Rembrandt: Portrait of Margaretha de Geer
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| Rembrandt, Margaretha de Geer, National Gallery, London. |
Rembrandt's companion portraits of Jacob Trip and his wife, Margaretha de Geer, have been dated on stylistic grounds to around 1661, the year of Jacob Trip's death. The features of Jacob are less individualised than those of his wife; this makes it possible that the portrait was painted after his death and that Jacob's features were copied from another portrait of him (McLaren 351). Margaretha de Geer likewise appears to have one foot in the grave, because of her aged features and her look of despair, although in actual fact she lived for another eleven years until 1672. Both sitters are quite plainly dressed in clothes of dull colours, and so it comes as somewhat of a surprise to learn that the Trips were one of the wealthiest families in Holland, with a fortune derived from iron forging and international arms dealing. Two of their sons, Louis and Hendrick, built a mansion called the Trippenhuis, erected in Amsterdam in 1660-2, and it is likely that the portraits of Jacob and Margaretha were commissioned to hang in this mansion (Mclaren 351). Perhaps Margaretha had come to Amsterdam to watch the work on the Trippenhuis, as it seems unlikely that such an old lady would have travelled all the way from her home in Dordrecht just to have her portrait painted by Rembrandt.
The nature of the commission must surely have influenced the style of the portraits. The Trips wanted to advance their social status, and so they chose a painter who could portray them with an air of old fashioned, aristocratic gravitas. Margaretha de Geer is sitting upright in a throne-like chair, with an elbow resting on one arm of the chair and a hand resting on the other chair arm. X-rays reveal that Rembrandt altered the position of her left hand until he got it exactly right (Art in the Making: Rembrandt 126). This is the kind of "classic" pose utilised by painters like Raphael and Titian in their portraits of popes and senators. Rembrandt has, in effect, created a new "old master", which must have been the kind of picture the Trips wanted. Margaretha de Geer's stiff ruff - which had gone out of fashion many years before - also helps to lend an antique air to her portrait.
The likelihood that the portrait was intended for the Trippenhuis may also have had an effect on its style. It is well known that Rembrandt often painted pictures for particular locations: The Night Watch, for example, was painted to hang in the headquarters of the Amsterdam militia companies, and The Syndics was painted to be displayed in the hall of the Cloth-makers Guild (White 95, 193). Margaretha de Geer appears to be sitting in a room, but its details are kept deliberately vague - which would have to be the case if the room (in the Trippenhuis) had not yet been built. The background wall is dark brown in colour, just possibly indicating the brown leather wall hangings upon which paintings were sometimes hung in wealthy households.
When we enter the National Gallery's Rembrandt room and see the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, how striking is the impression it makes upon us. How much more dramatic would this painting have been in its original location, perhaps a dark room lit only by candles or shuttered windows. It must have been like entering the presence of a living person. This is the effect calculated by the artist. Rembrandt's broad and vigorous brushstrokes create an image which, when seen from a distance, paradoxically looks more "real" than a picture in which all the details have been painstakingly delineated. Houbracken relates that Rembrandt "advised visitors to his studio to stand back [from the pictures] lest they be poisoned by the smell of paint" (Alpers 17), because Rembrandt intended his paintings to be viewed at a distance, so that all the brushstrokes would merge to create a single, unified image. In his self-portraits in the role of an artist - such as the Self-Portrait Holding a Mahlstick at Kenwood - Rembrandt usually depicted himself as standing up, implying that he liked to step back to look at his work while it was in progress. This also implies that he worked on the whole painting at once rather than finishing it bit by bit.
When we look at the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, we notice that the essential features - Margaretha's head and hands and her great white ruff - jump out at us, whereas the details of her gown, her chair and her surroundings are lost in shadow. Rembrandt knew that the human eye can only focus on one thing at a time, and so he concentrated on the most important areas and ruthlessly suppressed the lesser ones. The French Impressionists, many of whom admired the Dutch Old Masters, likewise knew that the eye receives blurred "impressions" and likewise tried to create pictures of what the eye actually sees. But their paintings tend to be uniformly impressionist all over, whereas Rembrandt takes certain parts of a picture - the parts that the eye is drawn to - and studies these in detail. Rembrandt is a painter who can work in more than one way: broad brushstrokes for the less important areas, precise and detailed strokes for the important parts. For the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Rembrandt is likely to have used thick hogs' hair brushes for filling in the background and thinner brushes for Margaretha's face, hands and ruff.
The National Gallery's conservators have carried out a detailed scientific examination of the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer but, even without knowing anything about their findings, we can still tell a lot about Rembrandt's techniques just by looking at the painting. The face, the hands, the ruff and the handkerchief are built up with thick layers of paint, almost as if Rembrandt is modelling in paint. The face seems to be based on lead white overlaid with dabs of red to create a mottled effect. This is a means of depicting the blotched skin seen so often in the faces of very old people, where blood vessels have burst or the blood is not circulating properly. Rembrandt uses darker paint to create shadows round the eyes, again found in elderly people. He also uses darker paint to create the prominent veins on the hands. He seems to be mixing and blending the colours while they are still wet upon the canvas to convey the blotchy skin of the old lady. This is not just a matter of technique but the actual subject of the painting: the ravages of old age.
If we turn to Margaretha de Geer's costume, we can see that Rembrandt in his later years had lost none of his skill in the depiction of materials. The National Gallery's Rembrandt room also contains the Portrait of Aechje Presser (?), which he had painted over a quarter of a century before the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer. Both the old ladies are wearing white ruffs and both ruffs are made up of tiny, carefully observed folds. In both cases, Rembrandt seems to have created shadows along the edges of the ruffs by painting white on top of black and then removing most of the white to reveal the dark paint underneath. The x-ray of the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer "shows us that the sitter's white cuffs were originally trimmed with lace . . . Rembrandt glazed it out to the present severe outline" (Art in the Making 128). This shows that Rembrandt was still just as capable of painting delicate lacework but that he suppressed this decorative passage in order to concentrate our attention on the face of the sitter, framed by her large white ruff. In a similar way, Rembrandt's Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 originally showed him holding a paintbrush or a mahlstick, but he painted out this detail in order to direct our attention to his face (Art in the Making 142). Margaretha de Geer is holding a handkerchief, but it is so broadly painted that it is not a distraction. Rembrandt needs to place something in her hand, and he needs such light areas to counterbalance the predominant darkness of the picture. The handkerchief is painted in such thick impasto that it seems that the thickness of the paint varies according to the thickness of the folds of the handkerchief, almost as though it was modelled in paint.
Although it is possible to study Rembrandt's techniques just by looking at his work, a proper knowledge of the pigments he used can only be gained by a scientific analysis such as carried out by the National Gallery. This has shown that previous ideas about Rembrandt's techniques were often completely wrong. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, thought that Rembrandt must have added wax to his paints, inspiring Reynolds to ruin some of his own paintings through the use of it. For the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Rembrandt primed the canvas with a double ground of earth pigments covered by a layer of khaki-coloured pigment (Art in the Making 120). This relatively dark underlayer means that the picture may now be darker than Rembrandt originally intended because, with the passage of time, the upper layers of an oil painting become slightly transparent, revealing something of the ground beneath. Chemical analysis has revealed that Rembrandt made extensive use of glazes. A glaze is a thin, transparent layer of oil paint applied on top of another layer of oil paint. Glazes are used to give richness to the colours or to smooth the transitions from one area of the picture to another (Mayer 247-255). The fur edge of Margaretha de Geer's gown is glazed with "a mixture of yellow and lake pigments, smalt and chalk" (Art in the Making 128). Lake pigments are expensive, added to give richness to colours, whereas smalt is cheap and poor quality, probably added to make the picture dry faster. This shows that Rembrandt was a master of his materials who knew how to select the pigments best suited to his purposes. Rembrandt added this glaze to the edge of Margaretha's gown to enhance the colour of the fur, though it is likely that some of this effect was lost when the picture was cleaned. Rembrandt has created shadows on the fur by painting a layer of brown over a layer of black, but "dragging" the paintbrush so that the underlying black shows through in places, where the shadows would be, and covering it all with a transparent glaze. Rembrandt, who made extensive use of chiaroscuro in his art, has also used "a glaze of bone black" on the wall behind the sitter, where the shadows become darker (Art in the Making 128). The Rembrandt Research Project in the Netherlands has shown that Rembrandt sometimes added small quantities of egg to his oil paint to make it thicker and to increase the variety of textural effects (Wetering 239). This may well have been used in the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer for the thickly worked impasto of the face and the hands.
Rembrandt's techniques were a means to an end, which was to convey the character of the sitter. In companion portraits of husband and wife it was usual for the couple to face each other, but Margaretha de Geer is turning to face the viewer, perhaps suggesting that her husband is dead. This would also explain the troubled look on her face and the fact that she is sitting in a darkened room, perhaps with the shutters closed in mourning. Rembrandt does not describe all the details of Margaretha's costume or the interior of the room; he envelops her in shadow, which adds atmosphere and drama to the painting. The light strikes the sitter's head and white ruff like a spotlight, throwing all the emphasis on her stark expression of loneliness and despair. She seems to be leaning forward slightly, as if to greet us, but her eyes stare fixedly ahead and she does not seem to acknowledge our presence, deep in her own thoughts. The pose of the figure recalls portraits by Raphael and Titian, but their sitters were serene and untroubled, whereas Margaretha de Geer seems deeply disturbed. Much of the power of the painting derives from this contrast between the balanced pose of the sitter and her expression of inner turmoil. As Svetlana Alpers says, Rembrandt had the intuitive ability to divine the inner nature of his sitters: "something there was within them that he found out and revealed" (Alpers 86). We look at this portrait of Mrs Trip, the widow of a wealthy arms dealer, with her gaunt features, narrow mouth, puritan costume and old fashioned ruff, and feel intimidated and disturbed by the presence of this severe-looking, unhappy old woman. But the most astonishing thing is that Rembrandt has created this great painting with the simplest of materials, mainly bone black, lead white, and a few earth colours.
Works Cited
Alpers, Svetlana, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, London: Thames & Hudson, 1988
Art in the Making: Rembrandt (exhibition catalogue by David Bomford and others), London: National Gallery, 1988
McLaren, Neil, and Brown, Christopher, The Dutch School 1600-1900 (catalogue of National Gallery paintings), 2 vols., London: National Gallery, 1991
Mayer, Ralph, The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, London: Faber, 5th ed., 1991
Wetering, Ernst van de, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997
White, Christopher, Rembrandt, London: Thames & Hudson, 1984
The likelihood that the portrait was intended for the Trippenhuis may also have had an effect on its style. It is well known that Rembrandt often painted pictures for particular locations: The Night Watch, for example, was painted to hang in the headquarters of the Amsterdam militia companies, and The Syndics was painted to be displayed in the hall of the Cloth-makers Guild (White 95, 193). Margaretha de Geer appears to be sitting in a room, but its details are kept deliberately vague - which would have to be the case if the room (in the Trippenhuis) had not yet been built. The background wall is dark brown in colour, just possibly indicating the brown leather wall hangings upon which paintings were sometimes hung in wealthy households.
When we enter the National Gallery's Rembrandt room and see the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, how striking is the impression it makes upon us. How much more dramatic would this painting have been in its original location, perhaps a dark room lit only by candles or shuttered windows. It must have been like entering the presence of a living person. This is the effect calculated by the artist. Rembrandt's broad and vigorous brushstrokes create an image which, when seen from a distance, paradoxically looks more "real" than a picture in which all the details have been painstakingly delineated. Houbracken relates that Rembrandt "advised visitors to his studio to stand back [from the pictures] lest they be poisoned by the smell of paint" (Alpers 17), because Rembrandt intended his paintings to be viewed at a distance, so that all the brushstrokes would merge to create a single, unified image. In his self-portraits in the role of an artist - such as the Self-Portrait Holding a Mahlstick at Kenwood - Rembrandt usually depicted himself as standing up, implying that he liked to step back to look at his work while it was in progress. This also implies that he worked on the whole painting at once rather than finishing it bit by bit.
When we look at the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, we notice that the essential features - Margaretha's head and hands and her great white ruff - jump out at us, whereas the details of her gown, her chair and her surroundings are lost in shadow. Rembrandt knew that the human eye can only focus on one thing at a time, and so he concentrated on the most important areas and ruthlessly suppressed the lesser ones. The French Impressionists, many of whom admired the Dutch Old Masters, likewise knew that the eye receives blurred "impressions" and likewise tried to create pictures of what the eye actually sees. But their paintings tend to be uniformly impressionist all over, whereas Rembrandt takes certain parts of a picture - the parts that the eye is drawn to - and studies these in detail. Rembrandt is a painter who can work in more than one way: broad brushstrokes for the less important areas, precise and detailed strokes for the important parts. For the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Rembrandt is likely to have used thick hogs' hair brushes for filling in the background and thinner brushes for Margaretha's face, hands and ruff.
The National Gallery's conservators have carried out a detailed scientific examination of the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer but, even without knowing anything about their findings, we can still tell a lot about Rembrandt's techniques just by looking at the painting. The face, the hands, the ruff and the handkerchief are built up with thick layers of paint, almost as if Rembrandt is modelling in paint. The face seems to be based on lead white overlaid with dabs of red to create a mottled effect. This is a means of depicting the blotched skin seen so often in the faces of very old people, where blood vessels have burst or the blood is not circulating properly. Rembrandt uses darker paint to create shadows round the eyes, again found in elderly people. He also uses darker paint to create the prominent veins on the hands. He seems to be mixing and blending the colours while they are still wet upon the canvas to convey the blotchy skin of the old lady. This is not just a matter of technique but the actual subject of the painting: the ravages of old age.
If we turn to Margaretha de Geer's costume, we can see that Rembrandt in his later years had lost none of his skill in the depiction of materials. The National Gallery's Rembrandt room also contains the Portrait of Aechje Presser (?), which he had painted over a quarter of a century before the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer. Both the old ladies are wearing white ruffs and both ruffs are made up of tiny, carefully observed folds. In both cases, Rembrandt seems to have created shadows along the edges of the ruffs by painting white on top of black and then removing most of the white to reveal the dark paint underneath. The x-ray of the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer "shows us that the sitter's white cuffs were originally trimmed with lace . . . Rembrandt glazed it out to the present severe outline" (Art in the Making 128). This shows that Rembrandt was still just as capable of painting delicate lacework but that he suppressed this decorative passage in order to concentrate our attention on the face of the sitter, framed by her large white ruff. In a similar way, Rembrandt's Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 originally showed him holding a paintbrush or a mahlstick, but he painted out this detail in order to direct our attention to his face (Art in the Making 142). Margaretha de Geer is holding a handkerchief, but it is so broadly painted that it is not a distraction. Rembrandt needs to place something in her hand, and he needs such light areas to counterbalance the predominant darkness of the picture. The handkerchief is painted in such thick impasto that it seems that the thickness of the paint varies according to the thickness of the folds of the handkerchief, almost as though it was modelled in paint.
Although it is possible to study Rembrandt's techniques just by looking at his work, a proper knowledge of the pigments he used can only be gained by a scientific analysis such as carried out by the National Gallery. This has shown that previous ideas about Rembrandt's techniques were often completely wrong. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, thought that Rembrandt must have added wax to his paints, inspiring Reynolds to ruin some of his own paintings through the use of it. For the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Rembrandt primed the canvas with a double ground of earth pigments covered by a layer of khaki-coloured pigment (Art in the Making 120). This relatively dark underlayer means that the picture may now be darker than Rembrandt originally intended because, with the passage of time, the upper layers of an oil painting become slightly transparent, revealing something of the ground beneath. Chemical analysis has revealed that Rembrandt made extensive use of glazes. A glaze is a thin, transparent layer of oil paint applied on top of another layer of oil paint. Glazes are used to give richness to the colours or to smooth the transitions from one area of the picture to another (Mayer 247-255). The fur edge of Margaretha de Geer's gown is glazed with "a mixture of yellow and lake pigments, smalt and chalk" (Art in the Making 128). Lake pigments are expensive, added to give richness to colours, whereas smalt is cheap and poor quality, probably added to make the picture dry faster. This shows that Rembrandt was a master of his materials who knew how to select the pigments best suited to his purposes. Rembrandt added this glaze to the edge of Margaretha's gown to enhance the colour of the fur, though it is likely that some of this effect was lost when the picture was cleaned. Rembrandt has created shadows on the fur by painting a layer of brown over a layer of black, but "dragging" the paintbrush so that the underlying black shows through in places, where the shadows would be, and covering it all with a transparent glaze. Rembrandt, who made extensive use of chiaroscuro in his art, has also used "a glaze of bone black" on the wall behind the sitter, where the shadows become darker (Art in the Making 128). The Rembrandt Research Project in the Netherlands has shown that Rembrandt sometimes added small quantities of egg to his oil paint to make it thicker and to increase the variety of textural effects (Wetering 239). This may well have been used in the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer for the thickly worked impasto of the face and the hands.
Rembrandt's techniques were a means to an end, which was to convey the character of the sitter. In companion portraits of husband and wife it was usual for the couple to face each other, but Margaretha de Geer is turning to face the viewer, perhaps suggesting that her husband is dead. This would also explain the troubled look on her face and the fact that she is sitting in a darkened room, perhaps with the shutters closed in mourning. Rembrandt does not describe all the details of Margaretha's costume or the interior of the room; he envelops her in shadow, which adds atmosphere and drama to the painting. The light strikes the sitter's head and white ruff like a spotlight, throwing all the emphasis on her stark expression of loneliness and despair. She seems to be leaning forward slightly, as if to greet us, but her eyes stare fixedly ahead and she does not seem to acknowledge our presence, deep in her own thoughts. The pose of the figure recalls portraits by Raphael and Titian, but their sitters were serene and untroubled, whereas Margaretha de Geer seems deeply disturbed. Much of the power of the painting derives from this contrast between the balanced pose of the sitter and her expression of inner turmoil. As Svetlana Alpers says, Rembrandt had the intuitive ability to divine the inner nature of his sitters: "something there was within them that he found out and revealed" (Alpers 86). We look at this portrait of Mrs Trip, the widow of a wealthy arms dealer, with her gaunt features, narrow mouth, puritan costume and old fashioned ruff, and feel intimidated and disturbed by the presence of this severe-looking, unhappy old woman. But the most astonishing thing is that Rembrandt has created this great painting with the simplest of materials, mainly bone black, lead white, and a few earth colours.
Works Cited
Alpers, Svetlana, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, London: Thames & Hudson, 1988
Art in the Making: Rembrandt (exhibition catalogue by David Bomford and others), London: National Gallery, 1988
McLaren, Neil, and Brown, Christopher, The Dutch School 1600-1900 (catalogue of National Gallery paintings), 2 vols., London: National Gallery, 1991
Mayer, Ralph, The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, London: Faber, 5th ed., 1991
Wetering, Ernst van de, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997
White, Christopher, Rembrandt, London: Thames & Hudson, 1984
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