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Harriet Backer's Northern Light

Near the top of our list of exhibitions we want to go and see: retrospectives of relatively neglected women artists. Also right up there: Nordic painters we would like to learn more about. So it's no surprise we were keen to explore  Harriet Backer (1845-1932): The Music of Colours  at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.  Backer was Norway's most renowned female painter of the 19th century, if little known outside her homeland. We must have seen her work in the past in the old National Museum in Oslo, but she'll have been one of many unfamiliar names. Now, though, she's getting the full retrospective treatment with a show that's already been seen in the Norwegian capital and in Stockholm.  Backer's paintings are mostly intimate depictions of interiors, both domestic and church. There's a calmness to them, and often a very interesting treatment of light, with Impressionism showing an influence from time she spent in France. One or two of the pictures on show are
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Rembrandt -- The Story Starts Here

There have been a lot of Rembrandt exhibitions last year and in 2019, the 350th anniversary of his death, and we've felt a wee bit satiated, to be perfectly truthful. 

The last big show in the Netherlands in this celebratory Rembrandt year is in Leiden, the city where the great artist was born in 1606, at the newly renovated and extended Museum De Lakenhal. It's about the start of his career, the period before Rembrandt really became Rembrandt. We approached it with a slight degree of trepidation; would this assembly of apprentice works actually constitute a decent exhibition? 

We needn't have been concerned. Young Rembrandt -- Rising Star turns out to be the best Rembrandt show of all those we've seen recently, and in fact the best of the dozens of exhibitions we've been to around Europe this year. And if you can't get to Leiden, it'll be transferring to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in February. 

This show takes us through to about 1634-35, by which time Rembrandt had moved to Amsterdam, married Saskia van Uylenburgh and was already producing work of fantastic inventiveness, quality and ability, plenty of which we get to appreciate here. But part of the tremendous achievement of this exhibition is that before we get to these great pictures, it illustrates the journey Rembrandt had to make. He certainly wasn't a fully formed artist from the beginning. 

The mature Rembrandt makes printmaking look so easy, with a profusion of the finest of lines or the perfectly placed mark to create wonderful images, but his early efforts on show here are often clumsy and awkward. Even great artists have to learn to get to grips with tricky techniques. By 1630, the year he turned 24, though, Rembrandt was already a master. 
And not just in those sketch-like self-portraits for which he's so justly famed. Two years later we find an etching that's full of unbelievable detail -- The Rat Catcher. It's an absorbing slice of everyday life, expressive faces and postures. The rat catcher has vermin hanging down from his basket as well as on top, and there's a live one sitting on his shoulder too. The householder doesn't want anything to do with him, even as the rat catcher's boy peers through the front door with huge interest.
But let's step back a bit first. The first room gives us some autobiographical and local background. This being Holland, we've got the details of where Rembrandt's parents lived, where he went to school, his time at Leiden University, the Oxbridge of the Netherlands. You can find them all on a map of Leiden from 1600, and there are historical documents to back it all up.

Rembrandt wasn't cut out for an academic career; he wanted to be an artist, and he became a pupil of the Leiden history painter Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburg and then of Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. Early on here, we see how the apprentice learned to paint biblical scenes, appropriating his masters' visual language but seeking to experiment with new techniques. There's some hesitancy, some unconvincing renditions of poses and faces, but the odd flash of brilliance too.

The Spectacles Seller (Allegory of Sight) is Rembrandt's earliest known work, part of a series depicting the five senses. It's by no means a great painting, but the faces of the old couple (possibly the artist's father and mother) are full of expression, and that case crammed with the seller's wares contains a hint of what was to come.
Now, in the mid-1620s, if you'd been forced to tip which young Leiden painter might be destined for greatness, you might have plumped for Rembrandt's friend and painting companion Jan Lievens. Look at Rembrandt's work from the period in comparison with Lievens's rather wonderful Old Woman Reading a Book, and Rembrandt really does come across as a poor second.
But Rembrandt kept on experimenting. With light and shade, with dramatic compositions and postures. Such as The Stoning of St Stephen, depicting an early Christian martyr. All the action is concentrated in the right-hand half of the picture, with all views -- and stones -- directed at Stephen, lit by a brilliant divine light. And behind the saint we see the face of Rembrandt, regularly sneaking himself into his creations like a prototypical Alfred Hitchcock.

And at a point in his early 20s, it all suddenly seems to have come together for Rembrandt. No more slightly clunky compositions, no more awkward poses. The technique and the invention unite, and around 1628 Rembrandt came to the notice of Constantijn Huygens, the influential secretary to the Prince of Orange. And the commissions and masterpieces start to flow.

Christ at Emmaus is an early example of Rembrandt's mastery of chiaroscuro. Saint Peter looks on in shock as he recognises the resurrected Jesus, silhouetted against a golden light. Such drama....
Alongside the biblical, the mythological. More drama, more tension in The Abduction of Proserpina, illustrating the Roman poet Ovid's story of how Pluto, the god of the underworld, fell hopelessly in love with Proserpina and decided to kidnap her. Rembrandt's Proserpina is fighting back, clawing at the face of her abductor, while her handmaidens grasp her gown, pulling it taut in a bid to prevent her from being taken away.
Mind you, just because you've done it once doesn't guarantee you're on to a winning formula. The Abduction of Europa, from a year or so later, is a bit ho-hum compared with the seething waters and sheer violence of Proserpina.

The curators have assembled pictures and engravings from all over for this really special show, and here from the Met in New York is one of Rembrandt's best-known paintings, The Noble Slav, actually a prince in Turkish-inspired costume. This life-size portrayal is early Rembrandt at his most brilliant -- the light, the fabrics, the face. He was about 26 when he painted it.
In the same year, 1632, he also painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, but you'll have to take a 15-minute train ride to The Hague from Leiden to see that one in the Mauritshuis, because it's one early masterpiece that's not in this show. 

Rembrandt quickly developed a reputation as a portrait painter in Amsterdam, the commercial hub of the Netherlands, and you can see why with a number of excellent works here. Perhaps the most outstanding is one apparently dashed off at speed of an elderly woman identified as Aertgen Claesdr., the mother of a Rotterdam brewer, and done when Rembrandt was in that city for just a few days. 
Rembrandt, not yet 30, and a fully-fledged genius. No wonder he felt entitled to portray himself with a feather in his cap.

Practicalities

Young Rembrandt -- Rising Star is on at the Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden until February 9. The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday from 1000 to 1700. Full-price tickets cost 20 euros, and you need to book a timeslot in advance here. Allow yourself two hours or more. The Lakenhal, naturally, overlooks a canal on Oude Singel in the centre of Leiden, and it's just 10 minutes' walk from Leiden Centraal rail station, with frequent connections from all over the Netherlands.

The show at the Ashmolean in Oxford runs from February 27 to June 7 (open daily 1000-1700). Tickets are already on sale, full price £13.90 at weekends (£15.50 including Gift Aid), and 50p cheaper during the week. You can buy them on the museum's website.

Images

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed, 1630, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Rat Catcher, 1632, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Rembrandt van Rijn, Spectacles Seller (Allegory of Sight), c. 1624, Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden
Jan Lievens, Old Woman Reading a Book, c. 1625, on loan from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam to Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden
Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ at Emmaus, c. 1628, Musée Jacquemart-André -- Institut de France, Paris
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Abduction of Proserpina, 1630, Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen Berlin -- Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Rembrandt van Rijn, Man in Oriental Costume ('The Noble Slav'), 1632, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of an 83-Year-Old Woman, 1634, The National Gallery, London

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