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100% found this document useful (4 votes)
63 views67 pages

Instant Ebooks Textbook Rembrandt S Eyes Simon Schama Download All Chapters

The document promotes the ebook 'Rembrandt's Eyes' by Simon Schama, available for download along with several other suggested ebooks. It highlights the book's exploration of Rembrandt's life and art, emphasizing the connection between his biography and his paintings. The text also provides links to download various other related titles.

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Rembrandt s Eyes Simon Schama Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Simon Schama
ISBN(s): 9781422151860, 1422151867
Edition: Reissue
File Details: PDF, 134.69 MB
Year: 2015
Language: english
A
MARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY

3 1111 01927 5393


S C H AM

Rembrandt s
M

Eves

i^
U.S.A. $50.00

For Rembrandt as for Shakespeare, all the world was


indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tac-
ticsof its performance: the strutting and mincing; the
wardrobe and the face paint; the full repertoire of ges-
ture and grimace; the flutter of hands and the roll of the
eyes; the belly laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew
what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle,
and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon; to
shake a fist how to sin and how to
or uncover a breast;
atone; how commit murder and how to commit sui-
to
cide. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fash-

ioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter


ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such
bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits
and the whole rowdy show in between.
More than three centuries after his death, Rem-
brandt remains the most deeply loved of all the great
masters of painting, his face so familiar to us from the
self-portraits painted at every stage in his life, yet still

so mysterious. As with Shakespeare, the facts of his


life are hard to come by: the Leiden miller's son who
briefly found fame in Amsterdam, whose genius was
fitfully recognized by his contemporaries, who fell

into bankruptcy and died in poverty. So there is prob-


ably no painter whose life has engendered more leg-
ends, nor to whom more unlikely pictures have been
attributed (a process now undergoing rigorous rever-
sal). Rembrandt's Eyes, about which Simon Schama
has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows
that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discov-
ered in his pictures. Through a succession of superbly
incisive descriptions and interpretations of Rem-
brandt's paintings threaded into this narrative, he
allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and to think
about it afresh.
But this book moves far beyond the bounds of con-
ventional biography or art history. With extraordi-
nary imaginative sympathy, Schama conjures up the
world in which Rembrandt moved — its sounds,
smells, and tastes as well as its politics; the influences

on him of the wars of the Protestant United Provinces


against Spain, of the extreme Calvinism of his native
Leiden, of the demands of patrons and the ambitions
of contemporaries; the importance of his beloved
Saskia and, after her death (Rembrandt was later

forced to sell her grave, so complete was his ruin), of

his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels; and, above all, the


profound effect on him of the great master of rhe
immediately preceding generation, the Catholic
painter from Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens: "the
prince of painters and the painter of princes" \
whom Rembrandt was obsessed for the first part of

mHHi MMfal
1
ALSO BY SIMON SCHAMA
Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1J80-1813

Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel

The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation


of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)

Landscape and Memory


Rembrandt's Eves
ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK 1999
Rembrandt's Eyes

Simon Schama
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 1999 by Simon Schama

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.


Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.randomhouse.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Schama, Simon.
Rembrandt's eyes / by Simon Schama. — 1st ed.

p. cm.
isbn 0-679-402.5 6-x
1. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1 606-1 669. 2. Rubens, Peter Paul,
Sir, 1 5 77-1 640 — Influence. 3. Painters — Netherlands — Biography.
I. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1669. II. Title.

ND653.R4S2.4 1999
759.9492 —dc2i
[Bl 99-19971 cip

Manufactured in Italy

First Edition

title page: Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait in a

Velvet Cap with a Plume, 1638. Etching. New York,


Pierpont Morgan Library
For John Brewer and for Gary Schwartz,
fellow lodgers in Clio's house
We should apologize for daring to speak about painting.
— PAUL VALERY
CONTENTS

PART ONE THE PROSPECTS OF A PAINTER

Chapter One The Quiddity

i 's Hertogenbosch, 1629 3


ii Leiden, 1629 7
iii 's Hertogenbosch, 1629 9
iv Leiden, 1629 12
V New York, 1998 24
vi The Hague, Winter 1631-32 17

PART TWO THE PARAGON

Chapter Two Jan and Maria

i Iniquities, March 1 571 41


ii Atonement 62

Chapter Three Pietro Paolo

i Painting in the Ruins jz


ii In Giulio's Shadow? 88
iii Gift Horses 102
1 \ Brotherhoods / 1
4

Chapter hour Apelles in Antwerp

1 I loneysuckle / j
>-

ii Tulips 144
iii The Burden of Faith iso
iv The Gentleman Completed / (> <;

v Ruhcns for I xport /


84
CONTENTS

PARTTHREE THE PRODIGY

Chapter Five RHL


O Leyda Gratiosa 19 5
ii Priming 208
iii History Lessons 220

Chapter Six The Competition

Summer Candlelight, 1627 242


The Partnership (Limited) 2^4
By Faith Alone 270
Dogging the Nonpareil 283
Making Faces 295

PART FOUR THE PRODIGAL

Chapter Seven Amsterdam Anatomized

The City in Five Senses 311


Movers, Not Shakers 322
Autopsy 342

Chapter Eight Body Language

Pairing Off and Dressing Up 3 54


1 Violations 383
ii Furies 401
v The Moving Finger 416
v Samson's Eyes 419
vi Wrestling with Rubens 430

Chapter Nine Crossing the Threshold

i Painting the Sun with


Charcoal, May 1640 448
ii Crossing the Threshold 458
iii Propulsion 480
iv Fallen Birds, June 1 64 2 5-0/
CONTENTS X I

PART FIVE THE PROPHET

Chapter Ten Exposures

The Real Thing? jii


ii The Mutable Line 5 27
iii Exposure 542

Chapter Eleven The Price of Painting

The Pulled Glove 562


Apelles Contemplating the Bust
of Homer? 582
111 Sacrifices 595

Chapter Twelve The Sufficiency of Grace

Rough Treatment 616


Mixed Company 639
Quietus 659
Non-finito, Summer 1667 669

PART SIX AFTER WARD

Chapter Thirteen Rembrandt's Ghost

Huygens's Eyes 689


ii Gerard's Eyes 691
iii Rembrandt's Eyes 700

Author's Note 703


Notes 705
Select Bibliography 72 j
Acknowledgements 729
Index 7}i
PART ONE

The Prospects
of a Painter
CHAPTER ONE THE QUIDDITY

s Hertogenboscb, 1629

thirty salvos the cannon were obliged to cool So perhaps


After
was then that Constantijn Huygens thought he heard nightingales
off. it

fluting over the artillery.


1

The windows in the headquarters of


Frederik Hendrik, the Prince of Orange, commanded a remote but pan-
oramic prospect of the siege. Had he been asked, Huygens would have been
in a perfect position to draft one of those grandiose bird's-eye views of the
operations of war, engraved to document the commander's genius, his wor-
thiness to be remembered as the equal of Alexander or Scipio. Some liked
to describe such scenes as theaters of valor. And to an eye as literary as
Huygens's, the distant view from his tower chamber might well have
seemed like a great masque, blazing with pyrotechnics and noisy with the
work of contraptions; a flamboyance of banners. But he also knew that for
all its appearance of a rout, such festive parades were actually conducted
according to a strict program: and drummers; then horses,
first the pipers
fantastically caparisoned; then mountebanks and men in lion skins; the
pasteboard dolphins and dragons; and finally triumphal cars a Vantique,
pulled by garlanded oxen or the occasional camel.
This, however, was quite different: the appearance of a plan, the reality
of chaos. Distance did not lend reason to the proceedings. There was much
frantic hithering and thithering like rats in a storm. Mounted cuirassiers
and harquebusiers would venture periodic sallies into the smoke, cantering
over the gory wreckage of men and horses, discharging their carbines opti-
mistically against the outer forts. Beyond them, in the low, wet ground,
sappers crept tentatively through the trenches, understandably nervous of
being hit by their own men's fire.And then there were those amidst the
action who did nothing lively: who snored with their heads propped
against a drum, threw dice, smoked a pipe, or, if they had been particularly
unfortunate, swung from a discouraging gibbet. Every so often, at dusk, a
mortar-launched grenade would snake into the inky light, find a rooftop
in the city, and a small blossom of vermilion fire would unfurl in the
Dog Star sky.
REMBRANDT' SEYES 4
The two secretaries attending on the Prince of Orange,
junior of the
Constantijn Huygens was spending much of his time, day and night, deci-
phering coded intercepts taken from the Spanish and Flemish troops inside
the besieged cathedral town of 's Hertogenbosch. When Frederik Hendrik
commended him for his aptitude in this craft, Huygens, who had been
expressly trained in the cipher while studying law at Leiden University,
shrugged off the compliment. It was, he said, with cavalier modesty, "mere
donkey work," mysterious only to those who had not been initiated into
z
the art. The truth was that it was sleepless toil, and Huygens later con-
fessed to being proud of having deciphered every enemy document that had
come his way. But occasionally he would allow himself a little variety, tak-
ing his goose quill and writing poems in Latin, Dutch, or French in his ele-
gant hand, the tails from his i/'s flicking like a whip, white fingers gliding
over the sheet, a fine spray of white sand tossed on the paper when he was
done to dry the dark and dainty lines.

This was 1629: the sixtieth summer of the war for the
Netherlands. One hundred twenty-eight thousand and seventy-seven men
were in arms Dutch Republic. The country which
for the service of the '

some foreigners supposed phlegmatic (even when they were busy enough
buying munitions from its arms dealers) had been marshalled into an
immense, bristling garrison. Dray horses, better used to being tethered to
hay wagons, were now harnessed into teams of twenty or thirty to pull field
guns and cannon. Troopers, many of them foreigners cursing in English,
Schwytzertiitsch, or French, packed the alehouses so tight that regulars
were forced to roost with the pigeons on stoops and benches. Twenty-eight
thousand of this mighty army had been mustered before 's Hertogenbosch,
right in the heart of Brabant, the province of both Huygens's and the
Prince's ancestors. Since May they had been laboring to take the cathedral
city from the two-thousand-odd defenders holding it for the Habsburg
Archduchess Isabella in Brussels and for her nephew King Philip IV of
Spain. But the siege which had begun in the airy brightness of spring had,
by the gray, sodden summer, turned into thankless, slogging work.
The military governor of 's Hertogenbosch had flooded the low fields in
front of his earthwork defenses, turning them into an impassable quagmire.
Frederik Hendrik's English engineers, using portable horse-driven mills,
would pump them and the cumbersome machinery of the army would
dry,
once again crank itself up for an attempted attack on the outer line of forts.
Captains of pikemen and musketeers would make their dispositions.
Armor would be burnished, sabers whetted at the grindstone. Sparks
would fly. Some effort would be made to scrape at least one layer of the
caked brown and yellow grime from the surgeons' tables. But then the
army would awake before dawn to a July downpour that continued for
days, dissolving strategy into a broth of streaming water and treacly mud.
In the rear of the soldiers, a train of hangers-on remained encamped in the
sopping mire, more numerous than the troops, a great fairground without
THE QUIDDITY J

pies: wives and whores, seamstresses and laundrywomen; babes at the tit

and snot-nosed urchins picking pockets or throwing back tankards of beer;


vermin-catchers; piss-gazing quacks; bonesetters; plume-hatted sutlers
demanding a king's ransom for a stony crust; tapsters; hurdy-gurdy men;
half-wild dogs rooting for bones; and bedraggled lousy vagabonds who
simply stood about, hollow-eyed and watchful, like gulls at the stern of a
herring boat, drawn to the leavings.
was mid-August before the ground was dry enough for the Prince to
It

move forward. But by this time a diversionary army of ten thousand Span-
ish, Italian, and German soldiers had invaded the eastern frontier provinces

of the Republic with the obvious aim of forcing Frederik Hendrik to break
off the siege. Reports arrived from the countryside of the usual enormities:
violated women; animals taken and butchered on the hoof; gangs of dis-
traught villagers fleeing into the woods or rowing grimly into the bull-
rushes. The Prince's wife, Amalia van Solms, fearing that her headstrong
husband might yet be a victim of his obstinacy, had a scholar-poet write a
Latin poem in the manner of Ovid's heroic odes, directed at "Frederik Hen-
drik who, with too much steadfastness, fights right beneath the walls of
's Hertogenbosch." 4
But the Prince, a small, stubborn man with sharply trimmed mustaches
and a brisk, zealous air, was unmoved. Was he not, like Joshua, known to
the people as "the Conqueror of Cities"? Whatever it took, and however
5

long it took, he would have his city. He would watch the papist bishop and
all the monks and nuns depart with the humiliating courtesies due to the

vanquished. Though he was no Calvinist fanatic, Frederik Hendrik still


believed it proper that the Cathedral of St. John be cleansed of Catholic
idolatry. The painful memory of the surrender of Breda, his father's city,

four years before would be somewhat assuaged. For Frederik Hendrik, the
capture of 's Hertogenbosch was not simply another trophy in the inter-
minable carnage of the war. It was meant to demonstrate conclusively to
the Spanish Habsburgs that they had no choice but to accept, uncondition-
ally, the sovereignty and liberty of the Protestant Republic of the United
Netherlands.

So the business of the siege began in earnest and men began


to die behind the bastions and in the greasy clay. The konijnen, the coneys,
burrowed away in the choking darkness, undermining the enemy's earth-
works, setting slow fuses, and praying that they be preserved from the
countermines arriving from the opposite direction. Above them, in the
open ground, limbs were splintered by gunfire or hacked off on the trestles
of the sawbones. Within the claustrophobic city, the common people were
caught amidst scorched timber and mounds of smashed brick. In the
chapels of the Gothic church of St. John, tapers were lit for the intercession
of the Virgin. May Our Lady bring a speedy deliverance. . . .
THE QUIDDITY

Leiden, 1629

Rembrandt had taken to painting himself in armor. Not


the full body suit. No one except cuirassiers, who were vulnerable to being
jabbed by pikemen below the crupper, went in for that anymore. But every
so often Rembrandt liked to wear his gorget. It was a hinged collar-piece,
covering the base of the neck, collarbone, and upper back, and it looked
good lying below a wound silken stock or scarf; a touch of steel lest he be
thought too much the dandy. It was not that he was about to report for
duty, even though, at twenty-three, he was of an age to serve in the militia,
especially since an older brother had had a disabling accident at the mill.
But this was social armor, military chic, not unlike the studiously worn
fatigues affected by twentieth-century politicians gone sedentary, or the
flak jackets of the urban paratrooper. Rembrandt's gorget with its glinting

studs gave him the bearing of a soldier without the obligations.


And then, quite suddenly, peril chilled the summer. In early August
1629, to general consternation, the city of Amersfoort, not forty miles from
Amsterdam, had fallen to the invading imperial army with scarcely a shot
fired in anger. Worse, the trembling city fathers had opened their gates to

the Italian and German soldiers, who swiftly set about reconsecrating its
churches to the Virgin. Censers swung. Nones and complines were sung.
The panic would not last long. A lightning counterattack on the imperial
citadel at Wesel had surprised the garrison at dawn and cut off the Catholic
army from its rear, dooming the whole invasion to sorry retreat.
But while it lasted, the sense of crisis was real enough. Companies of
part-time militia — brewers and dyers, men who, for as long as anyone
could remember, had done nothing more threatening than parade around
on Sundays in fancy boots and gaudy sashes, or who shot at wooden par-
rots atop a pole — were now being sent to frontier towns in the east. There
they were supposed to relieve the professional troops for active combat in
the embattled theaters of war. On the surface, much seemed the same.
There was still stockfish and butter for the table. Students at the university
still slept through lectures on Sallust and got tight in the evenings, braying

at the fastened shutters of the respectable. But the war had not bypassed

Leiden altogether. Propaganda prints reminding citizens, in literally graphic


detail, of the horrors endured when the towns of Holland were themselves

besieged fifty years earlier issued from patriotic presses. Students enrolled
in the school of military engineering were required to make wooden models OI'I'OMM : Rembrandt,
of fortifications and gun emplacements. Some were even taken to the bat- Self-portrait in a Gorget,
Brabant to see if their notions could stand the test of fire. On the
tlefield in c. 7629. Panel, 18 x
Galgewater and the Oude Rijn, barges rode low at the waterline, their 30.9 cm. Nuremberg,
holds crammed with morion helmets and partisans alongside crates of Germanisches
turnips and barrels of beer. Nationalmuseum
REMBRANDTSEYES 8

So it suited Rembrandt up as a military person. Of


to get himself
course, a "person" in the seventeenth century meant a persona: a guise or
role assumed by an actor. Rembrandt was playing his part, and the deep
shadow and rough handling of his face complicate the mask, suggest the
struggling fit between the role and the man. No painter would ever under-
stand the theatricality of social life as well as Rembrandt. He saw the actors
in men and the men in the actors. Western art's first images of stage life

the dressing room and the wardrobe —


came from his hand. But Rem-
brandt's drama did not stop at the stage door. He also painted historical
figures and his own contemporaries in their chosen personae, rehearsing
their allotted manners as if before an audience. And he cast himself in
—the executioners of
telling bit parts St. Stephen and Christ; a scared sailor
on the churning Sea of Galilee — and just occasionally in a significant lead:
6
the Prodigal Son, whoring For Rembrandt as for Shakespeare,
in a tavern.

all the world was indeed and he knew in exhaustive detail the tac-
a stage,
tics of its performance: the strutting and mincing; the wardrobe and the

face paint; the full repertoire of gesture and grimace; the flutter of hands
and the roll of the eyes; the belly laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew
what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle, and to console; to
strike a pose or preach a sermon; to shake a fist or uncover a breast; how to
sinand how to atone; how to commit murder and how to commit suicide.
No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, begin-
ning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence
or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the
whole rowdy show in between.
So here is the greatest trouper who never trod the boards playing
Youngman Corporal, his I-mean-business gorget belied by the soft fringed
collar falling over the studded metal, the slightly arched, broken eyebrow
line (absent from the copy in The Hague), the deep set of the right eye, and
the half-shadowed face, sabotaging the bravura, hinting at the vulnerability
beneath the metal plate: the mortal meeting the martial. There is a touch
too much humanity here to carry off the show. The light reveals a full,

mobile mouth, the lips highlit as if nervously licked; large, liquid eyes; a
great acreage of cheek and chin; and, planted in the center of his face, the
least aquiline nose in seventeenth-century painting.
And then there is the liefdelok, the lovelock trailing over his left shoul-
der. Huygens, who would never be accused of indulging in frivolous exhibi-

tionism, had written a long poem satirizing the outlandish fashions affected

by the young in The Hague: slashed breeches, over-the-shoulder capes, and


flying knee ribbons." But flamboyantly long hair was being singled out by
the Calvinist preachers as an especial abomination in the sight of the Lord.
Rembrandt evidently paid none of this any heed. He must have taken great
pains with his lovelock —also known from origins its French court as
in the

a cadenette — since of course took immense care


it to produce the required
effect of carelessness. The hair had to be cut asymmetrically, the top of the
lock kept full while its body was thinned to taper along its length, ending in
the gathered and separated strands.
THE QUIDDITY 9

And yet the picture is quite free of vain self-satisfaction. Rembrandt


looks at himself in the glass, already committed to catching the awkward
truth, trying to fix the point at shadowed by trepidation,
which temerity is

virile self-possession unmanned by pensive anxiety. He is Hamlet in Hol-

land, an inward-outward persona, a poet in heavy metal, the embodiment


of both the active and the contemplative life, someone whom Huygens was
bound to commend.

Hi s Hertogenbosch, 1629

From his timbered quarters in the village of Vught, south


of the town, Huygens must have heard the smack of the forty-eight-pound
balls as they punched into the earthworks, sending up eruptions of dirt in

which could be glimpsed rocks, palisading, and the occasional small ani-
mal. But it was a test of the true Christian stoic to remain studious amidst
commotion. So Huygens stopped his ears to the din and began to write his
autobiography. He was only thirty-three years old, but this might be
8

counted middle-aged; he was certainly old enough to reflect on his educa-


tion and his extended apprenticeship in the world of public affairs. His
father, Christiaan, in his own time secretary to the first Stadholder, William
of Orange, had made the formation of his two sons as virtuosi his dearest
project. To be a paragon-in-training meant starting early. Constantijn had
been taught the viol at six, Latin grammar and the lute at seven. As the
schooling proceeded, it added logic and rhetoric at twelve, Greek at thir-
teen, mathematics, ancient philosophy, history, law, and, throughout the
sound Christian doctrine as
years, a solid dose of laid down by the doctors
of the Reformed Church.
And like all adepts of the liberal arts, Huygens had been assigned a
drawing master. It was a commonplace of polite education, as the author of
an English drawing manual put it, that the arts were "a polisher of imbred
rudenesse and our informity, and a curer of many diseases our minds are
subject unto." 9 And while no one ever accused Huygens of coarseness, he
was, even when young, prone to bouts of melancholy. To those who might
have read Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, this might suggest that
the man had depths to fathom; to others, though, it indicated an errant
imagination and an excess of black bile. Though
were notorious for
artists
falling into the dark humor, the discipline of drawing was thought to set
this to rights. In any case, picturing ran in Huygens's blood. His mother was

Susanna Hoefnagel of Antwerp, niece of the great Joris Hoefnagel, whose


topographical views of cities and miniatures of all the known beasts and
insects of the world had been judged so fine that they had won him honor
and riches from the likes of the Dukes of Bavaria and the Holy Roman
Emperor. 10 Susanna had hoped that either Joris's son, Jacob Hoefnagel, or
REMBRANDTSEYES i o

her neighbor the graphic artist Jacques de Gheyn II, who had worked for
the Stadholder's court and himself been a prolific sketcher of spiders and
sycamores and the like, might take on Constantijn. But Jacob Hoefnagel
was too busy in Vienna editing and profiting from his father's celebrity, and
de Gheyn declared he had no inclination for the work. Instead de Gheyn
nominated Hendrik Hondius, an engraver and publisher whom Huygens
remembered, a little complacently perhaps, as "a good man, whose easy-
going character made him a fine teacher for us well-brought up young
men." 11 From Hondius Huygens learned anatomy and perspective; how to
delineate the forms of trees and mountains; and, since this was another of
Hondius's specialities, the design and construction of fortifications. 11

To be an educated amateur a lover of art, a kunstliefhebber was one —
thing; to paint for a living quite another. It was inconceivable that someone
with Huygens's family background and prospects should entertain
thoughts of becoming a professional painter. Oils, wrote Henry Peacham,
the instructor of noble amateurs, were unfit for gentlemen, being likely to
stain your apparel and rob you of time.' Instead, Huygens would add the
3

graceful practice of miniatura —watercolors — to the long list of his courtly


accomplishments: theorbo, guitar, calligraphy, dancing, and riding. Occa-
sionally, to maintain and perfect his drawing, he might take a sketchbook,
a tafelet, out to the countryside and make pictures of trees, flowers, or even
a figure or two.
14
He could even make something of a game out of this

miniaturization of the world, engraving ingenious devices and inscriptions


into the shells of hazelnuts and sending them as pieces of wit to his good
friends. 15
But there was another duty incumbent on a secretary to the Prince of
Orange for which a sound education in drawing was an indispensable
preparation. True gentility in the early seventeenth century required not
just a flourish of the rapier or the confident setting of one leg at an angle to
the other, contrapposto, just so. It also asked that a gentleman be a kenner,
literally a know-all, a connoisseur. True kenners were not just men who
advanced opinions that were little more than prejudices, or the parroted
fancies of their seniors; they were men whose taste had been formed by dis-
ciplined practice and by study; by looking and doing, preferably in Italy. "It
is not enough for an uninformed Gentleman to behold [the arts] with a vul-


gar eye but he must be able to distinguish them and tell who and what
they be." A connoisseur worth his mettle ought to be able to make fear-
16

less separations between superior and inferior talents. He would know the
best of painting because he had himself experienced the difficulty of mak-
ing it.

Huygens's teacher, Hondius, had a line of engraved reproductions of


the —
works of the masters of northern European art Holbein, Diirer, and
Bruegel —
in his shop in The Hague, and there Huygens could have

browsed the albums and played the critic. Although Jacques de Gheyn had
not wanted to be his tutor, his son, Jacques de Gheyn III, also destined to be
an artist, though an unproductive one, was Constantijn's friend-next-door.
From the beginning, then, he was involved in the world of public imagery
THE QUIDDITY I I

and would have subscribed to the truism that the arts


were a glory for the Netherlands, to be cultivated and
encouraged. Hondius had himself published an alle-
goricalengraving on The Fortunate State of the
Netherlands in which, beneath a palm of victory, a
painter sat sketching in the company of the liberal
arts, doing commonwealth.'"
his bit for the free

On becoming secretary to Frederik Hendrik in


1625, Huygens, who had seen how these things were
ordered in Italy, Paris, and London, viewed it as his
commission to discover painters who might orna-
ment a court that could hold its own with the Habs-
burgs, Bourbons, and Stuarts. His prince was a
Stadholder, not a king, more, in fact, like a hereditary
president, officially accountable to the States General
of the seven United Provinces. But his pedigree was
glorious and there was no reason why he should not
be surrounded by dignified state portraits, edifying •
i

histories, extensive views. Huygens had read enough

classical history to feel that republican grandeur was t


.

not necessarily a contradiction in terms. And was


it

fitting that a prince who had, after all,

manders sent by crowned monarchs should be seen


subdued com- J 612 I

as a new Alexander; a ruler who attended as much to


the fine arts as the martial arts.
So Huygens went scouting for talent. The Dutch Republic was already Constantijn Huygens,
thick with painters who could knock off landscapes, seascapes, vases of Self-portrait, 1622. Silver
,x
flowers, merry companies, belching boers, and strutting militiamen. But pencil on parchment
that was not what was needed for the galleries of the palaces Frederik Hen-
drik was eager to build. What was wanted, Huygens made clear in his auto-
biography, were homegrown editions of Peter Paul Rubens: a producer of
thrilling spectacle; a maker of magnificence. It was a maxim at court that
princes were gods on earth, but only Rubens knew how to make them look
7

immortal, transforming the physically unprepossessing specimens of the


European dynasts, the short, the toothless, and the flabby, into so many
Apollos and Dianas. In his hands, the most inconsequential skirmish
And Rubens could do all this because he was,
turned into a Homeric battle.
inways no one could quite put his finger on, noble himself. It had nothing
to do with the blood, and everything to do with bearing. His entire

demeanor defied the conventional wisdom that a painter could not also be
a gentleman. There was his frightening learning, his unfailingly graceful
courtesy. Even his Spanish masters, Huygens noted, who had condescended
toRubens for so long, had come to "he was a man born for
realize that
more than the easel." He was, "one of the seven wonders of the
in short,
world."' 4 How regrettable, then, that Rubens also happened to work for
the enemy, the Catholic Habsburgs.
It had not been easy to find what Huygens had been looking for: some
REMBRANDTSEYES i i

painter who, with the proper discipline and advancement, might yet turn
out to be a Protestant Rubens. Oh, there were able talents, of course, in
the Republic, some The Hague like Esaias van de Velde,
actually living in
the landscapist,who had also become something of a painter of battles
and skirmishes. And there was still Michiel van Mierevelt in Delft, turning
out production-line portraits of the mighty and the moneyed. He could
always be depended on for decorum, and Huygens rhapsodizes about
him as the equal if not the superior of Holbein. 10 And there was Lastman in
Amsterdam, and Bloemaert in Utrecht, both painting histories, both, alas,
Catholic.
It was only when he heard from someone in Leiden (perhaps his old
student friend Johannes Brosterhuysen, with whom he
regularly exchanged
lettersand who was himself something of a specialist in miniatura) that
there were two highly esteemed youths there, and only when he took the
trouble, toward the end of 1628, to see for himself, that Constantijn Huy-
gens thought he might finally have found not one but two Dutch Rubenses.
Though in his excitement Huygens called them "a young and noble duo of
11
painters," neither could exactly be counted a gentleman. Jan Lievens was
the son of an embroiderer; Rembrandt the son of a miller. But as Huygens
sat and wrote with guns booming in the distance, he sensed that he had
stumbled onto something precious. What had been rumored, for once, had
turned out to be true. In Leiden he had been amazed.

iv Leiden, 1629

Rembrandt was giving his full attention to the matter of


painting, and in particular to a small patch of plaster in a corner of his
walk-up studio. At the point where the wall met the upright beam of the
doorjamb, projecting into the room, plaster had begun to flake and lift,
exposing a triangle of rosy brick. It was the Rhine-water damp that did it;
the oily green river which exhaled its cold mists out over the canals, insinu-
ating itself through the cracks and shutters of the gabled alley-houses. In
the grander residences of well-to-do burghers —
professors and cloth mer-

chants that stretched along the Houtstraat and the Rapenburg, the invad-
ing clamminess was met, resisted, and, if all else failed, obscured by rows of
ceramic tiles beginning at the foot of the wall and climbing upward as
means and taste dictated. If means were modest, the householder could

make a serial strip of children's games or proverbs to which further —
items could be added as fortune allowed. If he were already fortunate, an
entire picture —
of a great vase of flowers, an East Indiaman in full sail, or
the portrait of William the Silent —
could be constructed from brilliantly
colored pieces. But Rembrandt's studio was bare of any of these conve-
THE QUIDDITY I 3

niences. Unhindered, the damp had eaten its way into the
plaster, engendering blooms of mold, blistering the surface,
opening cracks and fissures in corners where the moisture
collected.
Rembrandt liked this. From the beginning, he was
powerfully drawn to ruin; the poetry of imperfection. He
enjoyed tracing the marks left by the bite of worldly expe-
rience: the pits and pocks, the red-rimmed eyes and scabby

skin which gave the human countenance a mottled rich-


ness. The piebald, the scrofulous, the stained, and the
encrusted were matters for close and loving inspection;
irregularities torun through his fingering gaze. Other than
the Holy Scripture, he cared for no book as well as the
book of decay, its truths written in the furrows scored on
the brows of old men and women; in the sagging timbers of decrepit barns; Rembrandt, The Artist

in the lichenous masonry of derelict buildings; in the mangy fur of a valetu- in His Studio (detail of
dinarian lion. And he was a compulsive peeler, itching to open the casing of wall)

things and people, to winkle out the content packed within. He liked to toy
with the poignant discrepancies between outsides and insides, the brittle
husk and the vulnerable core.
In the corner of his room, Rembrandt's eye ran over the fishtail triangle

of decomposing wall, coming apart in discrete layers, each with its own
pleasingly distinct texture: the risen, curling skin of the limewash; the bro-
ken crust of the chalky plaster, and the dusty brick beneath; the minute
crevices gathering dark ridges of grunge. All these materials, in their differ-

ent states of deterioration, he translated faithfully into paint, and did so


with such intense scrutiny and devotion that the patch of crumbling fabric
begins to take on a necrotic quality like damaged flesh. Above the door
another veinous crack is making swift progress through the plaster.

To give his gash in the wall physical immediacy and visual credibility,
Rembrandt would have used the most precisely pointed of his brushes: a
soft-bristled instrument made from the pelt of some silky little rodent, the
kind the miniaturists favored, a brush capable of making the finest pencil
line or, turned and lightly flattened against the surface of the panel, a more

swelling stroke." Slick with pigment —


red lake, ocher, and lead white for
the brick; lead white with faint touches of black for the grimy plaster —the
squirrel-hair brush deposited perfect traces of paint over a scant few mil-
limeters of space on the panel, one set of earthy materials (the painter's)
translating itself into another (the builder's). It seems like alchemy. 13 But
the transmutation happens not in the philosopher's alembic but in our
beguiled eye.
Was the description of the patch of crumbled wall achieved in a matter
of minutes or a matter of hours? Was it the result of painstakingly calcu-
lated design or imaginative impulse? Rembrandt's critics, especially once he
was dead, disagreed on whether the problem with him had been that he
worked too impetuously or too laboriously. Either way, he is generally, and
REMBRANDTSEYES 14
not incorrectly, remembered as the greatest master of the broad brush there
ever was before the advent of modernism: the bruiser's meaty fist slapping
down dense, clotted pigment, kneading, scratching, and manipulating the
paint surface as were pasty clay, the stuff of sculpture, not painting. But
if it

from the and through his entire career, Rembrandt, quite as much as
outset,
Vermeer, was equally the master of fine motor control; the cutter of facets
of light; the tweaker of reflections, glinting minutiae like the beads of
brightness swimming on the metal bar laid across the door, a mote of sun-
shine on the tip of the painter's nose. This was a talent that Huygens and
Hondius, who both had goldsmiths and jewellers as forebears, might have
been expected to appreciate. It was entirely logical for Rembrandt to
believe that before he could aspire to be anything else, he first had to prove
his credentials as a master craftsman. That, after all, is what his contempo-
raries meant by "art" ars —manual dexterity in the service of illusion. 14

Is The more than a demonstra-


Artist in His Studio nothing
tion of this kind of "art": a practice piece, a mere jotting? It was painted on
a small oak panel —
scarcely bigger than this book turned sideways
which, before repriming with the usual mixture of chalk and glue, seems to
have had another work on it; just a little bit of wood lying around the
room, then/ So we are mischievously
5
led to suppose that this is a casual,
quite freely painted sketch of the painter's working space: a visual inven-
26
tory of his tools and practices. There are the palettes hanging on the wall;
there the grindstone for preparing pigment, its surface scooped with use
and supported on what looks like a crudely chopped slice of tree trunk.
There are the pots of medium on the table behind it and perhaps an earth-
enware warming tray. We can smell the oils and emulsions, especially the
astringent linseed. At first sight, the picture looks like the virtuoso flaunting
his stuff: the bravura rendering of material surfaces, not just that plaster-

work but the coarse-grained planking of the floor with its own web of
cracks, stains, and scuff marks; the dull iron hardware on the door. But
even as we discount the painting as a brag, a flourish, something cunning
begins to register. The painter has chosen to show off his mastery of ars
through the description of the materials of which it is constituted. With
that anvil-like grindstone so prominent, we can almost see him making
paint.
So how modest is this trade-card exercise in self-promotion? The
words that Rembrandt means to bring to mind when we peer at the rough
little rectangle are the same that recur when we look at his earliest face

paintings, the tronies, featuring his shock of hair and rock-star stubble:
Zonder pretentie, "unpretentious," both in what is being depicted and the
way it's being depicted. But it gradually dawns on us that we are being
pleasantly had. The panel is, in fact, brimming with pretensions: from the
incongruous grandeur of the painter's elaborate blue and gold costume to
the currant eyes planted in the gingerbread face. For all the ostensible
stinginess of its pictorial language and the slightness of its dimensions, The
THE QUIDDITY i 5

Artist in His Studio is as big a painting as anything Rembrandt ever did. Rembrandt, The Artist

Just as his earliest self-portrait etchings are postage-stamp minuscule in size in His Studio, 1629.
but wickedly grandstanding in effect, this picture should also be thought of Panel, zj.i * 31.9 cm.

as Rembrandt's Little Big Picture: a grandiloquent letter of introduction, Courtesy Museum of


nothing short of a pronouncement on the nature of Painting itself. To pack Fine Arts, Boston;
all this meaning into an unassuming frame was a typical conceit of his gen- Reproduced with
eration. Make the largest possible utterance within the least possible space permission
and you make a knotty little emblem; a mind-teaser, awaiting the work of
wit to unravel its message. A picture full of evidence of the dexterity of
Rembrandt's hand turns out, then, on closer inspection to be a demonstra-
tion of his shockingly original mind. For Rembrandt was seldom simple.
He just took pride in looking plain. And if was ever shown to Constan-
this
tijn Huygens, one wonders just who was scrutinizing whom. Take a look at
this, the cocky up-and-comer might have said in the provoking manner of
the riddle-master, eyebrows arched beneath his felt hat. Now what do you
see? Not much? Well, only everything you'll ever want to know about me
and my trade.
REMBRANDTSEYES I 6

Or perhaps he thought that a real miniaturist would sense what he was


up to? After all, Huygens's mother was a Hoefnagel; he himself had made
the acquaintance of the English miniaturist Isaac Oliver, and he was the
Dutch translator of John Donne, in whose economical sonnets lay entire
universes of thought and feeling. Like any sophisticated connoisseur of his
generation, Huygens would have known, and in all probability possessed,
the extraordinary prints of the Lorraine graphic artist Jacques Callot. Cal-
lot'sMiseries of War documented in merciless detail the butchery inflicted
by soldiers on civilians, and in some cases vice versa, all etched in micro-
scopic scale. Huygens must have grasped the irony of the French title
Les Petites Miseres de la guerre — because it was not the miseries that were
picayune but only the format of the etchings. So much grief and despera-
tion contained in so tiny a frame had the uncanny effect of self-

magnification. Such concentration was needed, such focus: ten men


hanging from a tree in less than a square inch; an infinity of pain in a thim-
ble. Copernican lenses had been polished in Italy that apparently allowed
one to behold the universe, with its scattered stars, gathered in a little circle
of glass. It was rumored that instruments were being fashioned through
which one might view whole commonwealths of animalcules, microorgan-
isms resembling crayfish, suspended in single droplets of water, or, better
yet, homunculi in a pearl of semen.

So a clever patron like Huygens, attuned to these games of magnitude,


ought really not to have been deceived by the unassuming size of Rem-
brandt's picture. And in his autobiography he does, in fact, notice that

"Rembrandt concentrates all his loving attention on small painting [but] in


this smallformat manages to achieve what would be sought in vain in the
1
biggest works of others." " But what Huygens meant here by "small" was
the Repentant Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver, six times bigger than
The Artist in His Studio. For that matter, the little panel was obviously not
a history painting; not the kind of thing Huygens had in mind for Rem-

brandt. But neither was it a conventional self-portrait, not with the features
of the painter stylized into a gnomic caricature. So what was it?

It was a quiddity: the essence of the matter; the something that made
things (in this case schilderkunst, the art of painting) just exactly what they
were. And it was also a quiddity in the other sense in which the seventeenth
century used the term: a subtle provocation; a riddling road to illumination.
Rembrandt is not usually thought of, first and foremost, as a profound
and complicated intelligence, but rather as an orchestrator of emotion, a
passion player. And that he certainly was. But from the very beginning he
was also a cunning thinker; as much philosopher as poet.
How can we read his quiddity? To begin with, there is that painting
within the painting: the same rectangular proportions, but magnified into
an overpowering, even forbidding presence at the center of the composi-
iX
tion. The panel dwarfs the remote, oddly doll-like figure of the over-
dressed painter. The disparity between The Artist in His Studio and the
painting inside it means that, whatever else the picture is, it can't possibly,
THE QUIDDITY I J

as almost all modern readings assume, be a mirror image of the painter at


work. Why? Because it would have been improbable, if not actually phys-
14

ically impossible, for Rembrandt to have set his tiny panel on a standard

easel and, bent forward, clutching his brushes and palette, to do the fine
work exhibited on its surface. He is much more likely to have executed the
painting seated, and at a table, as if it were a drawing, propped up against
the folding support, rather like a library bookrest, as can be seen in the
much later sketch of his studio in Amsterdam. ,0 So this is not a picture of a
painter catching himself in the act. It is, in fact, quite free of the narcissism

of his armored dandy self-portraits. This time, Rembrandt is not lost in


self-admiration; he is lost in thought. And the image he delivers is not one
he has seen in a glass, but in his mind's eye. Insofar as one could ever be
made, this is a picture of in-sight."
The dominating oak panel is, then, at the heart of the enigma, both vis-
ible and invisible, massively present (its shadow falling over the door as if
to repel the intrusion of the world) and yet elusive. Like all the rest of the
material fabric —the plank the peeling
floor, plaster, the easel with its pegs
and holes —the physical character of the panel is exactly described. Initially
it seems perverse for Rembrandt to have kept the most careful handling of
paint for the ostensibly meaningless backside of the panel: the horizontal
grain, the bevelled edges, and the outer edge so brilliantly lit that it seems to
have sponged up every beam of illumination from an implied window at
the left.

The drones wouldn't do it this way. They have no interest in being


cryptic. On the contrary, they're only too eager to show us what they can
do, making sure we have all the necessary information to complete the self-
advertisement. We get to look over their shoulder and see they're painting a
Bathsheba, a Mars and Venus, a vase of flowers, a lowlife, themselves. We
get to see them sitting, or occasionally standing, always at enough of an
angle to their work to allow them to bestow on us their most ingratiating
or authoritative manner: gallant; soberly industrious; merrily debonair;
silkily prosperous. We are asked to admire the cut of their slashed doublet;
the pleats of their dazzlingly bleached ruff; the coat of arms discreetly but
unavoidably visible behind them. They greet our examining gaze in such a
way as to make it abundantly clear that their principal concern is (after
themselves) us, the patron.They charm and they crow. This is what we do,
and don't we do it well? How dazzlingly saturated is our vermilion, how
snowy our lead white; how meltingly Venetian our flesh tint; how expen-
sive our ultramarine. Admire us, buy us, honor us, and in so doing you will

demonstrate to the world the rare quality of your taste.


But the little man in the sash and gown doesn't seem interested in strik-
ing a pose. Worse, he shows no interest in us at all; not the least bit. He
can't even be bothered to display what's being pictured on the face of the
panel because the demonstration of his credentials is, literally, beyond it: in
the entirety of what we see in this naked room. The patch of flaking plas-
ter; the whiplash crack over the door; the mottled stains on the wall; the
REMBRANDTSEYES i 8

scuff marks on the floor — all argue irrefutably for his mastery of ars: the
skill of painterly illusion. And the powerful line of perspective plotted
along the floor Rembrandt's faithfulness to another necessary
testifies to

work habit — the disaplina expected of even the most independent-minded


masters.
So Rembrandt is involved in something more ambitious than drum-
ming up trade or repudiating any suggestion that he is a mere pictor vul-
garis. He is presenting himself as the personification of painting: its skill; its
1
discipline; and, not least, its imagination, its power of invention.' This is

why he is dressed, or rather robed, with such ceremoniousness: the formal


ruff; the its golden shawl collar and
impossibly grand blue tabard with
sash, a far cry from the shapeless and colorless working smock seen in a
self-portrait drawing and a painting from the 1650s." Xot only the outside
world is barred from his enraptured stare at the panel; so are we. He is
monopolized by his mindful task; gripped by a transport of pure thought,
the poetic furor which writers on Michelangelo believed to be at the heart
of divinely engendered creativity.'"
There has been too much fretting over the precise stage of painting
supposedly represented m The Artist in His Studio. Some writers have
argued that this is the moment of original conception prior to any stroke
being laid on the panel. Others have insisted that since the painter is hold-
ing the small brushes and the maulstick used to steady his hand (in the
manner of a billiard resti when working up details, this must be a pause in
the finishing process, the artist standing back for a chm-stroking consider-
:

ation of a final dab here and there. But this is not a genre scene; a snap-
"

shot from a day-in-the-life of young Rembrandt the working stiff. It's a


compact grammar; an account of painting as both noun and verb: the call-
ing and the labor; the machinery and the magic; the elbow grease and the
flight of fancy.

Rembrandt's hands, the manual element of his art. grip his palette and
brushes, a pinkie curled tightly around the maulstick. A shadow falls across
his brow and cheek, perhaps marking him as another captive of poetic
melancholy; Huygens's brother-in-gloom, but also temperamentally close
to the most famous melancholic. Durer.
;
'
A brighter light bathes the lower
part of his face; not enough, though, to permit any kind of anecdotal spec-
ulation about what kind of man this might be. This is peculiar coming from
Rembrandt, who enjoyed changing his face with every etching: Monday,
beggar; Tuesday, roughneck; Wednesday, tragedian: Thursday, clown; Fri-
day, saint; Saturday, sinner. But this is Sunday. And on Sunday the thespian
has cancelled the matinee. His face is a closed book. It has no eyes.

We know from "model books," the drawing primers that


were first published m Italy in the sixteenth century and then quickly

adapted for use in the Netherlands, that the human face was the first

assignment given to apprentices.It was. after all, closest to the instinctive

apple-head or egg-head drawings of small children. The task of the master


THE QUIDDITY 19
was to educate instinct. So the youngest students were made to draw an
oval shape, then bisect that oval down its length and then make a second,
lateral line about halfway from the top. Along that simple grid the defining
features of a human face would be methodically distributed: bridge of the
nose at the center; eyebrows either side of the crossing. But when the stu-
dent, child or adult, was given an exercise in drawing a specific feature of
the physiognomy, and always first came the eye. "First you must begin
first

with the whyte of the eye," wrote Edward Norgate in his Miniatura, echo-
ing model book after model book.
"
A late-sixteenth-century print by Jan
3

Baptist Collaert from a model book illustrates a busy workshop where the
master is painting a St. George, an older pupil painting a woman from life; Willem Goeree, Illustra-

the very youngest sits off to one side drawing an entire practice page of tion from Inleyding Tot
eyes. These were the eyes of classical art, the regulation-issue European de Algemeene Teycken-
almond, enclosing cornea, iris, and pupil with the budlike swelling of the Konst . . .
, first edition

caruncula lachrymalis at each corner, the flesh curtains of the lids, the (Middelburg, 1668).
sprouting fan of the lashes, and the arched superciliary eyebrows, all Private collection
exactly delineated. Every detail, and the relationship between them, deter-
mined a reading of character, the sway of the passions. A pupil dilated so
that its blackness seemed to swallow up the entire iris would suggest one
kind of humor, a drooping superior eyelid another. An eye that was all
white sclera with iris and pupil contracted into a pinprick might suggest
horror, stupefaction, or devilish fury. Karel van Mander, who wrote the first
Dutch manual for artists, in the form of a long poem, reminded his readers Jan Baptist Collaert after
that the infernal boatman Charon (to which he might have added all the Johannes Stradanus,
accompanying demons) in Michelangelo's Last Judgement displayed his Color Olivi (detail),

eyes in exactly this way, as Dante had prescribed, "red wheels of flame c. 1590. Engraving, from
about his eyes"; maddened and hellish. For van Mander eyes were the the series Nova Reperta.
"mirrors of the spirit," the "windows of the soul," but also "the seat of Amsterdam,
messengers of the heart." 38 In 1634 Henry Peacham did his best
desire, the Rijksprentenkabinet
to make sure that his readers properly understood that

great conceit is required in making the Eye, which either by the dul-
nesse or lively quicknesse thereof, giveth a great taste of the spirit
and disposition of the minde ... as in drawing a fool or an idiot by
making his eyes narrow and his temple wrinkled with laughter,
wide-mouthed and showing his teeth. A grave or reverent father by
giving him a dominant and lowly countenance, his eye beholding
you with a sober cast which is caused by the upper eyelid covering
a great part of the ball and is an especial mark of a sober and
stayed brain within.' 9

So the utmost pains had to be taken with the depiction of eyes. The
white of the eye, for example, could not be painted in unmixed lead white,
which would have given it opaque cast suggesting an impend-
a strangely
ing cataract, but rather in white mixed with a minute quantity of black.
Similarly, the pupil was never painted dead black but with brown umber
REMBRANDT EYES 2

mixed with charcoal black and a flick of white; a


dark iris with lampblack and a touch of verdigris. 40
Something apparently as insignificant as the tiny
catchlights reflecting either pupil or iris or both,
depending on size, shape, and angle of reflection,
could make a face merry or disconsolate, lustful or
haughty.
Making an eye was the beginning of art.
41

Tracing the contours of the organ of vision was


both the apprentice's initiation into the mystery of
and an emblem of its purpose: a short-
his craft
hand profession of the power of sight. The routine
drawing of an eye was so fundamental that it may
have imprinted itself on an artist's unconscious,
returning long after he had become a master in the
Engraved drawing models form of habitual doodles or sketches made on an empty pad or etching
from Crispijn van de plate. Rembrandt's eyes sometimes appear on his most intuitively sketched
Passe, Van 't ligt der teken copper plates, floating free of the faces they are supposed to inhabit. On
en schilderkonst (Amster- one such plate, etched in the 1640s, Rembrandt has drawn on one side a
dam, 1643). New York, tree, on another the right section of his upper face with one eye visible

Columbia University, beneath a beret. But between hat and tree, altogether disembodied, is

Avery Library another eye, perfectly drawn, wide open, unnervingly watchful, a singular
vision.
Rembrandt, The Artist in When Rembrandt made eyes, then, he did so purposefully. So how does
His Studio (detail of head he treat the eyes of the painter in The Artist in His Studio? He takes his
and shoulders) finest brush, loads its neat point with black pigment, and makes the shape
not of little almonds but rather of lead shot, or
Malacca peppercorns, blackened seem to
o's that

absorb rather than reflect light. To make them,


Rembrandt must have deposited a small, perfect
dot and then moved his brush round and round,
building the dot into circular pinheads. They have
no convexity, these eyes. They are not gently pro-
truded from their containing sockets like the black
They lie flat against the
glass beads of a child's doll.
face, glitterless. They are, literally, black holes
cavities behind which something is being born
rather than destroyed'. Behind the drill holes, in the
deep interior space of the imagination, the real
action is going on, wheels within wheels; the
machinery of cogitation whirring and flying like

the delicately interlocking parts of a timepiece. An


idea, this idea, is in genesis.

Rembrandt knew that nothing in the conven-


tional repertoire of artist's eye-language was ade-
quate to this moment, and certainly not some
THE QUIDDITY 2 I

glassy-eyed staring. So he opts instead


for the blackout to convey a sense of cre-
ative reverie, the waking sleep which
writers on art since Plato have character-
ized as a kind of trance. The word most
commonly used for this visitation was
ingenium, and the image used to symbol-
ize it a female figure with winged heels,
from the mundane. Ingenium or
in flight

inventiowas the divine something with-


out which skill and discipline were just
so much hod-carrying. Ingenium alone
distinguished the stupendously gifted
from the merely accomplished. And
unlike skill and practice, this was not
something that could be studiously
acquired. was innate, and that made it
It

literally awesome, a gift of God. Poetic

visions came to those blessed with this


inner eye, in states close to delirium, as
they did to the "divine angel" Michelan-
gelo. And though nothing seems, on the
face of it, less Michelangelesque than
our little potato-head in his upstairs room, it is as though Rembrandt had Rembrandt, Sheet with
indeed read the pages in Giorgio Vasari's biography where he describes the Three Studies: A Tree,

isolation required by the authentic genius so that his ideas might ferment. an Eye, and a Partial
"Whoever wishes," Vasari wrote, "to work well must distance himself Self-portrait of the Artist

from all cares and burdens because his virtu needs thought, solitude and (inverted to show eye),

opportunity, so as not to lead his mind into error." 4


"
c. 1642. Etching. New
Was the miller's son, all of twenty-three, stuck in pious, professional York, Metropolitan
Leiden, already presuming to present himself as the incarnation of Genius? Museum 0/ Art
No wonder a visitorfrom Utrecht, Arnout van Buchell, who encountered
4.
Rembrandt in 1628, thought him "highly esteemed but before his time."
But Rembrandt did not, of course, think of himself as a genius in the mod-
ern sense of a transcendent figure, embattled with the culture into which he
arbitrarilyhappened to be born, answerable only to his inner muse and fed
on alienation. Alienation would come to Rembrandt, all right. But it was
not of his seeking. On the other hand, it doesn't do, either, to understate
Rembrandt's precocious awareness of his own quirky ingenuity. Ingenium
means something more than mere cleverness. It presupposes a divine spark,
and the painter's power of conception, behind his black eyeholes, has evi-
dently been kindled. Perhaps Rembrandt's pride in presenting himself in
this way required an ostensibly humdrum setting and a throwaway manner
to make its temerity palatable. Yet even this studied roughness was a pre-
tense. Diirer, passionately admired and universally known to artists in the

Netherlands, had observed that


REMBRANDT S EYES 2 1

an artist of understanding and experience can show more of his


great power and art in small things, roughly and rudely made than
many others can [show] in their great works. Powerful artists alone
will understand the truth of this strange remark. For this reason a
man may often draw something with his pen on a half sheet of
paper or engrave it wood and it will be
with his tool on a block of
fuller of art and better than another's great work on which he has
labored for a whole year. And this gift is wonderful. For God some-
times grants to a man understanding of how to make something
the like of which, in his day could not have been found. 44

So even if Rembrandt must


didn't think of himself as a "genius," he
have sensed his own budding originality. The Artist in His
For nothing like

Studio, so full of both handwork and headwork, could be found anywhere


else in the Dutch painting of 1629. There had already been countless self-

portraits of artists and there would be countless more, searching for clever
ways to suggest, simultaneously, their presence in, and their absence from,
the studio. They would appear as mirror reflections (like Parmigianino), or
as their own likeness on an easel (like Annibale Carracci); in the glass bowl
of a goblet, or in a print thrown carelessly amidst other artist's bric-a-brac.
But they would not presume to appear as the personification of painting
itself. And even Rembrandt has backed slyly into the role, his own mask,

with its cut eyelets, oddly reminiscent of the mask described in the most
famous emblem book of the seventeenth century as hanging from the neck
of Pittura, or Painting. He has disappeared inside his Persona.

How much of this complicated, audacious performance


did Constantijn Huygens, hardly an obtuse mind
on board?
himself, take
Did he, for that matter, even see The Artist in His Studio among the more
showy histories lying around Rembrandt's chamber? Might he have
thought that the large panel seen in the painting was some sort of allusion
to the grand wanted out of the artist? Certainly there's no
histories he
doubt that he was deeply taken with both Rembrandt and Jan Lievens,
enough for him to make the extraordinary boast that in time they would
surpass all earlier masters, both north and south of the Alps. But he can't
quite avoid the literally patronizing impression that what he had found
were two diamonds in the rough: brilliant but unpolished, intuitive rather
than tutored. Huygens seems to have been deceived by Rembrandt's delib-
erately assumed guise of nonchalance, his resistance to being told what was
good for him, into believing that he was somehow a kind of gifted primi-
tive. But in fact, when he so chose, Rembrandt, who had been to Latin

school and for a time at least to Leiden University, could trade erudition
with any of the scholars. Did it ever occur to Huygens, for example, that
the dazzling line that defined the edge of the panel might have been Rem-
lit

brandt's allusion to the most famous game of one-upmanship in the history


of art? It was one that Lievens and Rembrandt, who were themselves
THE QUIDDITY z }

engaged an obvious competition, knew well, and which they could have
in

expected others to discover with a happy shock of recognition.


The contest was told by Pliny in his history of the painters of the ancient
world, and in particular in his biography of the favorite painter of Alexan-
der the Great: Apelles of Cos.The story that everyone in the seventeenth
century would have remembered about Apelles was of his painting Alexan-
der's mistress Campaspe so well that the King gave her as a present to the

artist. Painters, especially, treated the memory of Apelles as the patriarch of


their craft, the perfect role model. He was, after all, the artist who became
the familiar of the greatest prince of the world. The story of his life was a
scripture of genius. On one occasion, according to Pliny, Apelles had heard
of a serious rival, Protogenes, and journeyed to Rhodes what he was
to see
made of. "He went at once to the studio. But the painter was not there.
There was, however, a panel of considerable size, on the easel, prepared for

painting." Apelles left a visiting card in the form of "an extremely fine line"
freely drawn across the panel in color, a knowing signature since the almost
unbearably virtuous and prolific Apelles was also known for obeying his
own stricture of "No day without a line" (Nulle dies sine linea), the motto
which had become the Renaissance summons to self-discipline. 4 '
Pro-
togenes returns, sees the challenging line, and rises to the bait: "He himself
using another color drew an even finer line exactly on top of the first." With
the uncanny timing usual in these apocryphas, Apelles comes back once
more, finds the competition out, naturally, and applies the killer, a third,
even finer line, cutting the other two. Protogenes throws in the towel and
dashes to the harbor to find his rival, having decided that the panel "should
be handed on to posterity as it was to be admired as a marvel by everyone,
but especially by artists. I am informed," Pliny adds, rather lugubriously,
"that it was burnt in the first fire that occurred in Caesar's palace on the
Palatine; it had previously been much admired by us, its vast surface con-

taining nothing else than the almost invisible lines so that among the out-
standing works of many artists it looked like a blank space, and by that very
fact attracted attention and was more esteemed than any masterpiece."
Suppose that this is what Rembrandt means by his brilliant line (and it

is only supposition), the biggest possible brag made with the most econom-
ical of means; suppose again that Huygens worked all this out and under-
stood The Artist in His Studio as a kind of cunning disquisition; would he
have been impressed? He was not, after all, in the disquisition market. He
was market for grandiose histories, decorous portraits; the pleasures
in the

of princes: images of themselves. Had he looked right through Rembrandt's


production in 1629, he might have been made a little uneasy by what he
saw, and perhaps come to the conclusion that for all his exceptional talent,
this was a somewhat singular young painter. Bringing him on might not be
an altogether straightforward business.
Now what was Huygens supposed to do with idiosyncrasy? He needed
quality. He needed reliability. He needed a domestic Rubens. Genius? Who
knew what that was?
REMBRANDT S EYES 24

New York, 1998

One might say the same of modern Rembrandt literature.


There was a time, not so very long ago, before the anachronism police had
been sent out on monograph patrol, when "genius" and "Rembrandt"
seemed to belong in the same sentence. For the unnumbered millions who
respond intuitively to his painting, applying the G word to Rembrandt
seems no more incongruous than awarding it to Shakespeare, Raphael,
Cervantes, Milton, or Bernini, all of whom predate the Romantic recoining
of the word. It was way in which Michelangelo was referred to both
the
inside Italy and beyond. Not long after his death, biographies of artists
made a habit of identifying thosewho were inexplicably exceptional as
prodigies whose seemed so incommensurably greater than those of
gifts

their contemporaries that they must have been marked by a touch of divin-
ity. By the same token, such rarities were also prone to antisocial fits of

melancholy and even madness. The isolated artist, eccentric in habits, mer-
curial in temper, embattled with the callow vulgarity of contemporary taste
or the conventions of academic mediocrity, straining against the expecta-
tions of his patrons, was not a modern, nineteenth-century invention. 46 It
was the way in which seventeenth-century writers wrote (and often com-
plained) about, for example, Salvator Rosa, just nine years younger than
Rembrandt and notorious for his arrogant indifference to the demands of
patrons. Of course, acknowledging the eccentricity and obstinacy of genius
was not the same thing as admiring it, and many critics who wrote of the
truly peculiar painters thought such waywardness a symptom of deplorable
self-indulgence.
But ever since one of the most penetrating of all writers on Rem-
brandt, the art historian Jan Emmens, published a ferocious attack, appro-
priately in a journal called Tirade, on what he took to be the vulgar
glorification ofRembrandt, allergy to genius-talk has virtually become a
professional obligation. 4 " The postwar generation has been understand-
ably cool toward cultural idolatry. In the Netherlands, mistrust of self-
abasement before cultural folk heroes has a particularly poisoned history.
In 1944 Dutch collaborators with the Nazi occupation thought it a bright
idea to promote a national "Rembrandt Day" on the anniversary of his
popular alternative to the surreptitiously patriotic celebrations of
birth, as a
4X
the birthday of Queen Wilhelmina, then in exile in London. Rembrandt's
inconvenient habit of keeping company with Jews was overlooked (though
not by all SS officers). This grotesque attempt to make over Rembrandt into

a perfect specimen of Greater German culture, including a commissioned


opera called The Night Watch, did not exactly catch fire in the public imag-
ination in the Netherlands. But the episode might well have been re-
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
BLACK-THROATED DIVER.

Colymbus Arcticus, Linn.


PLATE CCCXLVI. Male, Female, and Young.

One of the most remarkable circumstances relative to this beautiful


bird, which is intermediate between the Red-throated Diver and the
Loon, is the extraordinary extent to which the wanderings of the
young are carried in autumn and winter. It breeds in the remote
regions of the north, from which many of the old birds, it would seem,
do not remove far, while the young, as soon as they are able to
travel, take to wing and disperse, spreading not only over the greater
part of the United States, but beyond their south-western limits. In
the Texas I saw individuals of this species as late as the middle of
April 1837; and I find it enumerated in a list of the birds observed by
my young friend Dr J. K. Townsend on the Columbia River, where
he also met with Columbus glacialis. Its ramblings over a
considerable portion of northern and eastern Europe have equally
been noted, and it has been found breeding in the extreme north of
Scotland.
For many years I knew the young of this bird only by the name
“Imber Diver,” applied by Bewick to that of another species, and now
have pleasure in looking upon a drawing of mine, made about thirty
years ago, with that appellation attached to it. Very few old birds in
full plumage have been procured within the limits of the United
States, and none in as far as I know, farther south than the Capes of
Delaware.
No sooner has the foliage of the trees that border our western waters
begun to drop and float on the gentle current of the fair Ohio, than
the Black-throated Diver makes its appearance there, moving slowly
with the stream. The Mississippi, Missouri, and their tributaries, are
at the same period supplied with these birds. Along our eastern and
southern shores they are seen from the end of autumn until spring.
Whilst in Labrador, I saw a few pairs courting on wing, much in the
manner of the Red-throated Diver; but all our exertions failed to
procure any of the nests, which I therefore think must have been
placed farther inland than those of the Loon or Red-throated Diver. I
observed however, that in their general habits they greatly resemble
those species, for on alighting on the water, they at once immerse
their bills, as if for the purpose of ascertaining whether it yields a
supply of suitable food, and afterwards raise themselves and beat
their wings.
This species has almost as powerful a flight as the Great Northern
Diver or Loon, and I think shoots through the air with even greater
velocity. When flying it moves its wings rapidly and continuously, and
has the neck and feet stretched out to their full length. I well recollect
that while I was standing near the shore of a large inlet in South
Carolina, one of these birds, being shot while passing over my head
at full speed, did not, on account of the impetus, reach the ground
until upwards of twenty yards beyond me. They are equally expert at
diving, and fully as much so in eluding the pursuit of their enemies
when wounded. I saw my friend Mr Harris bring down one from on
wing, on which Napoleon Coste, and William Taylor, Captains of
the Revenue Cutter and Tender of which we had the use, paddled in
pursuit of it in a light canoe; but, although they advanced with all the
address of Indians, they proved unsuccessful, for after following it
both in the Bay of Cayo Island, and in the Bay of Mexico, for nearly
an hour, they were obliged to return without it, having found it
apparently not in the least fatigued, although it had dived sufficiently
often to travel above two miles, shifting its course at each immersion.
It is curious to observe how carefully these birds avoid the danger of
sudden storms or heavy gales. On such occasions, I have seen
Divers at once seek the lee of rocks, islands, or artificial
embankments, where they could not only remain in security, but also
procure their accustomed food. At other times, when striving against
the tempest, they dive headlong from on wing, and are sure to
reappear in the smooth parts which sailors term the trough.
I once caught one of these birds on the Ohio, it having been
incapacitated from diving by having swallowed a large mussel, which
stuck in its throat. It was kept for several days, but refused food of
every kind, exhibited much bad humour, struck with its bill, and died
of inanition. The food of this species consists of fish, aquatic reptiles,
testaceous mollusca, and all sorts of small crustaceous animals. Its
flesh resembles that of the Loon, and is equally unfit to be eaten.
The eggs, which are sometimes two, more frequently three, average
three inches in length, by two in their greatest breadth, which is
about a third of the whole length distant from the extremity. Their
form is that of the Red-throated Diver, which however they exceed in
size. The shell is rather thick, the surface roughish, the ground
colour chocolate tinged with olive, sparingly spotted at the larger end
with very dark umber and black, and sprinkled all over with very
small dots of the same colour.
I have represented an adult male, a female, and a young bird.

Colymbus arcticus, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 221.—Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. ii.
p. 800.—Ch. Bonaparte, Synopsis of Birds of United States, p. 420.
Colymbus arcticus, Black-throated Diver, Richards. and Swains. Fauna
Boreali-Americana, vol. ii. p. 475.
Black-throated Diver, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii.

Adult Male. Plate CCCXLVI. Fig. 1.


Bill as long as the head, straight, stout, higher than broad at the
base, much compressed toward the end, and tapering to a point.
Upper mandible with the dorsal line descending and considerably
convex toward the end, the ridge convex, narrowed toward the point,
the sides convex beyond the nostrils, the edges involute for half their
length in the middle, direct at the base and toward the end, the tip
narrow and sharpish. Nasal groove rather long and narrowed;
nostrils sub-basal, linear, direct, pervious. Lower mandible with the
angle extremely narrow, and very long, the dorsal line ascending and
very slightly convex, the ridge convex and narrow, the edges sharp
and involute, the tip attenuated.
Head of moderate size, oblong, narrowed before. Neck rather long
and thick. Eyes of moderate size. Body elongated, much depressed,
of an elliptical form viewed from above. Wings small. Feet short,
rather large, placed very far back; tibia almost entirely concealed;
tarsus short, exceedingly compressed, sharp-edged before and
behind, covered all over with reticulated angular scales, hind toe
extremely small, externally marginate, connected with the second for
half its length by a membrane, which extends, narrowing, to the end;
the anterior toes connected by articulated membranes, the fourth or
outer longest, the third a little shorter, the second considerably
shorter than the third; all covered above with numerous narrow
scutella; the second toe with a free two-lobed membrane, the claws
very small, depressed, blunt.
Plumage short and dense, of the head and neck very short, soft and
blended; of the lower parts short, blended, stiffish, considerably
glossed; of the upper compact, glossy; the feathers on the lower part
of the sides of the neck much incurved, oblong with the terminal
barbs stiff; those of the fore part of the back and the scapulars
straight, oblong, abrupt. Wings proportionally very small and narrow,
curved; primaries strong, tapering, the first longest, the second
slightly shorter, the rest rapidly graduated; secondaries very short,
broad, and rounded. Tail extremely short, rounded, of eighteen
feathers.
Bill black. Iris deep bright red. Feet greyish-blue, their inner sides
tinged with yellow; claws black, that of the inner toe yellowish at the
base. The upper part of the head and the hind neck are light grey or
hoary, the fore part and sides of the head darker. The upper parts
are glossy black tinged with green anteriorly, and shaded with brown
behind. On the fore part of the back are two longitudinal bands of
transverse white bars, the feathers being tipped with that colour; the
scapulars, excepting the outer, are marked in the same manner with
transverse rows of rather large square spots. Most of the wing-
coverts have two roundish spots of white near the end. The quills are
blackish-brown, tinged with grey externally, paler on the inner webs;
the tail also blackish-brown. The fore neck, to the length of six and a
half inches, is purplish-black, ending angularly below, and with a
transverse interrupted band of linear white spots near the upper part;
beyond which the sides of the neck are blackish-brown, with several
longitudinal white streaks, formed by the edges of the feathers; on
the lower part of the neck a broad space is occupied by these
longitudinal, dusky, and white streaks the former of which gradually
become narrower. The lower parts are pure white, excepting a
longitudinal band on the sides under the wing, which is dusky.
Length to end of tail 29 inches, to end of wings 27 1/2, to end of
claws 33; extent of wings 39 1/2; wing from flexure 12 3/4; tail 2 3/4;
bill along the ridge 2 5 1/2/12, along the edge of lower mandible
3 4 1/2/12; tarsus 3 1/12; hind toe 8/12, its claw 2/12; second toe 3 2/12,
1/2 1/2
its claw 5 /12; third toe 3 8/12, its claw 5 5 /12; fourth toe 4 1/4, its
claw 4 1/2/12.

Adult Female. Plate CCCXLVI. Fig. 2.


The Female is smaller than the male, but is similarly coloured.
Young in Winter. Plate CCCXLVI. Fig. 3.
The texture of the plumage is less dense, the feathers on the neck
being more downy, and those of the back oblong and rounded. The
bill is light bluish-grey, dusky along the ridge; the iris brown; the feet
more dusky. The upper part of the head and the hind neck are dark
greyish-brown; the sides of the head greyish-white, minutely
streaked with brown. The upper parts have a reticulated or scaly
appearance, the feathers being brownish-black, with broad bluish-
grey margins; the rump dull brownish-grey. The primaries and their
coverts are brownish-black, the secondaries and tail-feathers dusky,
margined with grey. The fore part of the neck is greyish-white,
minutely and faintly dotted with brown, its sides below streaked with
the same; the lower parts, including the under surface of the wing,
pure white; the sides of the body and rump, with part of the lower
tail-coverts, dusky, edged with bluish-grey.
When in their first downy plumage, the young are of a uniform
brownish-black colour.
SMEW OR WHITE NUN.

Mergus Albellus, Linn.


PLATE CCCXLVIL. Male and Female.

The Smew is a bird of extremely rare occurrence in the United


States, insomuch that it must be considered merely as a transient or
accidental visitor. Indeed I have felt strong misgivings on reading
Wilson’s article on this species, and cannot but think that he is
mistaken when he states that it “is much more common on the coast
of New England than farther south,” and again “In the ponds of New
England, and some of the lakes in the State of New York, where the
Smew is frequently observed—.” Now, although I have made diligent
inquiry, not only in New England, but in every part of our country
where I thought it likely that the Smew might occur, I have not met
with any person well acquainted with birds of this family, who has
seen it. Wilson, in short, was in all probability misinformed, and it is
my opinion that his figure was made from a stuffed European
specimen which was then in Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia, and
that he had taken the Buffel-headed Duck, seen at a distance, for
this species, as I am aware has been the case with other individuals.
The only specimen procured by me was shot by myself on Lake
Barataria, not far from New Orleans, in the winter of 1819. It was an
adult female in fine plumage. How it had wandered so far south is an
enigma to me; but having found it, and made a drawing of it on the
spot, I have taken the liberty to add one of the other sex from an
equally fine specimen. After all, the Smew can scarcely be
considered as belonging to the American Fauna, any more than our
Fork-tailed Hawk can with propriety be called a denizen of England;
and in this I am supported by all the great navigators of our Arctic
Seas, such as Ross, Parry, and Franklin, none of whom, nor any
of their companions, ever met with a single individual of this beautiful
bird.

Mergus Albellus, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 209.—Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. ii. p.
831.—Ch. Bonaparte, Synopsis of Birds of United States, p. 398.
Smew or White Nun, Mergus Albellus, Wils. Amer. Ornith. vol. viii. p. 126,
pl. 71, fig. 4. Male.
The Smew, or White Nun, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 467.

Adult Male Plate CCCXLVII. Fig. 1.


Bill rather shorter than the head, straight, rather slender, a little
higher than broad at the base, tapering, somewhat cylindrical toward
the end. Upper mandible with the dorsal outline sloping gently and
slightly concave to the middle, then straight, at the tip declined, the
ridge rather broad and flat at the base, then convex, the sides
sloping at the base, convex toward the end, the edges serrate
beneath, with about forty slightly reversed, compressed, tapering,
tooth-like lamellæ, the unguis elliptical, much curved. Nasal groove
oblong, sub-basal, filled by a soft membrane; nostrils oblong,
submedial, direct, pervious. Lower mandible with the angle very
narrow and extended to the obovate, very convex unguis, the sides
rounded, with a long groove, the edges with about sixty
perpendicular sharp lamellæ.
Head of moderate size, oblong, compressed. Neck of moderate
length. Body full and depressed. Feet placed far behind, extremely
short; tibia bare for a quarter of an inch; tarsus extremely short,
much compressed, anteriorly covered with a series of very small
scutella, and another row on the lower half externally, the sides
reticulate. Hind toe very small, with an inferior free membrane;
anterior toes double the length of the tarsus; the second shorter than
the fourth, which is nearly as long as the third; all connected by
reticulated webs, of which the outer is deeply emarginate. Claws
short, considerably curved, compressed, acute, that of the middle
toe with a thin inner edge.
Plumage full, soft, and blended; feathers of the head and upper part
of the hind neck very slender, and elongated along the median line
into a narrow decurved crest; those of the shoulders obovate and
abrupt, of the rest of the upper parts ovate, of the lower elliptical.
Wings very short, narrow, curved, and pointed; primaries narrow,
tapering, the first scarcely longer than the second, the rest rapidly
graduated; secondaries short, narrow, rounded, the inner tapering to
an obtuse point. Tail short, graduated, of sixteen rather narrow,
tapering feathers.
Bill dark greyish-blue. Iris bright red. Feet livid blue, claws dusky.
The general colour of the plumage is pure white; a short band on
each side of the hind neck bordering the crest, duck-green; a broad
patch on the lore and below the eye, a narrow band across the lower
part of the hind neck, formed by single bars near the tips of the
feathers, the middle of the back in its whole length, a short
transverse bar under the fore edge of the wing, the anterior margin
of that organ to beyond the carpal joint, the outer edges of the
scapulars, the primary coverts, the secondary coverts, and the outer
secondary quills, excepting the tips of both, deep black. The quills
are also black, but of a less deep tint; the hind part of the back
becomes tinged with grey, and the rump and tail-feathers are dusky
grey. The sides of the body and rump are white, finely undulated with
blackish-grey.
Length to end of tail 17 1/2 inches, to end of claws 18 1/4, to end of
1/2
wings 15 1/2; extent of wings 27; bill along the ridge 1 3 /12, along
1/
the edge of lower mandible 1 7 2/12; wing from flexure 7 3/4; tail 3 1/2;
1/
tarsus 1 1 /12; first toe 1/2, its claw 2/12; second toe 1 1/2, its claw
2

4/ ,
12third toe 1 11/12, its claw 4 1/2/12; fourth toe 1 10/12, its claw 5/12.
Weight 1 lb. 8 oz.
Adult Female. Plate CCCXLVII. Fig. 2.
The Female is much smaller. The feathers of the hind part of the
head and neck are also elongated so as to form a crest. The bill, iris,
and feet, are coloured as in the male. All the lower parts are white,
excepting a broad band of light grey across the middle of the neck,
and a narrow portion of the sides, which are of a deeper tint. There is
a patch of brownish-black on the lore and beneath the eye; the upper
part of the head and half of the hind neck, are light reddish-brown;
the rest of the hind neck, and all the upper parts, bluish-grey, darker
behind, and in the middle of the back approaching to black. The
wings as in the male, that is black, with a large patch of white, and
two narrow transverse bands of the same; the tail dusky grey.
Length to end of tail 15 1/4 inches, to end of claws 16 1/2, to end of
wings 14 1/2; extent of wings 25. Weight 1 lb. 4 oz.
GADWALL DUCK.

Anas strepera, Linn.


PLATE CCCXLVIII. Male and Female.

I have met with this species along the whole of our Atlantic coast,
from Eastport in Maine to Texas. It is, however, more abundant in the
interior than in most of our maritime districts, and is particularly so on
the tributaries of the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi. In the early part
of autumn and late in spring many are found on the margins of our
great lakes. Yet the Gadwall has been represented as not plentiful in
the United States, probably on account of its being generally
dispersed, and not congregated in particular districts.
The Creoles of Louisiana name it “Violon,” on account of the
whistling sound of its wings. It arrives in the neighbourhood of New
Orleans and the mouths of the Mississippi along with the Widgeon,
and is fond of the company of the Red-head, to which it is about
equal as an article of food. The Gadwalls are usually seen in small
flocks, and during winter resort to the larger lakes and the pools in
the interior of the great marshes, adjoining the waters of the Gulf. In
that part of the country they feed on small fish, insects, and aquatic
grasses. Fewer of them are found in Massachusetts and the State of
New York than elsewhere, and this probably on account of these
districts being more elevated and less marshy than those farther
south. My friend Dr Bachman informs me that they are rather
plentiful in South Carolina, where they are considered good eating,
and where they arrive in the beginning of October, but are more
frequently met with at that season, and in early spring, than during
winter, when a single individual may sometimes be seen in a flock of
other ducks.
While we were in the Texas, in the latter part of April and the
beginning of May, we found the Gadwall quite abundant on all the
inland ponds and streams, as well as on the brackish pools and
inlets of the islands and shores of Galveston Bay. Many of them had
paired and separated from the other ducks; and I was assured that
this species breeds there, as does the Dusky Duck, the Mallard, the
Blue-winged Teal, the Widgeon, and the Shoveller, the young of all
these species being plentiful in the end of June and beginning of
July. I was satisfied as to the truth of the repeated assurances I had
received on this subject, by observing the manners of individuals of
all these species before my departure from that country. After a
continuance of rainy weather, Gadwalls are found in great numbers
on the vast prairies of Oppelousas and Attacapas, where I have
been told they continue until very late in spring, and some remain to
breed.
This species dives well on occasion, especially on being wounded.
At the appearance of danger, it rises on wing—whether from the
ground or from the water—at a single spring, in the manner of the
Mallard, and, like it also, ascends almost perpendicularly for several
yards, after which it moves off in a direct course with great celerity. I
have never seen it dive on seeing the flash of the gun; but when
approached it always swims to the opposite part of the pond, and,
when the danger increases, flies off. On being wounded, it
sometimes by diving makes its escape among the grass, where it
squats and remains concealed. It walks with ease, and prettily, often
making incursions upon the land, when the ponds are not
surrounded by trees, for the purpose of searching for food. It nibbles
the tender shoots and blades of grasses with apparent pleasure, and
will feed on beech-nuts, acorns, and seeds of all kinds of gramineæ,
as well as on tadpoles, small fishes, and leeches. After rain it alights
in the corn-fields, like the Mallard, and picks up the scattered grains
of maize. The common notes or cry of the female have a
considerable resemblance to those of the female Mallard; but the cry
of the male is weaker as in that species.
It is by no means shy in the Western Country, where I have often
found it associating with other species, which would leave the pond
before it. Near the sea, however, it is much more wary, and this no
doubt on account of the greater number of persons who there follow
shooting as a regular and profitable employment. From the following
note of my friend Dr Bachman, you may judge how easily this fine
species might be domesticated.
“In the year 1812 I saw in Dutchess County, in the State of New
York, at the house of a miller, a fine flock of ducks, to the number of
at least thirty, which, from their peculiar appearance, struck me as
differing from any I had before seen among the different varieties of
the tame Duck. On inquiry, I was informed that three years before, a
pair of these ducks had been captured in the mill pond, whether in a
trap, or by being wounded, I cannot recollect. They were kept in the
poultry-yard, and, it was said, were easily tamed. One joint of the
wing was taken off, to prevent their flying away. In the following
spring they were suffered to go into the pond, and they returned daily
to the house to be fed. They built their nest on the edge of the pond,
and reared a large brood. The young were perfectly reconciled to
domestication, and made no attempts, even at the migratory season,
to fly away, although their wings were perfect. In the following
season they produced large broods. The family of the miller used
them occasionally as food, and considered them equal in flavour to
the common duck, and more easily raised. The old males were more
beautiful than any that I have examined since; and as yet
domestication had produced no variety in their plumage.”
The migration of this species extends to the Fur Countries, where it
is said to breed. The description of a male killed on the
Saskatchewan River, on the 22d of May 1827, is given in the Fauna
Boreali-Americana; and I have a fine male procured by Dr
Townsend on the Columbia River.

Anas strepera, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 200.—Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. ii. p.
859.—Ch. Bonaparte, Synopsis of Birds of United States, p. 383.
Gadwall, Anas strepera, Wils. Amer. Ornith. vol. viii. p. 120, pl. 71, fig. 1.—
Richards. and Swains. Fauna Bor.-Amer. vol. ii. p. 440.
Gadwall or Grey, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 383.

Adult Male. Plate CCCXLVIII. Fig. 1.


Bill nearly as long as the head, deeper than broad at the base,
depressed towards the end, the sides parallel, the tip rounded.
Upper mandible with the frontal angles short and obtuse, the dorsal
line at first sloping, then slightly concave and direct, the ridge broad
and flat at the base, then broadly convex, the edges soft, with about
fifty internal lamellæ, the unguis roundish, curved abruptly at the
end. Nostrils sub-basal, lateral, rather small, oblong, pervious. Lower
mandible flattened, its angle very long and narrow, the dorsal line
very short, slightly convex, the edges soft, with about sixty lamellæ.
Head of moderate size, oblong, compressed. Neck rather long,
slender. Body elongated, slightly depressed. Feet very short; tibia
bare for about a quarter of an inch; tarsus very short, compressed,
anteriorly with two series of scutella, the outer shorter, the rest
covered with reticulated angular scales; toes obliquely scutellate
above; first very small, free, with a narrow membrane beneath; third
longest, fourth considerably shorter, second shorter than fourth, their
connecting webs entire, on the edge crenate; the second or inner toe
with a membranous margin. Claws small, slightly arched,
compressed, rather acute, the hind one very small and more curved,
that of the middle toe with an inner sharp edge.
Plumage dense, soft, blended. Feathers of the head short, of the
occiput and nape a little elongated, of the lower parts glossy with the
extremities of the filaments stiffish. Wings rather long, little curved,
pointed; the first quill longest, the rest rapidly graduated; secondaries
very broad, but pointed, the inner much elongated, and tapering to a
point. The tips of the filaments of the outer web of the first primary
are separated and curved a little forwards. Tail short, rounded, of
sixteen strong pointed feathers, of which the middle pair project
considerably.
Bill bluish-black. Iris reddish hazel. Feet dull orange-yellow, claws
brownish-black, webs dusky. Head light yellowish-red, the upper part
and nape much darker and barred with dusky; the rest dotted with
the same. The lower part of the neck, the sides of the body, the fore
part of the back, and the outer scapulars, undulated with dusky, and
yellowish-white, the bands much larger and semicircular on the fore
part of the neck and breast; the latter white, the abdomen faintly and
minutely undulated with brownish-grey; the elongated scapulars
brownish-grey, broadly margined with brownish-red; the hind part of
the back brownish-black; the rump all round, and the upper and
lower tail-coverts, bluish-black. The anterior smaller wing-coverts are
light grey, undulated with dusky, the middle coverts of a deep rich
chestnut-red; primary coverts brownish-grey, outer secondary
coverts darker and tinged with chestnut, the rest black, excepting the
inner, which are grey. Primaries and inner elongated secondaries
brownish-grey, of which colour also are the inner webs of the rest,
part of the outer webs of five of the outer black, and their terminal
margins white, of which colour are the whole outer webs of the three
next to the inner elongated quills. Tail brownish-grey, the feathers
margined with paler.
Length to end of tail 21 3/4 inches, to end of wings 19, to end of
claws 23 1/4; extent of wings 35; bill along the ridge 1 3/4, along the
edge of lower mandible 1 7/8; wing from flexure 11; tail 4 3/8; tarsus
1 1/2; hind toe and claw 1/2; second toe 1 5/8, its claw 4/12; third toe
1 7/8, its claw 4/12; outer toe 1 7 1/2/12, its claw 2/12. Weight 1 lb. 10 oz.

Adult Female. Plate CCCXLVIII. Fig. 2.


The female is considerably smaller. Bill dusky along the ridge, dull
yellowish-orange on the sides. Iris hazel. Feet of a fainter tint than in
the male. Upper part of head brownish-black, the feathers edged
with light reddish-brown; a streak over the eye, the cheeks, the
upper part of the neck all round, light yellowish-red tinged with grey,
and marked with small longitudinal dusky streaks, which are fainter
on the throat, that part being greyish-white; the rest of the neck, the
sides, all the upper parts and the lower rump feathers brownish-
black broadly margined with yellowish-red. Wing-coverts brownish-
grey, edged with paler; the wing otherwise as in the male, but the
speculum fainter. Tail-feathers, and their coverts dusky, laterally
obliquely indented with pale brownish-red, and margined with
reddish-white.
Length to end of tail 19 1/4 inches, to end of wings 18 3/4, to end of
claws 19 1/2; extent of wings 31; wing from flexure 8 1/4; tail 3 3/4;
tarsus 1 4 1/2/12; middle toe 1 9 1/2/12, its claw 4/12.

In a male, the roof of the mouth is deeply concave, with a prominent


median ridge, and oblique grooves toward the end. The tongue is 1
inch 10 twelfths long, fleshy, with a deep longitudinal groove, two
lateral series of filaments, and a thin broadly rounded tip, as in other
ducks. The œsophagus, a, b, is 10 1/2 inches long, 5 twelfths in
diameter for about four inches, then enlarged to 10 twelfths, and
again contracted as it enters the thorax. The proventriculus, b b, is 1
inch and two twelfths long, its greatest diameter 8 twelfths. The
stomach, c d e, is a very large and powerful gizzard, of an elliptical
form, compressed, 1 inch and 9 twelfths long, 2 inches in its greatest
breadth, or in the direction of the lateral muscles, of which the right,
c, is 10 twelfths thick, the left, d, 9 twelfths. The epithelium is thick
and rugous; much thickened and forming two roundish, flat or slightly
concave grinding surfaces, opposite the muscles. The intestine, e f
g, is 6 feet 10 inches long, wide, its diameter for 2 feet being 4 1/2
twelfths, towards the rectum enlarging to 6 twelfths. It forms first a
very long duodenal curve, c e f g, and is then convoluted or coiled in
numerous folds. The rectum is 5 1/4 inches long; the cœca 11 inches,
their greatest diameter 6 twelfths, for 2 inches at the commencement
2 twelfths, towards the end 2 1/2 twelfths, their extremity rounded.
The trachea, h, is 7 1/2 inches long; its diameter at the upper part 4
twelfths, gradually diminishing to 3 1/2 twelfths; it then enlarges to 5
twelfths, and contracts to 3 1/2 twelfths at the commencement of the
dilatation of the inferior larynx, which is extremely similar to that of
the Widgeon, but larger; there being an enlargement, i, formed by a
number of the lower rings united, and to the left side a rounded bony
tympanum j; the greatest transverse diameter of this part, from i to j,
is 1 inch 1 twelfth. The bronchi, k k, are of moderate size, covered
with a dense layer of adipose matter.
LEAST WATER RAIL.

Rallus jamaicensis, Gmel.


PLATE CCCXLIX. Male and Young.

My knowledge of this pretty little species is altogether derived from


Titian Peale, Esq., of Philadelphia, by whom, in October 1836, I
was favoured with the following letter:—
“I herewith send you the ‘Little Rail’ of which we were speaking
yesterday, and the letter of Dr Rowan which relates to it. The young
died soon after I received them, but the old one lived with me until
the 26th of July (four days after its capture), evincing considerable
anxiety for the young, as long as they lived. Both young and old
partook sparingly of Indian meal and water, or bread and water, and
soon became quite at home, and probably might have been
domesticated, had they been properly accommodated.
“The most remarkable part of the history of this individual is, that
after its death we should have discovered in dissection that it was a
male, rendering it singularly curious that he should have suffered
himself to be captured by hand while in defence of the young brood.
“There is now in the Museum a specimen of this species, which has
been in the collection for about thirty years, said to have been caught
in the vicinity of the city. It stands labelled ‘Little Rail, Rallus minutus,
Turton’s Linn;’ but the authenticity of the specimen has always been
disputed by Bonaparte and others, because none else had been
found; and the author just named expressed a belief that it was an
immature specimen of Rallus (Crex) Porzana of Europe.
“I regret that I should have mislaid the measurements of the
specimen when recent, if any were taken, and cannot lay my hands
on them, or any thing more than the above notes. Respectfully
yours, &c.

Titian R. Peale.”
Inclosed in Mr Peale’s letter was the following note from Dr Rowan
“to the Messrs Peales.”
“On Saturday last I wrote to you of the Rail Bird breeding near this
place. I then described one that I caught last summer, which was
unlike the Rail in the fall season, and I presumed that all in the wet
ground were the same, but this day my men mowing around the
pond started up two of the usual kind. The hen flew a few rods, and
then flew back to her young in an instant, when they caught her
together with her four young, which I herewith send you. Many more
can be caught. I have seen them in our meadow every month of the
year, but they never make a great noise except when very fat on the
wild oat’s seed. From the above you will conclude that they do not
migrate to the south, but breed here. Respectfully,

Thomas Rowan.”

Rallus jamaicensis, Brisson Sup. p. 140.—Gmel. Syst. Nat. vol. ii. p. 718.—
Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. ii. p. 761.

Adult Male. Plate CCCXLIX. Fig. 1.


Bill shorter than the head, rather stout, compressed, tapering. Upper
mandible with the dorsal line nearly straight, being slightly convex
toward the end, the ridge narrow and convex in its whole length, the
sides convex towards the end, the edges sharp, the tip rather acute.
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