Rembrandt and Literature

Tim Brinkhof ponders the Dutch master’s influence on literature.

By Tim BrinkhofFebruary 27, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Literary Criticism

ALTHOUGH ONE CAN never get enough of Vermeer or van Gogh, a regrettable consequence of this current age of blockbuster art exhibitions is that more and more great artists are being viewed in isolation from each other. Turning the 18th-century notion of the singular genius into a marketing ploy, museums around the world present their subjects as rebels, outcasts, and troublemakers who operated outside time and space, when all of them were, in fact, closely connected with—and creatively indebted to—their culture and time period.

It is refreshing, then, to stumble upon a show like Impulse Rembrandt: Teacher, Strategist, Bestseller (2024–25) at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts in Germany, whose accompanying English-language catalog of critical essays plugs the most revered of the Dutch masters back into the ecosystem that influenced him as much as he influenced it.

Born in Leiden to a well-to-do miller in 1606, Rembrandt in early youth began to draft sketches of the Dutch countryside and portraits of his Protestant mother, who instilled in him a lifelong reverence for Christian mythology. In his teens, he apprenticed first with Jacob Isaacszoon van Swanenburg, a history painter freshly returned from Italy, then with Pieter Lastman, who also taught Jan Lievens. At 22, Rembrandt began taking on students of his own, many of whom, including Ferdinand Bol, Gerard Dou, and Carel Fabritius, became successful painters in their own right. Contrary to popular belief, writes the head of paintings and sculpture at Leipzig Museum, Jan Nicolaisen, in the exhibition catalog, these students—some as young as 14 when they first appeared at Rembrandt’s stately house and studio on Amsterdam’s Jodenbreestraat—didn’t spend their time completing Rembrandt’s masterpieces so much as copying them, adopting his style and sensibilities as their own. Concerned more with light and emotion than idealized forms, and increasingly painting in loose, expressive strokes, Rembrandt has been deservedly called one of the first “modern” painters, his well-documented influence running from his immediate disciples to Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí.

Less studied is Rembrandt’s lasting impact on other art forms, notably literature, yet it is with prose and poetry, rather than sculpture or architecture, that his paintings have the most in common. As Nicolaisen writes in the catalog essay “Between Production Facility and School of Seeing” (echoing last year’s Directed by: Rembrandt exhibit at the Museum Rembrandthuis), the artist drew as much inspiration from written texts, including plays, as he did from other paintings. He regularly attended Amsterdam’s theater, the Schouwburg, to sketch actors mid-performance, emphasizing both their gestures and their expressions. Back in his studio, he taught his pupils to draw their subjects—even the biblical ones—“as if on a stage” and “as characters in a plot.” Versed in Aristotle’s Poetics, a foundational text for dramatic writing, he had a penchant for illustrating anagnorisis, the moment of personal revelation that precipitates a story’s climax, as when Moses speaks to God before leading the Jews out of Egypt, or when Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father. (Rembrandt’s 1647 painting Susanna and the Elders shows the biblical heroine in the midst of turning her head towards two men who, in the Book of Daniel, promise her harm if she refuses to sleep with them.) Unlike the Renaissance artists who preceded him, Rembrandt did not treat historical and mythological figures as impersonal archetypes but, much like a writer, tried to show their thoughts and feelings, their “lijdinge des gemoeds.” “The Dutch painters of the seventeenth century,” Nicolaisen surmises, “sought to depict not only external reality, but also the ‘inner man.’”

Just as Rembrandt drew inspiration from Amsterdam’s literary scene, so the literary scene drew inspiration from him, with Dutch writers using Dutch painting—already of international renown—as a standard for their own creative endeavors. “I tried to imitate with words the colors, design, and passions of the painter,” the writer Joost van den Vondel, a contemporary and acquaintance of Rembrandt, stated in the preface to his 1640 biblical tragedy Joseph in Dothan, echoing the Roman poet Horace’s dictum “ut pictura poesis”—poetry is painting. Vondel went on to make a similar statement in the preface to his play Gebroeders (“The Brothers”), published the following year, saying he tried to write the story as Peter Paul Rubens might have painted it, and again in his 1661 book Toneelschilt (“Shield of the Stage”), describing a theatrical performance as a “speaking painting.” Another leading poet of the age, Jan Vos, agreed, thinking—as Maria A. Schenkeveld put it in her 1991 book Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt—“in an essentially pictorial way,” and working from the belief that “seeing is superior to saying.”

By and large, the development of 17th-century Dutch literature followed the development of 17th-century Dutch painting, Amsterdam’s writers and poets moving away from the dominant, classical style of their French neighbors in much the same way Rembrandt looked beyond the masters of the Italian Renaissance. In both cases, notes Schenkeveld, Dutch creatives abandoned the example of their Greco-Roman forebears in favor of nature, which they saw not as an imperfect form hiding a Platonic ideal, the way Michelangelo had done, but rather as the ideal itself. Just as Rembrandt had traded the rigid, brightly lit compositions of the classicists in favor of chaotic assemblies à la Night Watch (1642)—here bathed in light, there covered by absolute darkness, creating scenes that were, for lack of a better phrase, more evocative of “real life”—so too did poets like Vos, in his plays Aren en Titus (1641) and Medea (1667), seek to replace the sound but unnatural structure of ancient theater with the modern method of confusion and disorder.

But if their defiant attitudes contributed to their success, they also made them a target of criticism. While Night Watch wasn’t, as many Rembrandt legends would have you believe, met with scorn and laughter, the painter’s late style—expressive, experimental—certainly contributed to his dwindling popularity, prompting even former admirers like Vondel to disparagingly refer to him as “hiding in the shadows, like an owl.” In a move that would have the opposite effect today, one of Vos’s fiercest critics, a fellow poet and playwright named Andries Pels, sought to discredit his rival’s work by comparing him to Rembrandt—that “first heretic in painting” who asked washerwomen and peat-stampers to be the models for his Aphrodite, “an error, which he calls following nature’s model.”

Rebellion against Renaissance classicism, which would find its fullest and most well-formulated expression during the 19th-century Romantic period, also introduced the aforementioned notion of the singular genius—that darling of blockbuster exhibitions who reaches artistic heights not through training and dutiful mastery of technique, as was the way of the Italian masters, but via talent, passion, and expression of selfhood. Written off as a misguided narcissist by classical and neoclassical critics, and as a scandal-prone, out-of-control hedonist by Victorian ones, Rembrandt would have better luck with Romantic tastemakers like Eugène Fromentin and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, the “rediscoverer” of Vermeer, both of whom recognized Rembrandt as one of those inspiring, uniquely gifted figures: a precursor to modern art movements like impressionism, and a cornerstone of the Dutch national identity that was beginning to take shape after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Where writers from the Dutch Golden Age had adopted Rembrandt’s ideas about life and art, those of subsequent centuries were more interested in the attributes of his person, often featuring him as a character in historical novels or narrative biographies—e.g., Hendrik Willem van Loon’s R. v. R.: The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn (1930)—or using his paintings as plot devices for genre fiction, including Nina Siegal’s The Anatomy Lesson (2014) and, by way of his ill-fated student Fabritius, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013). In most of these cases, Amy Golahny notes in her 2001 essay “The Use and Misuse of Rembrandt,” authors engage not with the historical Rembrandt so much as with the reputation that has enshrouded him since the 19th century, invariably treating him as a tragic hero, misunderstood prophet, and stand-in for concepts of truth and authenticity.

Perhaps Rembrandt’s closest and most overlooked connection to literature is the way his role in art history aligns with one of the foundational works of literary theory: Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1916). A Marxist thinker, Lukács understood the development of literature as a dialectical process driven by socioeconomic change, with the ancient and feudal epic giving way to the novel during the political upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries, when monarchs throughout Europe fell to revolution. Epics and novels, Lukács argues, fundamentally differ in both form and content: where epics were written in verse, using highly abstract and metaphorical language, novels were written in concrete, descriptive prose. The epic, created when political power and religious doctrine went largely unchallenged, exists in a “closed totality,” populated by mythical heroes whose quests serve to bring the world back into cosmic balance; novels—written during the dawn of the modern era, characterized by uncertainty and ever accelerating development—revolve around “problematic individuals” who struggle to fit into “problematic worlds.” Where the epic, in other words, presupposed meaning, the novel searched for it, sometimes in vain.

Although Lukács and other Marxist literary critics, including Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio Gramsci, did not think to connect the birth of the novel—typically seen as the publication of the first part of Don Quixote in 1605—to either the Netherlands in general or Rembrandt in particular, the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age arguably underwent a similar transformation, taking on new forms to reflect fresh living conditions. Lukács closely associates the birth of the novel with the emergence of the petite bourgeoisie, or middle class—and for good reason, as this new stratum was as literate as it was uncertain of its place. Neither restricted by the customs and responsibilities of the nobility nor shackled to their employers like the working masses, the middle class produced as many novel writers as it did novelistic protagonists, and few countries in early 17th-century Europe had as developed a bourgeoisie as the Dutch Republic, which—after breaking off from the Spanish Empire during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648)—was essentially managed by traders, merchants, accountants, and other freshly evolved species of urban professional.

So large and wealthy was the Dutch middle class that painters such as Rembrandt no longer needed to rely on their profession’s historical patrons, the nobility and the church. The country’s old aristocracy left with the Spanish, as did the Catholic Church—which, at any rate, hadn’t commissioned much artwork since the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation. Petit bourgeois customers still asked Dutch painters for stately portraits and biblical scenes, but they also showed interest in subjects that princes and bishops probably wouldn’t have cared for, such as still lifes of exotic flowers and food items (imported by the Dutch East India Company), street and interior scenes, or simple landscapes. And their portraits and biblical scenes were markedly different from those produced elsewhere in Europe, involved as they were in creating the visual culture of a new kind of nonauthoritarian, market-driven society. Where Raphael and Michelangelo had reserved their energies for powerful patrons, Rembrandt painted subjects other artists would not have considered worthy of their talents, from historically marginalized groups like women and people of color to those living on the fringes of society, such as ratcatchers and homeless drunkards. And that’s to say nothing of his many studies of slaughtered oxen.

Of course, Rembrandt tackled mythological and religious scenes also, but when he did, he generally tried, as a matter of purely personal interest, to render these larger-than-life stories in ways that felt relatable, approachable, alive. Contrary to an artist like Rubens, who gave his Christs the chiseled torsos and stoic stares of ancient Greek statues, Rembrandt’s look emaciated, pensive, and sorrowful, like a convincing stage actor.

Rembrandt’s paintings, more so than those of other Dutch masters, function as the visual equivalent of Lukács’s novel, using different means to accomplish the same goal: exposing the emotional, spiritual, at times existential turmoil inside the hearts and minds of his characters. They provide not only an evocative description of their exterior reality but also a detailed account of their internal existence—never at ease, always searching.

It is, in light of this conclusion, rather fitting that both academic and literary treatments of Rembrandt have slowly moved beyond the one-sided interpretations of the past, viewing him neither as a nuisance—as the classicists and Victorians did—nor as a Romantic genius, but rather as a man of unresolvable contradiction, a hungry miller’s boy who bit off more than he could chew. Possessed of both innate talent and acquired skill, he was equally sensible to corporeal and aesthetic pleasures, and willing to change and develop in response to both his surroundings and his own better judgment. A best-seller indeed.

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Featured image: Rembrandt. Self-Portrait, 1660. Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, The Met Museum (14.40.618). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed February 21, 2025. Image has been cropped.