Late Rembrandt es una exposición (hasta el 17 de mayo) en el Rijksmuseum de Ámsterdam:
Rembrandt’s later life was marked by tragic personal loss and financial setbacks. Yet it was also the time when he produced his best work. He experimented with paint and light, managing to bring an unprecedented emotional depth to his work. It resulted in his most daring and intimate work.
En A Generosity of Rembrandts: The Late Works at the Rijksmuseum la comentan:
The exhibition begins with a series of late self-portraits, a somber how-do-you-do in the foyer of the show. These establish what Rembrandt’s numerical age might not (he was 63 when he died): that he was playing an endgame. All half-lengths, the self-portraits depict the body in a three-quarters view, the head turned to the picture plane. In each, his face is wrinkled and pouchy, and in the 1659 self-portrait now in Washington, D.C., he seems to have taken great care to use all the crusty bits of paint on his palette to render the weathered and spotty texture of his skin in strokes of jaundice yellow and rosacea pink.
Rembrandt had reason to feel the weight of mortality and loss. He had once dominated the Amsterdam art world. His portraits were in demand by the city’s elite, he made a love match with his dealer’s higher-born niece, Saskia, and he could afford to buy a large new house in a nice part of town. By 1656, all that was over. Saskia had died after a series of difficult pregnancies; he’d had a disastrous love affair with the woman he’d hired to take care of his surviving child; and unwise spending, much of it on art and things like exotic shells, led to bankruptcy. He lived in reduced circumstances with his second love, Hendrickje, and his son Titus, but he survived them both, Hendrickje by six years, Titus by one.