist and provided a kind of advertisement for Amsterdam’s golden age when he wrote to a friend of the wonder of watching “ships arriving, laden with all the produce of the Indies and all the rarities of Europe.” He went so far
as to relate the various kinds of openness that the city fostered to the personal freedom he required: “Where else on earth could you find, as easily as you do here, all the conveniences of life and all the curiosities you could hope to see? In what other country could you find such complete freedom, or sleep with less anxiety, or find armies at the ready to protect you, or find fewer poisonings or acts of treason or slander?”
All of this boundary-breaking activity can be related to gedogen, the look-the-other-way form of tolerance that had guided Amsterdam in dealing with Anabaptists and other radicals back in the sixteenth century (and that still governs its approach to sex and drugs). And ultimately it relates back to water: to people who banded together to make their home out of what was once sea and in whom an ethic of cooperation became hardwired, so that tolerance of otherness trumped ideologies. At least much of the time.
Rembrandt may have been ambitious, but he was also a homebody. As far as we know, once he made the move from Leiden to Amsterdam he almost never left the city for the rest of his life. Not only that, but many of his dealings were confined within a very small area of the city center, really just a handful of blocks. He lived first in the Academy of Van Uylenburgh on the Breestraat. His first great commission was executed in the anatomy theater a few minutes away. After he married Saskia van Uylenburgh, a cousin of his boss and landlord, he and his wife moved a few blocks away, to a house on the Nieuwe Doelenstraat, on the site of what is today a big, modern café called De Jaren (where, coincidentally, I have written a good portion of this book). A minute’s stroll from there, across a little iron bridge, brings you to a handsome Renaissance-style building that was headquarters of the men who were appointed by the city to check the quality of cloth that was manufactured. A drab enough sounding occupation, but it says something about Amsterdam at the time that its commitment to quality control of products it shipped was such that these men warranted a group portrait. The result—The Staalmeesters (staal means “sample”)—has long been considered among Rembrandt’s greatest works, due in part to his having managed to bring energy and mystery to a subject that by rights should be crashingly dull. (The image was also translated into pop consciousness as the logo of the Dutch Masters cigar brand a century ago.)
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