Everybody loves a Rembrandt. They go mad for him. Pre-blog I went to the Rijksmuseum at opening time on a Sunday morning. It was almost empty until we got to The Night Watch where the crowd was five deep. You can dangle his contemporaries, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Peter Paul Rubens and get a nibble but Rembrandt provokes a feeding frenzy.
So … as interviewees preface their replies on the Today programme, I did not expect to see twenty-four of his pictures in the Hermitage without being jostled by hordes of other tourists. True, Vera, our delightful guide, made us work up an appetite for them. We started with the Grand Church, it lives up to its name, and bustled round rooms and buildings for more than four hours before getting to them.
I was especially interested in one room that had some of the pictures Catherine the Great bought from Robert Walpole’s collection at Houghton and which briefly returned there on loan a few years ago. Amongst them was this charming portrait of hounds sniffing the air. The one on the right is rather like Bertie looking coy. Incidentally, Robert Walpole eccentrically took a tame magpie out hunting.
When the pictures were trucked to Houghton in 2013 it was done in secrecy in case of a heist. In 1995 pictures from the Hermitage were lent to the Florida International Museum, appropriately located in St Petersburg, Florida. The insurers were jumpy and something most unusual happened. Sorry, this is a digression. A senior representative of the underwriters went out to St Petersburg to watch the pictures packed and loaded. Then he hopped on, sitting between two v large drivers who did not have access to sanitation. They drove across the border into Finland and boarded a ferry bound for Bremen. The Underwriter secured a cabin for himself and the drivers availed themselves of the showers so that the onward journey from Bremen to Frankfurt was less oleofactorily challenging. The pictures were transferred to the hold of a ‘plane bound for Florida. The Underwriter’s job was done. What would have happened if there had been a heist? An Underwriter is not the best man to ride shotgun. What would have happened if the pictures were snitched on the return journey? It’s a true story as I heard it from the Underwriter at a leisurely lunch last week.
Do you know how C the G came by her collection? It originates from a collection bought by a German merchant and international art dealer: Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. It’s funny how things overlap. I’m reading The Club, about Johnson, Boswell et many al. James Boswell met him in 1764, observing him “a gallant German, stupid, comely, cordial”. How frank; anyway, I’ll hand the baton to Wikipedia.
On 10 December 1763 when Gotzkowsky was unable to pay for the Russian grain Gotzkowsky decided to provide 317 paintings, including 90 not precisely known, to the Russian crown to satisfy the obligations of Catherine the Great. Flemish and Dutch masters such as Rembrandt (13 paintings), Rubens(11 paintings), Jacob Jordaens (7 paintings), Anthony van Dyck (5 paintings), Paolo Veronese(5 paintings), Frans Hals (3 paintings), Raphael (2 paintings), Holbein (2 paintings), Titian (1 painting), Jan Steen, Hendrick Goltzius, Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick van Balen en Gerrit van Honthorst formed the basis and the beginning of the collection in the Hermitage.
I went to Dulwich for another dose of Rembrandt. An excellent exhibition but with a weird angle.
“Echoing Rembrandt’s power for storytelling, the exhibition’s atmospheric lighting and design has been carefully curated to immerse audiences in his world. In-house curators Jennifer Scott and Helen Hillyard have collaborated with the award-winning cinematographer, Peter Suschitzky, famed for his work on films such as Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Mars Attacks! to create this unique experience.“
It seemed to me that those who flocked to this exhibition were interested in Rembrandt and not Suschitzky whose input was at best neutral and at worst infuriating. Sorry, you cannot go, it is over: “it’s too late now … “
But it’s not too late to go to Oxford for Young Rembrandt at the Ashmolean. Here’s a trailer.
