JOLLY DAYS

Rembrandt

This article by Robert Hughes about Rembrandt is worth reading. Hughes can often be a dismissive narcissist in his criticism, waving off with grandiosity complex issues and images, but he likes art and looks at it — add to that his ability to write, and you got something.

Here is a good example of Hughes' ability to enter into the life of a painting with great empathy and insight — Hughes at his best — a snip about Rembrandt's great Bathsheba at her bath :

… Bathsheba clearly has an internal life, not merely an external beauty. She is engaged in moral reflection - the fact that she is no longer reading the letter makes that clear - and her pensive expression has a gravity beyond that of any other Bathsheba. Will she? Won't she? Does she want to? If so, how much? The questions are left hanging in the air, but we are left intensely conscious of them - of the ambiguity, so to put it, that hangs over all beauty, all desire. But then, her beauty is of a different order to the conventional; those broad hips, those sturdy hands, connect her to the actual world we live and feel in. And what lends a further dimension to the subject is that we know, if we are Biblically literate, something that Bathsheba, inside the Bible story, does not: that the amoral King David wants her so much that he is going to murder her husband, get him out of the way by putting him in the front line of battle.