You Reading About Me Looking at a Painting

Published on August 23, 2009 by Christy Tennant

The following is a guest blog by our summer intern, Thomas Alberti. Tom is a student at Grove City College, where he is majoring in philosophy (BA, 2010).

Time, it seems, is fleeting. My summer in the city is coming to an end, and for the last three weeks, I’ve decided to do a multi-part viewing of Rembrandt’s self-portrait. I plan to dig into the topics that I’ve previously only scratched. I’m thinking of reading up on Rembrandt and his historical context, and I hope to consult a critical review of the painting; but for the first viewing, I just went in as before.

I have wanted to make a return to the Met since I first came. During my initial visit, I dashed through the Rembrandt section, making a mental note to come again, and so all this past week I’ve been looking forward to spending some quality time with the Dutch master. When I entered his section of the European Paintings gallery, I took a moment to browse some of his other works, as kind of a warm up, before settling down with the centerpiece of the room—Self-portrait.

As I sat down on the bench taking out my pen and notebook, I looked at the painting and considered the time we would be spending together, as if I were sitting down with an interviewee or an old wise-man. It’s common for us to personify objects, especially those that resemble people, which of course include portraits, but with self-portraits the connection of the object to a person might very well transcend mere resemblance. The self-portrait seems to bear some intrinsic relationship with its author; it is an artifact seemingly imbued with the very essence of its maker. So the notion came to me that over the next few weeks, I’d be getting to know this painting pretty well—or rather, that I’d be getting to know Rembrandt pretty well.

I see brown. They arere some reds too, but mostly browns. The background accounts for most of the brown. It’s a murky, cloudy, amorphous mass of brown. The lighter browns extend to the periphery and fade into darker colors as they near the center. The figure’s coat is also brown, with some red and yellowy highlights. But his hat—it is not brown. The hat is black. The absolute darkest part of the painting, the hat hardly even has any texture; it’s an obsidian silhouette. The hat contrasts the rest of the painting with its definite and concrete form. It’s shape, unlike the background, is defined by straight, level lines which give the painting some geometric structure. The hat slants downward at about 45 degrees from left to right, creating a line parallel to the one made by the figure’s left shoulder and collar. Between these two lines rests the main subject of the painting: Rembrandt’s own face.

Unlike either the background or the hat, or even the coat, the face is articulate. Not only is it the brightest part of the painting, but it’s the object rendered with the most detail. The right side is in shadow, the left in light. There are splashes of red on the cheek and nose, shadows near the mouth; the lips are thin, drawn, and deflated and are a more subdued, dulled red. Thin but distinct furrows run the length of his forehead, and at the bottom-center the eyebrows draw together to form a ‘v’-shaped notch. His forehead also, like his nose, reflects the light coming from the right; these two places are the only ones painted with white. His eyes, in contrast, are shadowy, black-brown orbs, the right being the closer, and therefore the larger and more penetrating of the two.

The way Rembrandt captures the light makes the face pop, so that it lifts from the two dimensional canvas as if it were a relief sculpture. And it’s not that it’s exceedingly realistic—it’s clearly a painting and not a photograph. In fact, I think it’s because it’s a painting that the face almost seems there. It looks like flesh, like I could touch it and mold it and feel it. The face is content and mature; it is soft, yet set. While the face holds no overt emotions, there is an understated inquisition within. It’s almost as if the face knows that it’s being studied, and in response it studies its own observer, as if to ask the question, “Who is studying whom?”

After looking at Self-portrait, I began to consider the complexities of the genre. It some ways, the self-portrait is an ancestor of the meta-narrative. The self-portrait is simultaneously a thing of the author and a thing about the author. It both proceeds from and goes beyond the author, such that the portrait can look back at its maker, who in turn looks back at it, and thus the self-portrait folds in on itself in a way that speaks not only of postmodernism’s love for meta-narrative, but also of the fact that we have ourselves a maker who saw fit to make us in His own image. And so here we are, beings made in His own image, now making things in our own image, but to what end?