At the Rembrandt Exhibit (with Proust, Woolf, and Bacon)

Infamous for never having traveled far, Marcel Proust did pack his bags in early October 1898 and left for Amsterdam to visit the new Rembrandt exhibition. In all, 124 of the painter’s works and sketches had been put on display at the Municipal Museum to celebrate the coronation of the young Queen Wilhelmina. One among 43,000 visitors in just short of two months, the French writer had the opportunity to study well-known pieces including Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Titus at his Desk (1655), and the massive 1642 oil canvas of an Amsterdam militia guild, The Night Watch (which had been lifted off the wall in the nearby Rijksmuseum and carried by at least 25 men through a window and across the square [fig. 1]). Proust was beyond himself: “all these pictures,” he wrote upon his return to Paris, “are extremely serious matters, fit to preoccupy the greatest minds among us during a whole lifetime”—especially, he found, towards the end of such a lifetime, when the frail body encounters works of art that have remained undiminished by “the flight of years.”¹ Proust’s account goes on to record precisely such a chance encounter, as its author imagines running into the art critic John Ruskin, in extreme old age, newly inspecting at the Amsterdam exhibit a Rembrandt he remembered from his youth.

Proust’s writings are filled with such fictional museum-goers. After his visit to the 1921 Dutch Exhibition at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, the author famously has his character Bergotte in the Recherche retrace his steps to die in front of Vermeer’s View of Delft. We come across another visitor in Proust’s unfinished Chardin and Rembrandt, which was only recently translated as part of a series of handsomely produced pocket reprints of art criticism by the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vernon Lee, and Paul Gauguin. Here the narrator takes a young man who “cannot catch a train to Holland” on a tour of the Louvre in order to “make him stop” at the paintings by Rembrandt.² Now, 350 years after the painter’s death, museums across the world—from the British Museum to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, from the Ashmolean to the Agnes Etherington in Ontario—are again inviting the public in to celebrate the Old Dutch Master. The centerpiece of the commemorative year is All the Rembrandts at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. For the first time in its history, the museum has taken all its Rembrandts out of storage: sixty drawings, some 300 prints and twenty-two paintings, including its latest acquisition jointly purchased by the Dutch and French states, the stunning pendant portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit (1634). In that abundance (much like the pair’s own wedding dress), All the Rembrandts closely resembles the exhibition Proust saw—and it is overwhelming, absorbing.

Fig. 1.

Men moving Rembrandt’s The Night Watch for the 1898 Coronation Exhibition in Amsterdam, which Marcel Proust would visit in mid-October. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Virginia Woolf, I am sure, would have wanted to see it too. She has Mr Bankes in To the Lighthouse cross the lawn and tell Lily Briscoe of how he “had been to Amsterdam . . . He had seen the Rembrandts.”³ Shortly after the Armistice, Woolf went to see the Rembrandts in the National Gallery in London and found them “very fine.”⁴ In 1922 she heard Fry lecture on the painter at the Mortimer Hall. “Slide, please,” she recalled his voice saying years later while writing the critic’s biography: “And there was the picture—Rembrandt, Chardin, Poussin, Cézanne—in black and white upon the screen.”⁵ Fry was apparently such a born narrator, pointing his wand to the screen “like the antenna of some miraculously sensitive insect...