Okay, Okay It’s The 350th
Anniversary of Rembrandt’s (You Know The Dutch Painter With the Funny Last Name
That Nobody Remembers Anyway) So Happy, Happy Birthday Brother
By Sam Lowell
By rights fellow writer
here and budding amateur art critic (she insists I put that “amateur in) should
be all over this short piece since she is much more involved in this aspect of human
culture than I am theses days. Except Dutch painters (Flemish too or whatever they
call the Netherlands painters at the art museum near you) leave her cold, do
nothing for her despite their oversized place in the art world, at least in art
books and generic museums.
Frankly I kind of shared
her opinion about these dark color aficionados and their proper prosperous bourgeois
subjects, their families, their towns and their inclinations toward showing
family life from their home furnishings to their larder (those fish and fowl
paintings still give me the willies). Two things changed my mind. One was that after
some hiatus from museum-going I started up again and after having it up to my
neck with every possible painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the death of
Christ, the martyrdoms of the apostles and kindred and the whoredom of subjects
like Mary Magdalene from the Middle Ages it was like a breath of fresh air to
see even some hoary old bastard of bourgeois, his funky wife, and the general
mayhem of urban Dutch society.
The other, strangely, was
the theft many years ago of a famous Rembrandt self-portrait (among other stolen
treasures taken during that heist) at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston
which made me wonder why they had taken that painting. An example as shown here -a masterpiece
of composition, lighting, and warts and all approach. So Happy Birthday
Rembrandt and I hope they get that painting back to fill up that wall at the Gardner
again.
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