Abstract
The chapter explores a transformation in the viewer’s understanding of the subjectivity represented by the image of the artist in Rembrandt Van Rijn’s Self-portrait with Two Circles (c. 1663–1669) at Kenwood House, Hampstead. Through an innovative intertemporal comparison with Max Beckmann’s superficially similar Self Portrait on Yellow Ground with Cigarette (circa 1923) it is shown how the transformation depends on the viewer’s deferred recognition of the sliver of reversed canvas cropped by the extreme right hand edge of Rembrandt’s painting. Once the edge of the canvas is noticed the artist no longer appears to commune with the viewer but is understood instead to be memorizing his own image in a mirror before turning to paint it. This transition from an enduring to an instrumental kind of self is then considered within the context of external and internal determinants of the painting: respectively, its intervention upon traditional representations of the artist and its analogy with the struggle between body and soul in Western philosophy and theology. In particular the imminent ‘swiveling’ of the artist’s body away from communion with the viewer to self-depiction on the canvas enjoins the spectator to an act of disengagement that re-enacts the transition from a Platonic to a Cartesian alignment of body and soul. Disengagement involves empathy, however, so that the essay concludes by attempting to establish the case for interpreting the painting as a mirror image of an invented memory of the artist that shows him as art lovers might wish to see him. In this way the dominant mimetic interpretation of the painting is qualified by one that admits memory and imagination. It entails a hypothesis that brings the external and internal determinants of the Kenwood portrait together within the capacity of seventeenth-century self-portraits to encapsulate dialogue between viewers and their social world. The painting internalizes this world through symbolic representations of culture that mentor viewers into sharing the artist’s values
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Notes
- 1.
Dating is based on arguments in Wetering (2005), p. 303.
- 2.
For example W. G. R. Hind, Self portrait (1863), Canada; Anna Molka Ahmed, Self portrait (1939), Pakistan; Gerta Overbeck, Self portrait at an Easel, 1936, Germany; Massimo Campigli, Painter and Model (1946), Italy; François Krige, Self portrait with Buddhist Print (1980s), South Africa; Narashige Koide, Self portrait with a Hat (1924), Japan; Yasuo Kuniyoshi, At Work (1943), Japan; Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael (1921), Britain; Barbara Hepworth, Self portrait (1950), Britain; Gillian Melling, Me and My Baby (1991), Britain; Horace Pippin, Self portrait (1941), North America; Fred Williams, Self portrait at an Easel (1960–1961), Australia; and Avigdor Arikha, Self portrait Standing Behind Canvas (1978), Israel and America.
- 3.
The concept of self-fashioning was developed in Stephen J. Greenblatt’s literary study Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1980) from Erving Goffman’s pioneering psycho-sociological study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). It began to be applied to art history in the 1990s, including Mary Rogers, Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art (2000).
- 4.
See Leonaert Bramer’s engraving of a smoking painter in Brink Goldsmith (1994), p. 241, dating back to a series of circa 1650–1655, a decade or two before the Kenwood portrait, depicting the various professions.
- 5.
For example, his Rembrandt and Saskia in the Scene of the Prodigal Son in the Tavern (c. 1635). See Chapman (1990), p. 97.
- 6.
- 7.
I am grateful to Philippa Boldiston for this insight.
- 8.
For example, Self Portrait at the Window, Drawing on an etching-Plate (1648) and Self Portrait at the Easel (1660), where the hand with brushes was once positioned closer to the reversed panel.
- 9.
Of the unpicturable mystery of what artists do in James’s novels, Maurice Beebe observes (1964), p. 222: ‘Five appearances of the turned-back image do not, of course, prove that James used it always deliberately, but it seems significant that the five turned backs represent almost the same thing in each instance. To repeat, it matters not what the artist does in the world, how he dresses, what company he frequents; for when he creates, he inevitably withdraws to a private realm. The detachment of the artist is rooted in an innate consciousness that transforms and vitalizes normal perception, that actually “makes life.” Thus James was able to use the turned back of the artist to symbolize the “artist in triumph.”’
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Read, R. (2014). The Thin End of the Wedge: Self, Body and Soul in Rembrandt’s Kenwood Self-Portrait. In: Kambaskovic, D. (eds) Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9072-7_5
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