I’ve become indifferent to many of the hundreds of illustrations I’ve painted over the years. Not so with this picture. In fact, I can’t tell you if it’s an illustration or a painting. It’s just one of my favorites.
I was experimenting with fast-drying acrylic paint after years of using oils. I wanted to see if I could build up glazes like Titian and Rembrandt without waiting a week for each layer of paint to dry. Clients don’t like waiting for artwork to dry.
I gessoed a panel, sanded it smooth and started painting. To my surprise, the shadow of an airplane appeared. I set down my brushes and admired my work. The picture didn’t look complete; something was missing. But what?
A year passed, with the picture being relegated to the back of my closet. One day I rediscovered it and somehow knew what it needed. In less than an hour I added the antique globe. Why? I’ve no idea. But when the globe was added to the composition it just felt right. I’ve tried over the years to explain this image in words, but I’ve always failed. When I taught at our local art college I used to joke that if a picture made perfect sense and was easily comprehended by most people, it was an illustration. If it made no sense at all but just made you feel something, anything, it was a painting. For me, this is a painting.
Maybe you have an idea what it means.
Whenever I accompany someone to a museum they inevitably ask the same question, “Why did you stop in front of this particular painting instead of the hundreds of others we’ve walked past?” The answer is simple: I’m looking for a moment when an artist reveals himself.
This picture is a perfect example of what I mean. This wasn’t painted for nobility or a wealthy merchant. Rembrandt was painting a portrait of his son, not something that would have carried much value at the time. He emulated in paint what a novelist would take hundreds of pages to describe. This portrait hangs in the Wallace Collection in London. It is a depiction of Rembrandt’s twelve year old son, Titus, and it contains what is arguably the most revealing passage in all of art.
If you look closely (please enlarge the detail) you will confront the colors of extinction and the grave. This is an eye without a future, not just a revelation of a soul but a portal to nothingness. I could go on at length about the fantastic dexterity that went into creating this detail; the strong brushstrokes and indescribably beautiful juxtaposition of tone and color, but I can’t get beyond the notion that any father would have the honesty to describe such emptiness in his child’s gaze.
How could Rembrandt know that his son would be dead in a handful of years? This painting seems to confirm that he knew, and it’s hard to understand how such knowledge didn’t drive him mad. I tend to think that this painting is Rembrandt’s way of preserving his child. He lavished love on this canvas as if it, not Titus himself, were his flesh and blood, his link to posterity.
Rembrandt didn’t need a crystal ball to see the future. Titus van Rijn would not have a long and happy life. He would marry and die shortly after the birth of his first child. The artist followed his son into the grave less than a year later.
Rembrandt’s painting serves as a gut-wrenching expression of parental agony, a silent shriek of loss and anguish to haunt the centuries. The question shouldn’t be: Why pause in front of this painting? The question should be: How can we ever look away?
