The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  43 Johannes Vermeer, Woman Tuning a Lute, c. 1665, oil on canvas.

  The prominence of black cloth is not surprising, since bolts of fabric, and yarn, were a large part of Holland’s international trade. A special committee of the Drapers’ Guild certified the quality of blue and black cloth before attaching the small lead seal of approval. Rembrandt painted a group portrait of six of these Staalmeesters in clothes and hats of the deepest black, perhaps with a witty pleasure in seeing a person wear the goods he also guarantees.4 Again, in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, there is clear pleasure in the fine, jet-black clothing worn by Dr Tulp, and by all but one of his seven colleagues or pupils (illus. 44). Their blacks, and snow-white pleated collars, contrast beautifully with the grey-green pallor of the cadaver, whose flayed fingers flex as Dr Tulp plucks the tendons. Black here has not so much the bourgeois worth of the Staalmeesters: rather, it signals the dedicated scholar, in transit, we might say, between the devotion of the priest and the concentration of the scientist. The dark background is neither gloomy nor spiritual: rather its opacity returns us to the foreground – it gives us no option but to focus on the figures. The sitters may be Calvinists, but black here is secular. The effect is common in Rembrandt, but can be seen in other Dutch portraits, by for instance Jan Lievens.

  A proviso must be made, for if one looked only at portraits by Rembrandt, one would think everyone in Holland wore black all the time. Clearly this was not the case, since in genre scenes showing streets, fairgrounds and taverns the main colours are buff and brown, or the deeper sorts of green and blue (though in almost every picture someone will wear black). And when Rembrandt himself paints a kind of genre-scene – the greatest genre-scene of all, The Night Watch – his militia is in various colours. The leader, Captain Banning Cocq, wears black velvet with a scarlet sash; his lieutenant is luminous in buff, white and gold; while the lead arquebusier wears a crimson doublet and breeches. Others wear different blue-greys and browns.

  44 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, oil on canvas.

  Black was worn especially for responsible occasions, like a meeting of the deacons of a church, or of the officers of a trading guild, or of the rectors of a charitable institution. Clearly, posing for a portrait – especially a portrait by Rembrandt – could have a comparable importance. Black is of course compatible with the Calvinist or Mennonite faith, with its emphasis on solitary, contrite prayer; at the same time, a quality black quietly shows one’s wealth and standing. But black also suits the steady seriousness with which Rembrandt’s sitters gaze back to us. Seeing their gravity, we might think again of the Protestant ethos – the bleak churches with no stained glass, a cosmos stripped of saints and seraphim. But their seriousness may have had a more immediate source. Portrait painters will speak of a problem in their occupation: that as time passes the subject goes inert – the eyes dull, the body slumps – so, when painting the face at least, the artist must talk them back to life. It may be that Rembrandt’s own voice, and weighted gaze, caused his sitters to return the same look to him; so they face, as he faced, the serious side to life, especially after his bereavements, and quarrels with women, and his catastrophic bankruptcy and fall from fashion. Though we do not hear his words, we see the face his sitters saw when we look at his own self-portraits – where again he seems to think, and not only about tone and texture, but about the ways in which men and artists stumble, as well as about when and where to scumble.

  As to his dark backgrounds, they may be simply that – a foil to the foreground – as when he paints a neutral black behind a snub-nosed kitchenmaid leaning on a window-sill. In his early work he could be facile, adding black to turn up the emotional pitch. He used the same elderly model for St Paul, St Peter (in prison), for Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jersusalem. This old man, who may have been a relative, has a lean, lined, long-nosed face; he looks pensive, weary, seasoned, kindly – and very little like a Hebrew prophet, or early-Christian evangelist. The drama – the pretence of intensity – is made by the exaggerated chiaroscuro. Here we see the soft side of Rembrandt, and may recall how pious bourgeoisies love to reward sentimental art.

  I realize I may seem arbitrary in this chapter in attributing different meanings to the black backgrounds, in different paintings, which may in themselves be nearly identical flatnesses of paint. But we do give the dark a different value if we see in front of it a child’s face in a window-frame, a person who looks deeply depressed, or a frolicking skeleton. Similarly the choice is partly ours when we read blackness as receding space, or as enclosure. In Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Proserpina, the entire right-hand side of the painting is black or near-black against the strong sunlight that falls on Pluto, who thrusts his hand under Proserpina’s skirt while the needle-toothed lion-face on his chariot grimaces into the darkness (illus. 45). We could say the blackness is simply blackness, and still we associate it with Pluto’s Underworld and death, while the bright light on Proserpina, as she pushes and claws the rapist’s face, is life and spring in defeat.

  More hideously eloquent is the blackness engulfing The Blinding of Samson, in which a determined soldier screws a Javanese ‘kris’ with a rippling blade hard into Samson’s eye socket, while Samson’s foot, flying up in the air, clenches its toes in the extreme of agony (illus. 46). Other soldiers lug Samson’s chains with a desperation equal to his rage to be free, while a soldier in red with a brutish face pokes a halberd at Samson’s other eye with the look of a lout goading penned cattle. Delilah makes away with sparkling shears, holding high the chestnut mist of Samson’s hair. Blackness surrounds them: it could be the dark of blindness, or of atrocity (that word coming from the Latin ater, black). Or we might ask where events are occurring, for we seem not to be in a house or a tent but in a cave: a round, dark hollow with a round entry also, through which light enters – not unlike an eye socket with the eye taken out. In which case the darkness would indeed be blindness, though we see all too clearly the destruction of sight.

  THE BLACK ON Rembrandt’s canvases is lamp-black, made by pounding with linseed oil the greasy soot of burned tar. Rembrandt’s mastery extended to another black, that of ink. ‘Indian ink’ was available then, though Rembrandt preferred not to use it for drawing; he liked the warm tones of bistre and brown ink. But his etchings are not printed in sepia; they are made with thick black printing ink (which might be of burned vinewood, bound in gum arabic and linseed oil, with iron or copper sulphate as the drying agent).

  45 Rembrandt, The Abduction of Proserpina, c. 1632, oil on panel.

  If we pause to follow Rembrandt through the successive blacks of the etching process, we shall see him hold up a copper plate, polished on one side. He waves its underside over a candle flame until it warms. Then he strokes the plate with a cake of semi-transparent stuff which melts across the metal. When this has cooled and hardened – it is the ‘etching ground’ – he waves the plate again, shiny side down, over the tip of the candle flame where smoke begins. When the metal is black with soot, he lays it down, takes a needle set in a wooden handle, and begins to draw in the night-black surface. He works in the negative, exposing the copper in thin, shining lines which will later print black. Unlike the copper itself, which an engraver must dig with a burin, the etching ground offers no resistance. It is like drawing with a biro on waxed paper, so the most perfect control of the hand is needed. But he is Rembrandt, he has that.

  When the drawing is made, he lowers the plate into a tray of shallow acid. Blinking at the fumes, he strokes the sunken plate with a feather, removing the tiny bubbles which gather along the lines as they are eaten – ‘etched’ – by the acid. Then he takes the plate out, cleans it and inspects the thin lines the acid has bitten. He – or an apprentice – warms the plate over the candle again, and rubs hard into it a thickly concentrated printing ink. On the hot metal the dense ink liquifies, and runs into the etched grooves, so the whole plate is shining black with ink. Now once more
he cleans the plate, with rags from the bench beside him, while a pile of blackened rags grows on the other side, perhaps in a basket. Again he holds up shining copper, with the lines of half-congealed ink glistening in the grooves. Only now can he lay it on the bed of the press, and on top of it a dampened sheet of paper, and on top of that blankets to spread the pressure. He screws down the press to its hardest thrust, then unscrews it, and rolls the blankets back. Very carefully he peels back the paper, and lays it on the bench. Finally he sees the ‘etching’ – where, in places, the densest-woven webs of line build people, things, in lustrous black. To make another print, all the inking and wiping must be done again – well, the apprentices may do that.

  46 Rembrandt, The Blinding of Samson, 1636, oil on canvas, detail.

  47 Rembrandt, The Omval, 1645, etching.

  Inspecting his print, he may take pleasure again in the way each etched line, fine as an eyelash, has exactly the fluidity, the delicate curl, which it had when he drew it with his needle. In engraving proper there is not that sensitivity, since one pushes against resisting metal – which is why engravers first began to use etching, as a short cut toward the finished print. Also that is why he will etch, not engrave. So one shallow hairline makes the surface of water, another clumps leaves, while a handful of firmer, square-set lines give the back of the man who stands on the riverbank (illus. 47).

  In this art, his genius is sure. No etching is maudlin, as his painted crucifixions have sometimes been. He loves black paint and he loves rich colour: but in ink on paper he never fails (see illus. 63).

  SINCE 1455, WHEN the Gutenberg Bible began to be printed, black-and-white has filled the world: in black clothes and white ruffs, in chequerboard floor tiles, in house-fronts of plaster with beams stained black, in harpsichord keys of ebony and ivory, but above all in black ink on white paper. In hand-bills, broadsheets, books and above all endless Bibles, together with woodcuts, ‘dutchwork’ pictures – that is, copperplate engravings – and etchings that pretend they are engravings: for those who cannot read can see, so every eye drinks black and white. Often the lines could not be delicate, for hundreds of copies must be printed; but firm lines may have beauty too, like the beauty of an elegant, spare, clean penmanship.

  It was part of Rembrandt’s downright genius to foreground the material stuff of art, so we see the latent visual pun – the visual equivocation – which gives pictures life. We see an etched line curve on paper, and it grows and waves like grass in a breeze. Or, in his oil paintings, we relish a kneaded thick impasto, and also read it as the frogging of a cloak. In A Woman Bathing in a Stream, Hendrickje’s white shift is brushed with nearly dry paint, so we see the paint-crust on the canvas, and at the same time see light cotton – which she raises, stepping gingerly forward, up to her calves in water (illus. 48). She has a soft but also hesitant smile as she tests her footing on what may be a riverbed. But would a riverbank be piled with drapery? The water is too big to be a bath in a house. Nor could she appear nearly naked at a quayside, though there seems to be masonry behind her legs. We meet her in an imaginary space. The water, on the picture’s right side, extends we do not know how far; and this water is black.

  ‘Black water’ can have sombre meanings, as it does in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, but in pictures water’s blackness may represent depth, and also its odd, fugitive materiality. Water can smother us, or disperse into the finest spray. Also black water is clear water, for dust or scum would catch the light. Black water has no boundary: we are unsure of its surface and cannot plumb its depth. In A Woman Bathing in a Stream the colours are warm earth-colours, while Hendrickje’s exposed skin invites us to feel the delicious coolness. In this black water there is nothing sinister: it has the darkness of the strangeness of its nature as an element.5

  It was a different black water that Caravaggio had painted in his Narcissus (illus. 49). Though is it water? The surface is flat and hard as glass – but black glass, and thick, or solid to a depth. Or might it be a heavier fluid, more inert, like mercury? In it this young man contemplates, breathlessly, a shadow-figure who looks back. Mirrors, too, when Caravaggio paints them, are black as if made of obsidian. See a reflection, his art says, and you will meet a shadowy doppelgänger: not the self you know but your occluded self, obscure with menace. As if the psyche – he might say the soul – were a pothole of black water, and far from transparent.

  48 Rembrandt, A Woman Bathing in a Stream, 1655, oil on panel.

  49 Caravaggio, Narcissus, c. 1598–9, oil on canvas.

  And for an uncanny encounter in Rembrandt’s art, there is the portrait of his close friend the melancholy poet Jeremias de Decker (illus. 50). The painting is strange because it is so black, so we only partly make out the edges of hat and coat against the blackness everywhere. An arrowhead of shirt-collar is brilliant white, and warm light touches a third of Decker’s face, with its sombre, sad, good-willed expression. But the shadow of the hat-brim falls oddly on his right eye, across the iris below the pupil (and his left eye is dark), as though he stood just beyond the border of sight. Decker was dying, and died before the picture (a gift of friendship) was finished. Black here is death, but death seen in a still grief, as one gazes after a friend who has already ‘passed over’, and who for a little may mutely look back from within the shadow that takes him away.6

  50 Rembrandt, The Poet Jeremias de Decker, 1666, oil on panel.

  The question has been asked whether Rembrandt was a melancholic, and showed this when he painted himself with shadow blacking half his face.7 One resists this idea, I think: he seems too much to relish the substantial stuff of life, even when he paints his own broad, subtle, doughy face. But Jeremias de Decker was known for his melancholy, in his life and in his verse. It perhaps is time – or overdue – to turn from black surfaces to the primal ‘black stuff’ within us. Melan choly, the Greeks called it: black bile, which also is melancholia.

  51 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving.

  SIX

  Black Choler

  THE COLOUR BLACK has been identified with frightening things beyond our power – the darkness of the night, the Devil, evil. But also, from ancient times, there has been a powerful will to find a blackness not only outside us, but inside us also. Sin, in the Bible, may be called a stain, which makes it sound external. But the stain is on our soul, not on our body: in other words, it is within. Apart from sin, for many hundreds of years there was another black substance discovered inside us. The Greeks called it melan choly, the Romans atra bilis. In England we first called it ‘black choler’ from the Greek, and later ‘black bile’ from the Latin. But we still use the old Greek name when we speak of ‘melancholy’ or ‘melancholia’. This is now another name for clinical depression, but for the Greeks, too, black bile could cause depression, as well as other deformities of body and mind.

  One may speak of a will to find blackness within, because black bile is an invention, and its blackness another imaginary colour, like that of sin. For there is no black bile. The only black substance a physiologist will find in the body is clotted blood. But for 2,000 years physicians and scientists believed, or rather knew, that black bile not only existed, but could control our well-being. Their ideas were not only theoretical. They made dissections, more often of animals than of people, and probed the look, smell and even the taste of the things they found. Black bile was one of the body’s four ‘humours’. The others were not elusive: they were blood, which was red and plentiful; and phlegm; and yellow bile. This is the bile we know by its burning, gagging bitterness if even a few drops rise to our throat. Our liver produces up to a litre of it per day; as a digestive fluid it breaks down fats and releases the vitamins soluble in them. Bile can be of different colours: brown, acid yellow, green as grass. It can also be dark, in vomit, but it is not black.

  Black bile was found, in other words, because of a powerful wish to find it. There needed to be four humours, because it had been known since Pythagoras that the
universe was ordered by fours. There were four elements (earth, air, fire, water), and four qualities (dry, cold, hot, wet), and four domains (earth, sky, sun, sea). The philosopher Empedocles explicated this order, building on separate earlier ideas as to what the fundamental form of matter might be: the candidates had been water (Thales), air (Anaximenes) and fire (Heraclitus). The new fourfold order must extend to the human body also, and the breakthrough is recorded in a text, ‘Of the Nature of Man’, which is attributed to a practising Greek doctor, Hippocrates (c. 460 to c. 370 BCE) or to his son-in-law Polybus (fl. c. 400 BCE). In this text the humours were formalized, and aligned with the elements and the qualities, also the four seasons and the four ages of man (and incidentally with the four colours of Apelles). Phlegm was white, and cold and wet, and nearest to winter and water; blood was red, and hot and wet, and nearest to spring and air; yellow bile was hot and dry, and nearest to summer and to fire; and black bile was cold and dry and nearest to autumn and to earth.1

  The humours were said to determine our temperament, and we still use words reflecting this system if we call a person who is too positive ‘sanguine’ (overactive blood), or an unresponsive person ‘phlegmatic’ (excess of phlegm), or an irascible person ‘choleric’ or ‘bilious’ (overactive yellow choler) or a depressive ‘melancholy’ (over-active black bile). Of these four humours, black bile was the most dangerous. For while blood, phlegm and yellow bile were tied to particular dispositions and illnesses, black bile could have a catastrophic effect on one’s mood, one’s character, and one’s fate. It had an intrinsic morbidity, and its pathology was thought to cover stuttering, ulcers, epilepsy, hallucinations and depression. The excess of it caused lunacy, and self-destructive activities ranging from suicide to bad marriages. Again, in these effects, one finds a will to see things as they ‘ought’ to be: because black bile was black it must cause diseases, and a cause of diseases would – surely? – be black.