Simon Schama has already written a fine book on the French Revolution and a substantial one on the Dutch Golden Age, of which the present volume is presumably - though in the highest sense - a spin-off. He is a historian, not an art scholar, and as such he is courageous in taking on Rembrandt as a subject, since the literature on him is enormous and few artists have suffered so much scholarly analysis. (Sir Kenneth Clark once produced a slightly facile book on him and took some flak from Rembrandt experts as a result).
There appears to be something about Rembrandt which nags at the modern sensibility and places him right in the forefront of 20th-century consciousness. The self-portraits, in particular, have a special quality of emotional confrontation and soul-searching which in many senses is acutely modern. Some recent commentators complain that he never really meant them to be viewed like that, and that we read our own subjectivity into them, but the fact remains that they appear to invite this approach. Looking at the late self-portraits, in particular, we feel face to face with a speaking image of Man.
Though the salient facts of his life are well known, interpretations of them differ widely, and to span the psychological void of three centuries needs a leap of intuition as well as scholarly information. What was he really like as a private person, and are we reading modernist sensibilities into a 17th-century man and artist, who was soaked in the Bible and lived in a country which had just emerged from destructive religious strife? Rembrandt was of lowly stock, was ambitious and intelligent and perhaps rather bumptious, a successful, even fashionable portrait-painter who married well but lost his wife. Late in life he co-habited with Hendrickje Stoffels, much younger than he but devoted and practical; he survived both her and his beloved son Titus. Those late years, in fact, sound unremittingly sad, particularly since his style had gone out of date, or rather out of fashion.
However, Schama has made his book in part a kind of sustained two-part fugue in which Rembrandt's career alternates with that of another and very different giant of Netherlandish art, Peter Paul Rubens. This makes it rich in texture though also very long, even to a fault - a trait it shares with most of his previous works, by the way. He sees Rembrandt's whole career as being powered at least partly by emulation of this Flemish forerunner who was the Universal Man of the Counter-Reformation and a genuinely European figure, a prince of painters who consorted not only with temporal princes but with kings. Rubens was everything Rembrandt was not - well-born, courtly, handsome, patronised by the royalty of many countries, the correspondent of the learned men of his age, an accomplished diplomat, a polymath and a prodigy.
Rubens's life was all in high colour, while Rembrandt's by contrast was like so much of his paintings - done in earthcolours. He was small, ugly and awkwardly made, and though his reputation spread well outside Holland in his lifetime, he was probably more respected by fellow-artists than by the fashionable public. Unlike Rubens, he often seems in some way or other to be out of tune emotionally with his age, almost an outsider, even if in certain aspects he epitomised the mentality of the mercantile, Calvinist Dutch Republic. Rubens, the pupil of the Jesuits, summed up the best of Counter-Reformation Catholicism while Rembrandt belongs to Biblical, burgerlich, self-sufficient Holland and to the "levelling" aspect of the Reformation. It is almost a classic case of the velvet doublet versus the puritan buff jerkin - except that Rembrandt developed an awkward luxury streak which made him overspend at auctions.
Schama plays cleverly and stimulatingly on this duality between two very great artists who were not contemporaries, and his biographical details are sometimes novel and invariably relevant to the whole, complex argument. In spite of his lack of art-scholarly training, he is as much at ease with the iconography of 17th-century painting as he is with the complexities of the religious strife of the times - which eventually split the old, prosperous Netherlands into two hostile countries, one Calvinist and republican, the other under the shield of Catholic Spain.
Rembrandt had some very gifted contemporaries, including Jan Lievens - his fellow-townsman and fellow-youth prodigy - who promised to become a great master, but somehow never quite did. Though he may have withdrawn progressively from the world as he aged and grew indifferent to immediate fame, in his youth he was highly competitive and ambitious, anxious to make his name and stamp his individual style on his milieu. Schama also shows conclusively - to me at least - that Rembrandt, though never classically schooled like Rubens, was cultured and even learned in his own way. From early maturity he seems to have known who and what he was, and was sufficiently sure of posterity to believe that it would know him too and take him at his own valuation.
Perhaps his greatest gift as a painter was his mastery of what Henry Moore has called "the emotional sense of space." He despised Baroque pomp and formality, and compositionally is most effective with only one or a few figures; his "props" are few and all the more telling for that, his brushwork is as free and fluent as an Impressionist's, and he was revolutionary and daring in the works of his last years. (Some pundits considered him a bad and even pernicious influence on younger artists, particularly for his sketchy finishing; that he was a supreme draughtsman was often forgotten or overlooked.)
He had a special feeling for the old, the humble, and for Amsterdam's legally tolerated but socially isolated Jews - Schama is fully justified in emphasising the greatness of that late picture, The Jewish Bride. What used to be considered his masterpiece, The Night Watch, is essentially an impersonal tour-de-force of design and lighting, and Schama classes it merely as "attributed to" - though he treats as genuine a picture which I thought had recently been demoted, The Polish Rider. But then art scholarship, like most fields of intellectual activity, tends to keep changing with the times; and even those parallel pictures which were not created by Rembrandt's own hand are ultimately a reflection of his style and powerful - even unique - individuality.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic