Young Rembrandt: The Leiden Years, 1606-1632 (review)

In 2006, Rembrandt admirers and scholars celebrated the 400^th anniversary of his birth with several major symposia, exhibitions, scholarly catalogues, journal articles, and books. An example of the last, Roelof van Straten's Young Rembrandt: The Leiden Years, 1606-1632, appeared within this broader context of Rembrandt celebrations. Despite widespread scholarship on the artist's early activity in his hometown of Leiden, van Straten lamented that "the longer I studied Rembrandt, the more it became clear to me that the view of his time in Leiden, as portrayed by many art historians, is in many ways incorrect." The author, therefore, established three goals for his book: "to strive for a multifaceted portrayal of Rembrandt and his environment; to explore his time in Leiden; and where necessary, debunk the myths" (11). The reader's expectations, however, are destabilized when the author also states that his book is not about Rembrandt alone, but is rather a "'duography'": that is, "it is a continuous story about Rembrandt and (Jan) Lievens, their work, and about the people around them" (11). One wonders, therefore, why van Straten did not title his publication more inclusively.

Van Straten's book has much to commend it; however, the publication's strengths stem from its individual parts rather than from their summary whole. Richly illustrated with color and black-and-white reproductions of the artists' works, fascinating collateral imagery such as Jacques de Gheyn II's Karel van Mander on His Deathbed (259), and seventeenth-century maps and documents, van Straten's book provides a valuable resource for scholars' specific questions about Rembrandt's and Lievens's artistic production, professional relationship, and patrons. However, when read sequentially, the lengthy main section, which assumes the same title as the larger book, lacks a clear overarching thesis or theses. The author's organizing principle of chronology results in very short sections of text, rather than chapters, with remarkably specific and often unrelated subtitles that highlight the lack of argued transition and trajectory between sections. Examples in sequence include: "Lievens' Earliest Surviving Works," "Lievens in Conflict with Jean Franchois Tortarolis," "Rembrandt's Earliest Paintings and One by Lievens," "Rembrandt with Pieter Lastman," and "Lievens' 'Tilted Heads' Period." Regrettably, in sharp contrast with the author's republished articles at the book's end, van Straten includes only very occasional asterisks in the main text in lieu of customary foot- or endnotes to identify scholarly sources.

The usefulness of the unusually brief bibliography is compromised by van Straten's sometimes denigrating, short annotations: Ernst van de Wetering's The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt is "somewhat confusing . . . with some quite speculative contributions . . . this publication creates more 'mysteries' than it solves" (356). About Alan Chong et al.'s Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt: Art and Ambition in Leiden, 1629–1631 van Straten concludes: "There are not many new insights, however, and there is hardly any place for Jan Lievens" (356). With regard to Gary Schwartz's Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings, van Straten writes: "Unfortunately, quite a few remarks of the author, especially on the Leiden years, are quite speculative" (357). Van Straten's criticism of the "speculative" nature of colleagues' scholarship is surprising given the many instances of his own subjectivity throughout his text.

The last 102 pages of van Straten's book include eight essays (six by van Straten) on "historical context," four of which actually republish with some revision his previous articles on works of art rather than on "historical context." Like the book's first lengthy section, these provide valuable scholarly information, but their lack of integration with or cohesion among each other, or with the substantial first section of the book, undermines their larger scholarly contributions. Finally, van Straten's two-page book postscript on a painting by David Bailly discusses a work by a Leiden artist produced twenty years after Rembrandt left for Amsterdam. Thus, the painting has...