拍品專文
The present lot belongs to a series of The Five Senses, of which two others - The Sense of Hearing and The Sense of Sight - are extant in private collections. The Sense of Hearing was the first to come to light and was published by Vitale Bloch in 1933. It was acquired by Dr. van Aalst (see above); some time later and by 1939, he had (see above) also bought The Sense of Touch. The Sense of Sight only came to be known to a wider public in 1968 when it was exhibited in Leyden. All three pictures had been enlarged in a similar fashion. The enlargement of the present lot was removed a few years ago by Menno Dooijes. His cleaning report in Dutch is available for inspection; Dr. Christopher Brown, in his entry in the Stockholm exhibition catalogue, see above, referred to Dr. Peter Klein's dendrochronological analysis - a felling date of the support of the present panel of between 1610-20 - and to the report on pigment analysis by the Centraal Laboratorium voor Onderzoek van Voorwerpen van Kunst en Wetenschaap, Amsterdam. These are also available for inspection. The X-radiograph is reproduced by the Rembrandt Research Project, op. cit., p. 401, fig. 2.
The critical fortune of the three pictures has been mixed: Knuttel, Rosenberg and Bauch did not accept the attribution and Gerson found it not 'wholly convincing'. The Rembrandt Research Project placed the three paintings in Category B - 'Paintings Rembrandt's authorship of which cannot be positively either accepted or rejected'.
Such a categorisation did not rule out Rembrandt's authorship; the Project, see above, reserved judgement as to whether Hearing and Touch were 'beginner's' work by Rembrandt himself' or whether they came 'from his immediate entourage', because of the 'absence of any comparative material from the years before 1625' (see under its B1).
Following the publication of the views of the Rembrandt Research Project, Schwartz accepted the attribution to Rembrandt believing the series to be Rembrandt's earliest work, while Tümpel was later to attribute these pictures to 'an early Leyden follower of Rembrandt'.
The judicious caution of the Project was in part no doubt due to the degree to which Hearing and Touch were overpainted (see particularly under its no. B1) not to say enlarged (for the extensive degree of overpaint, see its p. 404, fig. 4 for Hearing, p. 409, fig. 4 for Touch, and p. 414, fig. 4 for Sight). In about 1988 Hearing and Touch were cleaned; they were publicly displayed in Stockholm in 1992/3 (for the first time since 1956). The entry by Dr. Christopher Brown, the chief Curator at the National Gallery, in the exhibition catalogue persuasively argued for the attribution to Rembrandt working very early in his career (1624 or 1625). Professor Dr. Ernst van de Wetering, Head of the Rembrandt Research Project, who studied the paintings at the exhibition, has kindly informed us (orally) that he believes this view to be correct.
For Dr. Brown, a comparison with the Moscow Christ expelling the Money-changers from the Temple(fig. A) of 1626 (Rembrandt Research Project, op. cit., no. A4) was most compelling - as it had been suggestive for the Project, see its p. 403 - so similar are the colour range, scale and facial types. The two seated money-changers are closely comparable in their manner of execution with the surgeon and his patient in the present lot. Dr. Brown also found points of comparison with other early works by Rembrandt of 1625-1626; detecting a certain crudeness in handling - as had earlier the Project - he believed that the series must have been executed earlier than the Moscow picture. Indeed he now (oral information) considers that it is Rembrandt's earliest work, as Schwartz had already suggested.
Notable in the present lot after cleaning are the spontaneous handling, the subtle colour range and the sense of dramatic tension and energy. Taking into account the recently expressed views of Dr. Brown and Professor van de Wetering, doubts concerning the status of the present lot should be discarded; thus it is here catalogued as the work of Rembrandt.
Rembrandt during his Leyden period was to use a candle as a direct source of light in one other painting - the Berlin Rich Man of 1627 (Rembrandt Research Project, op. cit., no. 10); his early candle-lit drawings are discussed by Benesch, loc. cit., 1940. This motif was becoming common currency among the Utrecht Caravaggesques in the early 1620s; Rembrandt in his use of it in the present lot shows himself to be as à la mode as was his near contemporary and neighbour in Leyden, Jan Lievens (see following lot).
The Rembrandt Research Project, op. cit., under its nos. B1-3, noted the vein of moralising satire in the three extant Senses. In the case of the present lot, Rembrandt relied on a Netherlandish tradition reaching back to Hieronymus Bosch's The Stone Operation in the Prado (for the satirical content of which see D. Bax, Hieronymus Bosch etc., Rotterdam, 1978, pp. 271-3). Kauffmann, op. cit., p. 144, dated the Dutch development of the genre scene as a means of depicting The Five Senses, circa 1610. Rembrandt's three extant renderings in this series of The Five Senses appear to be to a degree both new and inventive, demonstrative of what was to be his remarkable genius.
The critical fortune of the three pictures has been mixed: Knuttel, Rosenberg and Bauch did not accept the attribution and Gerson found it not 'wholly convincing'. The Rembrandt Research Project placed the three paintings in Category B - 'Paintings Rembrandt's authorship of which cannot be positively either accepted or rejected'.
Such a categorisation did not rule out Rembrandt's authorship; the Project, see above, reserved judgement as to whether Hearing and Touch were 'beginner's' work by Rembrandt himself' or whether they came 'from his immediate entourage', because of the 'absence of any comparative material from the years before 1625' (see under its B1).
Following the publication of the views of the Rembrandt Research Project, Schwartz accepted the attribution to Rembrandt believing the series to be Rembrandt's earliest work, while Tümpel was later to attribute these pictures to 'an early Leyden follower of Rembrandt'.
The judicious caution of the Project was in part no doubt due to the degree to which Hearing and Touch were overpainted (see particularly under its no. B1) not to say enlarged (for the extensive degree of overpaint, see its p. 404, fig. 4 for Hearing, p. 409, fig. 4 for Touch, and p. 414, fig. 4 for Sight). In about 1988 Hearing and Touch were cleaned; they were publicly displayed in Stockholm in 1992/3 (for the first time since 1956). The entry by Dr. Christopher Brown, the chief Curator at the National Gallery, in the exhibition catalogue persuasively argued for the attribution to Rembrandt working very early in his career (1624 or 1625). Professor Dr. Ernst van de Wetering, Head of the Rembrandt Research Project, who studied the paintings at the exhibition, has kindly informed us (orally) that he believes this view to be correct.
For Dr. Brown, a comparison with the Moscow Christ expelling the Money-changers from the Temple(fig. A) of 1626 (Rembrandt Research Project, op. cit., no. A4) was most compelling - as it had been suggestive for the Project, see its p. 403 - so similar are the colour range, scale and facial types. The two seated money-changers are closely comparable in their manner of execution with the surgeon and his patient in the present lot. Dr. Brown also found points of comparison with other early works by Rembrandt of 1625-1626; detecting a certain crudeness in handling - as had earlier the Project - he believed that the series must have been executed earlier than the Moscow picture. Indeed he now (oral information) considers that it is Rembrandt's earliest work, as Schwartz had already suggested.
Notable in the present lot after cleaning are the spontaneous handling, the subtle colour range and the sense of dramatic tension and energy. Taking into account the recently expressed views of Dr. Brown and Professor van de Wetering, doubts concerning the status of the present lot should be discarded; thus it is here catalogued as the work of Rembrandt.
Rembrandt during his Leyden period was to use a candle as a direct source of light in one other painting - the Berlin Rich Man of 1627 (Rembrandt Research Project, op. cit., no. 10); his early candle-lit drawings are discussed by Benesch, loc. cit., 1940. This motif was becoming common currency among the Utrecht Caravaggesques in the early 1620s; Rembrandt in his use of it in the present lot shows himself to be as à la mode as was his near contemporary and neighbour in Leyden, Jan Lievens (see following lot).
The Rembrandt Research Project, op. cit., under its nos. B1-3, noted the vein of moralising satire in the three extant Senses. In the case of the present lot, Rembrandt relied on a Netherlandish tradition reaching back to Hieronymus Bosch's The Stone Operation in the Prado (for the satirical content of which see D. Bax, Hieronymus Bosch etc., Rotterdam, 1978, pp. 271-3). Kauffmann, op. cit., p. 144, dated the Dutch development of the genre scene as a means of depicting The Five Senses, circa 1610. Rembrandt's three extant renderings in this series of The Five Senses appear to be to a degree both new and inventive, demonstrative of what was to be his remarkable genius.