On Sept. 22, 2015, a New Jersey auctioneer opened bidding for a painting believed to date from the 19th century. Projected to sell for an amount between $500 and $800, the artwork’s price rose to $870,000 after the bidding war ended. The two rivaling purchasers recognized it to be Rembrandt’s “Unconscious Patient”—a painting from a five-part series that is the Dutch artist’s earliest known work.
Painted circa 1624 to 1625, “The Senses” dates from the time that Rembrandt (1606–1669) opened a studio in partnership with Jan Lievens (1607–1674). The studio was a startup business: Rembrandt and Lievens were still teenagers and both had recently completed their apprenticeships. The studio itself occupied part of Rembrandt’s parents’ house in Leiden. Working in that minor Dutch city allowed the artists to avoid the higher guild fees they would have had to pay in Amsterdam.
‘Five Senses’ Series
At this point in time, Rembrandt’s signature coloration was dark, pale, and deep with subdued shades. By 1630, chiaroscuro—strong contrasts between light and dark—became a key component in most of his work.“The Senses” exemplifies Rembrandt’s early artistic career. The four extant paintings suggest relatively little about his mature, characteristic style—which explains why the auctioneers didn’t suspect that “Unconscious Patient” came from his brush.
The full set includes “Spectacles Seller (Allegory of Sight),” “Three Singers (Allegory of Hearing),” “Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell),” “Stone Operation (Allegory of Touch),” and an allegory of taste. The taste-themed painting’s whereabouts are currently unknown.
Rembrandt’s Inspiration
Despite exceptions within Rembrandt’s and Caravaggio’s body of work, there are three key contrasts between them: tenebrism, chiaroscuro, and color.
The terms chiaroscuro and tenebrism are often used interchangeably; however, it’s important to note the difference between the two techniques. Chiaroscuro creates three dimensions by using extreme contrasts of light and dark. Artists have portrayed depth through graduations of light and shadow since the Renaissance, but it was the Baroque master Caravaggio who took this technique to new heights with the creation of tenebrism, which means dark and gloomy.
Similar to chiaroscuro, tenebrism uses striking contrast between light and shadow, but darkness becomes the painting’s dominating characteristic. Tenebrism is exclusively used to create dramatic illumination through a spotlight effect. A painter can spotlight a subject or a group of people while leaving the other areas black, in order to create contrast and drama. Chiaroscuro employs subtler gradation of light and shadow to create a more natural, softer effect.
Caravaggio’s tenebrism inspired Rembrandt and other Dutch artists who worked in the “candlelight tradition”—whereby all compositional light emanates from a single candle.
Color and Continuity
Rembrandt’s turn to dark colors and deeper shades owes much to Caravaggio. When using other shades of primary colors, Rembrandt generally continued using the softer ones of his early works rather than the bold shades that Caravaggio preferred.Only a few other of Rembrandt’s early paintings demonstrate the continuity, in subject matter and color scheme, to his later works. Each of the ‘'Senses” paintings, has an obvious lightness and humor that appears in his work from time to time. Familiarity with day-to-day life in Rembrandt’s world reveals that “The Senses” paintings go beyond that. They’re a form of satirical allegory to which he rarely (if ever) returned.
Details of his satire are clear in two of the four known paintings. “Spectacles Seller (Allegory of Sight)” and “Stone Operation (Allegory of Touch)” are based off 16th-century Dutch idioms. “To sell someone glasses without [corrective] lenses” refers to the ability to deceive those whose eyesight is too weak to tell that they are not being sold the product they need. “Cutting out the stone” referred to barbers who claimed they could cure headaches but removing a stone from a person’s head—another swindle. It’s likely that Rembrandt’s allegories to smell, hearing, and taste alluded to similar idioms whose meanings are now lost to us.
It is precisely in Rembrandt’s differences with Caravaggio that we see elements of continuity between the Dutch artist’s early paintings and his mature style. His subtle tones and transitions demonstrate his enduring preference for elegant understatement over vibrancy and flamboyance. While dignity and gravitas were common, levity was rare.
