Rembrandt’s Hands

In honor of the visit by Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from Kenwood House in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York has hung a large gallery (614) almost entirely with large portraits by Rembrandt and his followers or workshop (the latter all indubitably purchased by American collectors and donated to the Met as actual “Rembrandts,” only to be subsequently downgraded). This gave me a rare chance to focus on a problem I first encountered a year ago when visiting the Frick Collection: the awkwardness of Rembrandt’s hands. A Rembrandt portrait is all about the face, and especially the eyes, so much so that the rest of the painting is often little more than background noise, albeit beautifully painted noise. But half the time there is another patch of light, drawing secondary attention to the hands, and the more I looked at Rembrandt’s hands, the more troubled I became.
Rembrandt’s magisterial self-portrait at the Frick Collection is very different from the Kenwood painting – the Frick’s is a “dress-up” portrait, while Kenwood’s is of the homely variety; but both are large, late and exquisitely painted, and each has its adherents as the world’s greatest self-portrait. What stopped me at the Frick, however, was not the sitter’s shrouded eyes or sumptuous dress, but his left hand. It was large, much too large, and the more I stared at it, the more I saw a lobster claw. Unlike the better-proportioned right hand, it seemed unattached to the body, jutting out from offstage. Nor was its enormous size explained by the laws of foreshortening. Judging from the sitter’s posture, the left hand was no closer to us than the right hand, yet it was twice as large. Furthermore, its grasp on the staff it held was tenuous at best. I stopped a Frick curator giving a tour, but she had no answer for this anomaly. When I showed the picture to a friend, he speculated that the subject had gout or somesuch ailment to cause this bloat.
I didn’t go to the Met looking for hands, but my Frick experience was at the back of my mind when I started to move around the room. The first work I was delighted to see was the portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, usually found in the Lehman Wing. His left hand was, again, too large, and without any apparent bones. Here, the subject famously was deformed by syphilis, and it is possible that Rembrandt was merely being brutally accurate when he made Gerard’s hand resemble a garden rake. Hendrickje Stoffels, on the other hand, had no infirmity and was a loved subject. Her hand, too, is puffy and unstructured (perhaps “unfinished,” suggests the Met’s website).
Woman With a Pink, always a Met favorite, has a left hand that dissolves into nothingness. The right hand is more important, as it holds the pink carnation of the title, but it appears misshapen as a hand: it looks more like a bud vase. The companion Man With a Magnifying Glass has a puffy hand that bears little relation to the tautly drawn face. It just sits there, resting in his lap, disembodied, weakly encircling the glass.
In The Standard Bearer (Floris Soop), Rembrandt poses his subject with one hand gloved, the other bare – a common device in those days, intended, I believe, to show the artist’s skill at depicting both leather and skin. Rembrandt, however, hardly differentiates the two, and neither is significant. The right hand of the Man in Oriental Costume (The Noble Slav), like Floris Soop’s, rests listlessly in deep shadow. If he has a left hand, it is lost to view.
More problematic is the one partial hand of Herman Doomer. It’s another amorphous, blobby claw, largely tucked inside his cape. There is no apparent relationship to Doomer’s beautifully drawn face; and by this point I began to wonder if Rembrandt confined himself to painting his subjects’ faces, leaving most of the body, and the hands, to his workshop assistants (the Met does acknowledge debate as to how much of The Standard Bearer was done by Rembrandt’s hand). Last in the gallery was Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan, which provided mixed evidence for my survey. The woman’s left hand, lightly gripping the chair or bench in front of her, was far and away the most convincing hand in the room. (The ring on the pinky was typical of the time – what did it signify, I wonder?) But on the other hand, literally, Rembrandt seems to have gone out of his way to cast a shadow, so that the act of holding the fan is obscured. (In fact, the fan itself is barely discernible.)
Finally, the big question: how did Rembrandt treat the hands on the Kenwood self-portrait, a work in which every inch is carefully considered. Many of the other backgrounds, though often beautifully painted, are seas of brown, except when they are black, which is never as pleasing. In the Self-Portrait, however, Rembrandt has carefully delineated two incomplete perfect circles, which themselves have been the subject of much critical analysis over the years. As for hands? There aren’t any to speak of, although the portrait extends downward to thigh-level. The right hand is folded backward at the hip, in deep shadow. The left hand could be important, as it holds the artist’s palette and paintbrushes, his attributes. All we see, though, is the impression of a hand, undefined slabs of paint. There is much conjecture, because of this, that the portrait is unfinished, although Rembrand painted several other self-portraits after this one. Interestingly, of the self-portraits painted in Rembrandt’s final decade, only the Frick version pays any attention to hands. Examples in Scotland, Vienna and The Hague are merely busts. The ones in Cologne, Florence and the Rijksmuseum show enough body to include hands, but they don’t. In the National Galleries of Washington and London, the hands are clasped together, stuck in a corner and suggested, more than drawn.
Rembrandt is a painter of faces, above all a painter of eyes. In his best works, the light – whatever its mysterious source – focuses on the face, and everything else, except a ruff here or there, fades away. The eyes are the window into the soul, and Rembrandt, better than any other painter who ever lived, paints the soul. Just look at the MIA’s Lucretia! Speaking of whom, her hands could be improved, so much so that Tom Rassieur has privately speculated that they are 18th-century overpaints. Perhaps Rembrandt handed off his hands to assistants. Or perhaps he just didn’t want a secondary focus of light distracting from the face.
For now, I await the Rembrandt show to open at the MIA in late June. I will admire Rembrandt’s fabulous faces. But I will also want to look at the hands.