'Rembrandt: Britain's discovery of the master' (ctd.)
July 31 2018
Video: National Gallery of Scotland
I've written about the excellent new Rembrandt show at the National Gallery of Scotland; here's a short video on his self-portraits. The first exhibit in the show is a self-portrait on loan from the Walker Art Gallery, which was the first self-portrait to arrive in Britain, having been acquired by Charles I in the early 1630s. In the exhibition, it is labelled as 'attributed to Rembrandt', even though the Walker describes it when on display in Liverpool as 'Rembrandt'.
For me, no painting highlights the idiosyncracies of the Rembrandt Research Project more than the Walker self-portrait. Despite its early history, the RRP rejected the attribution. Indeed, it is still doubted by Ernst van der Wetering, who re-organised the RRP after its effective failure (at least in terms of connoisseurship) in the 1990s. (Another of the RRP's rejections is also on display in the Edinburgh show, The Mill from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, though this is a picture Ernst quite rightly now accepts).
To not accept Rembrandt's authorship of the Walker self-portrait means we must believe that in his own lifetime, and before he reached the heights of his international fame, people were making imitations of Rembrandt self-portraits, which in turn entered the most significant art collections in the world. I find this simply impossible to believe. Nor can I imagine a fake David Hockney hanging on the walls of Buckingham Palace for decades, and nobody noticing.
Anyway, there's another short video on the Rembrandt show here.
