Rembrandt: Terms and notes on Rembrandt’s Technique
REMBRANDT: TERMS AND NOTES ON REMBRANDT’S TECHNIQUE
Even with Rembrandt’s style, nothing comes out of nothing, meaning whom did he learn from? The answer is Titian and Rubens. So let’s begin with some chronological information, since without Titian’s inventions Rubens may have painted differently and then Rembrandt may have found other styles and lifestyles to aspire to.
Venice was the hub during the Renaissance through which coloring material imported from the known world was exported to every city in Europe. This material colored textiles, stained glass, and became artists’ pigments. Venetians became masters at using these colors and exploring the possibilities of oil painting on canvas. They glazed, scumbled and formed creamy layers of paint with translucent media, which may have included ground glass, chalk, a variety of resins and oils, and a wide range of pigments to create images that were more beautiful than nature could present. For example, Titian’s famously painted black fabrics were composed of as many as a dozen superimposed layers of paint and glazes creating the most luxurious surface fit only for a prince.
Titian (1488/90–1576), born Tiziano Vecellio, was a legendary figure, “not just to artists but to all cultivated Europeans.” In 1523 he began painting for the future Duke of Mantua, Federico II Gonzaga, having already been appointed in 1516 official painter of the Republic of Venice. To write his second edition on the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari met with the aging Titian and the artists and art connoisseurs of Venice in 1566. In the process Vasari learned to appreciate the evolution of Titian’s style from the Giorgionesque smooth, fine techniques learned from his masters Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione--where a painting was judged for its mirror like reproduction of the world as it appears to anyone, and every detail is carefully and smoothly finished to his rough, unfinished-looking mature style. Vasari called the mature style “Pittura di Macchia, painting with Splotches”. In this later style Titian left signs of ‘repentir, or alterations made while painting. Repentir or pentimento, both words derived from repentance, leave on the canvas a record of revising & improving. The boldness of leaving a pedimento added to the appreciation of the artist’s process and of the painting and became a theoretical concept. The term for all these effects of looseness, effortlessness, nonchalance, and studied carelessness was Sprezzatura. Sprezzatura was associated with the casualness of a courtier, as personified decades later in Rembrandt’s portrait of Jan Six. Matisse and Diebenkorn made it part of their modern style. Titian had changed forever the criteria for appreciating paintings. As the popularity of his style spread throughout Europe, art collectors who wanted to give the impression of being in the know were counseled to tell a painter “Is it possible that the pencil (meaning brush) can have given such softness by such rough touches, and that such apparent carelessness should be so attractive?” After Titian’s death, Sprezzatura was so appreciated that “the most discerning connoisseurs bought (his)unfinished pictures facing the wall”.
Vasari warned young artists infatuated by Titian’s style and fame, to “wait for your style to mature to use Pittura di Macchia and begin with the fine manner.”
Rubens (1577-1640). In May 1600 Rubens visited Venice and soon after became court painter to Vincent I Duke of Mantua, descendent of Federico II previously mentioned as an early patron of Titian. It is said that to absorb Titian’s technique Rubens would copy a single swatch of Titian’s color effect onto canvases, producing dozens of such experiments.
Charles Bouleau’s Painters Secret Geometry makes it clear that Rubens used musical ratios in planning the grids on which his compositions are built and that Rembrandt must have followed suit.
Rembrandt (1606-1669) admired both Titian and Rubens and wanted to emulate them. Rubens, like Titian, had achieved international fame and consorted with high nobility. Rembrandt painted himself wearing gold chains, usually the gift of a monarch, although he was never awarded any such gifts. Vasari’s book listing Titian’s patronage and styles was translated and printed in Holland in 1604 and Rembrandt surely read it. And following Vasari’s advice mentioned above, like Titian, Rembrandt began in the fine manner and gradually as his style matured, he left areas regarded as unfinished, rough and splotchy. And while this gives the impression of sprezzatura, in actuality it takes a buildup of layers and a great deal of care to use “Pittura di Macchia”. Careful work and reworking are necessary. When he was questioned about his use of sprezzatura Rembrandt replied, “it is finished when the master achieves his intention”. Rembrandt tugged people away from looking too closely at his painting by telling them that the smell would bother them. Interestingly, from farther away the rough manner looks more realistic than the fine manner. This must be due to our biological inability to see edges while an object is in motion. Sharp edges are only possible when things are static, thus less lifelike. figures painted in sharp focus seem motionless compared to those painted roughly with blurred edges. With blurred edges our brain fills in missing information, making an experience closer to observations of our actual environment. These techniques must have been observable in the workshops of Rembrandt’s teachers, van Swanenburg and Lastman. Both had spent many years in Italy and trained in Italian workshops.
Rembrandt was the first artist since the Middle Ages to experiment with how light can reflect on the uneven bumpy surface of paintings formed with bas reliefs. On a convex sloping wall of glossy impasto paint light reflects a glint directly into a viewer’s eye, enhancing the brilliance of that passage. He achieved this by bulking up some paint mixtures with whiting. He loved the sparkle. He also created paints to match the surface structure of the material depicted and manipulated his colors and textures to create depth. For example adding fine silica to the paint will produce a surface similar to worn wood, or adding glossy Venice turpentine will make a patch of paint sparkle like a gem.
Rough areas make objects perceptibly close at hand. Smoothness makes them withdraw. Rough brushstrokes in foreground, smooth in background and shadows. For the 1669 self-portrait canvas is coarse, with ground silica and brown ochre. The face, turban, and collar are constructed on a massive foundation of lead white. There is undermodelling in brown under an impasto flesh layer of lead white and earth pigments. Darks are glazed over brown ground.
Contrast in value and temperature-- warm-cool-- more than chiaroscuro creates depth. High contrast like rough textures comes forward, but reduced contrast makes the object recede. Blues and purples considered cool colors, of equal or less intensity than reds and oranges, called warm colors, also recede. In a face Rembrandt would use the following sequence: highlights cool, lights warm, core of shadows cool, reflected lights warm. Aerial perspective and sfumato also works to create depth even in small distances, as in the lance of the Night Watch and in the Anatomy Lesson. He uses drybrush effects on receding contours. Blurred edges give the impression of rounded volume like a shoulder, while sharp edged imply thin materials, like a sheet of paper.
Naturally overlapping creates distance; Rembrandt painted from background to foreground.
Chronology:
1488-1576 Titian
1511-1574 Giorgio Vasari, second edition of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects published in 1568 and translated into Dutch in 1604.
1577-1640 Rubens. His first great patron, beginning in 1600, was Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, a great collector of art.
1581 Dutch Republic declares independence from Spain.
1606 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn born in Leiden, Holland 9th of 10 children born to a miller, Van Rijn. Rijn is the river near the windmill. Four older sisters and four brothers survived infancy. They belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, although the mother was born Catholic. He was sent to the Leiden Latin School till age 14.
1620 (14) was enrolled at the University of Leiden but did not stay there long and began as a painter’s apprentice to Van Swanenburg.
1624 (18) Spent part of a year studying with Pieter Lastman, a Caravaggisti painter.
1924 Set up is own studio with students and apprentices in Leiden.
1631 Invested 1,000 guilders in the art business of Uylenburg in Amsterdam and quickly became a successful portrait painter.
1634 (27) Married Saskia (20), an Uylenburg. Her uncle’s family owned the gallery/dealership. Rembrandt was reportedly a spendthrift.
1641 (35) Birth of Titus.
1642 Saskia died. Geertje Dircx was hired as a caretaker & nurse and became Rembrandt’s lover. After the relationship failed she sued for breach of promise and was awarded alimony.
1649 (43) Hendrickje Stoffels (23) hired as maid, became his lover.
1654 (48) Hendrickje gave birth to daughter Cornelia.
1669 (63) Completed self-portrait with turban.
Death of Rembrandt October 8, 1669.
Some of us sometimes forget how much thought beyond knowledge of technique is required to create a masterpiece. All three artists were very well educated, though probably only Rubens and Rembrandt had any formal education. All three had intellectual friends, Titian belonging to a small group of the most brilliant minds in Venice. There men of letters especially praised Titian’s intelligence; he could hold his own on a variety of topics with the great dignitaries of his time, including Popes and Holy Roman Emperors. In the “Four Philosophers”, 1611-12, Rubens painted himself with like-minded men of learning discussing philosophy, his brother Phillip, and Jan Wowerius placed near the bust of the philosopher Justus Lipsius.
I love the following anecdote Van Gogh told a friend: “Would you believe – and I honestly mean what I say, I should be happy to give 10 years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture (Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride, 1665) for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.”
Rembrandt’s procedure and materials:
Canvas = linen
Sizing = sizing (animal glue) to protect the canvas from the acidity of the oils.
Gesso = Chalk (called whiting) mixed with animal glue.
Ground = made up of two layers. 1st layer ochreous, reddish. Chalk, lead white, ochre, quartz, other pigments might have been added, and linseed oil. This layer is coarse, filling the interstices of the weave. Some research found in the first layer silica sand tinted with brown ochre, a little lead white and linseed oil, but when I tried adding silica sand to the first layer the surface was too rough. Maybe his sand was much finer than the quality I found online. 2nd layer grey, light brown or dull yellow with lead white and black charcoal, also using linseed oil as the binder. But remember that a painting must be built up from layers with very little oil, to keep them stiff, to layers with more oil, making each additional layer more elastic. This is referred to as “lean to fat”.
Primer comes next = translucent coat of oil paint over entire surface. Content: white lead + umber + chalk + a little ochre + the residue from his brush cleaning can + coloring pigment to give a specific color. The binder is usually linseed oil, but the conservators cannot specify on the type of linseed oil.
Imprimatura = a very thin layer of tinted surface ground usually in middle tone to help best organize the lights and darks. Light reflects through this paint layer. This process helps set up chiaroscuro.
There are no traces of underdrawings, but since there are traces of chalk in all the layers, this suggests that Rembrandt drew with chalk, at least in the beginning stages. There is also a quick sketch done with translucent dead color to rough in the darks.
Dead color or soup: the residue from his brush cleaning can + black pigment + traces of cobalt + umber + again traces of chalk are found.
Like most paintings of his time the light comes from the left. Some writers suggest he was righthanded, thus keeping the shadow of his painting hand out of his way.
Paint layers:
1. Imprimatura
2. Dead coloring, mostly for shadows
3. Impasto in the lights
4. Second coloring
In these layers there are varying thicknesses, textures, transparencies, and color juxtapositions.
The background is glazed with big movements of black and brown, using translucent charcoal black and umber suspended in red and yellow lakes. Today I might use hansa yellow and alizarin to substitute for the lakes.
Some of his dark shadows are burnt sienna mixed with black and alizarin on top of the dried dead-color.
Some textures are made with the back of the brush handle and some I am guessing might have been made with a burin or etching needle. Rembrandt had a printing shop as well as his painting studio. In etching, grooves are cut into a copper plate and ink is pushed into them. The rest of the plate’s surface is wiped clean. Paper is then pressed against the plate by the printing press, forcing the ink to transfer from the grooves to the paper. It appears to me that Rembrandt might have pressed paint into fine grooves scored into the surface of a paint layer and gently wiped the surface before adding more transparent glazes. I wish I could look at the Jewish Bride with a powerful magnifying glass.
Shadows and half tones are thin and smooth.
Flesh is lead white, vermilion and iron oxide red.
Impastos in areas are very thickly painted, as well as highlights.
With the painting in its final stages retouching or finishing
Modifying with scumbles of yellow earth.
Modifying with scumbles of earth and vermilion.
Modifying with a little black and red ochre.
Final details of shadows, eyes, etc.
Light grounds left as small holidays, a term meaning small overlooked areas where the underlayers have not been covered with additional paint.
Dark ground or colored grounds sometimes left exposed.
Baroque rules to give a form volume: a) shadows warm, b) halftones cool, c) lights warm, d) highlights cool.
Two ways for cool halftones: paint with cool tone pigment or use turbid mixture where a pale milky translucent paint film over a dark area creates a bluish reflection.
Student Hoogstraten: “…it is better to aim at softness with a well-nourished brush. From paint applied as thickly as you please, smoothness will, by subsequent operations creep in of itself”.
Rembrandt: “I don’t want to hear a brush scrape the canvas”. Yet some of his brush strokes are loaded with paint while others are dry-brushed. Strokes are dragged, dabbed, and twisted.
Some areas show thick grey over imprimatura or dead color followed by the main color. In other areas the brush is dipped into several shades of white unmixed on the palette.
Left breast: lead white, small amount of charcoal black, red, yellow and brown earth, red lake, vermilion plus a few grains of azurite.
Rembrandt also uses azurite to make some greens, but he never seems to have actual blue areas in his paintings. At Dave’s Rock Shop in Evanston I was surprised by the remarkably intense blue of azurite stones, very similar to the purest cobalt or light ultramarine blue. This explains why a thin glaze of azurite over a yellow ochre ground resulted in a rich green surface.
Conventional sequence for flesh: 1) shadows, 2) mid flesh color forming cool half tones where it overlaps shadows, 3) heightening with thick more colorful warm flesh tones, 4) the darkest shadows.
Materials:
Brushes: Miniver: winter red squirrel
Badger
Hog bristle
Probably also horse and calf bristles
These bristles are held together by a quill ferrule.
Wooden palette
Mahl stick.
Colors:
Majority are yellow & brown earths and red oxides. Azurite and smalt are the only blues used in mixtures, but no areas are left blue.
lead white
vermillion
lead-tin yellow (I have used Naples instead)
ivory black
charcoal black
lamp black
ochres of all types
siennas
umbers
lakes: red (alizarin or madder)
yellow (transparent)
Today, quinacridone pigments, which are less fugitive, have replaced pink, crimson, and magenta lakes. Fugitive colors are sensitive to light and air quality which make them fade away. For example Van Gogh’s blue Bedroom in Arles was originally lavender but the warm pigment faded away leaving only the blue pigment visible.
Rembrandt even knows to put fugitive colors under layers of glazes which in fact form a UV protective screen.
Rembrandt‘s TURBID medium: creates a bluish effect by applying a thin scumbling of a light whitish dull color over a dark base. The dark base absorbs red rays and the turbid layer reflects bluer.
He is aware of how to use certain pigments for bulk, transparency or color.
Cuffs & collars are lead white. Lead white and other colors are used for flesh tones and for impasto because it doesn’t crack and is fast drying.
Adding chalk to lead reduces opacity. He uses chalk as pigment and extender when bulk without density of color is required. It’s great for thick glazes.
Uses lots of lead-tin yellow, like Naples yellow, ranging from primrose to golden yellow. It’s very opaque and is used for embroidery.
Greens: lead-tin yellow plus azurite.
Dark-colored glazes in background have chalk and yellow lake plus earth pigment for a rich translucent effect.
Red: vermillion is rarely used by Rembrandt.
For large areas: bright red ochre mixed with red lake. Lakes are organic dyestuff.
The three classes of earth colors are: ochres, siennas, umbers.
Ochre: most opaque, yellow to red.
Sienna: both raw & burnt are most transparent.
Umber is in all imprimatura.
Black- Ivory black is a warm deep black found everywhere in Rembrandt’s paint layers. It is used in dark-colored glazes and costumes, in the dead-color or soup sketched underlayers, and occasionally used to shadow flesh.
Wood Charcoal- bluish; enhances the cool ½ tones of flesh, see “Woman Bathing in Stream”.
Blue- Azurite, used as blue pigment to make greens and as a drying agent in small quantity.
No ultramarine blue used.
Smalt is moderately ground cobalt glass. Poor glazing pigment but very good drying agent. Used for bulk, for texture in thickly laid glazes.
Paint Medium: linseed oil used 99% of time. Problem is there are half a dozen types of linseed oil; raw, sun-thickened, boiled, boiled with lead, and burnt plate oil. Each has a different viscosity, gloss, drying time, and leveling properties. Could he have used more than one?
Lead carbonate mineral called plumbonacrite, Pb5(CO3)3O(OH) lead oxide or litharge were added to his oils to make a paste-like paint for his signature impasto.
Researchers noted that in a few prepared painting mediums Rembrandt added a pine resin, but they do not name this material. The only pine resin I know of which an excellent additive to a linseed oil and turpentine mixture is Venice turpentine. I personally love using it for the brilliance and elasticity it adds to the paint. Venice turpentine was and still is commonly used to harden horses’ hoofs.
The following medium mixture was not found in my research, but in my practice yields effects that look similar to Rembrandt’s surface.
1 part refined turpentine (the Venice turpentine doesn’t dissolve well in Turpenoid ).
1 part Venice turpentine
4 parts Damar varnish
2 parts thickened linseed oil
3 parts Turpenoid (Weber blue & white can, this is a modern substitute for turpentine).
Prepare the above recipe in a leak proof, mineral spirit resistant bottle. Into the refined turpentine dissolve the Venice turpentine then add the other ingredients. Shake well and when not in use, store in refrigerator to prolong its shelf life.
Traces of chalk (whiting) are found in every layer of his painting. Whiting becomes translucent when mixed with oil, thus adding transparency and bulk to the paint.
Sources:
[1] Van de Wetering, Ernst. Rembrandt, the Painter at Work. ISBN 0520226682. University of California Press, Berkeley and Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2000. p. 165.
[2] Ibid, p. 161.
[3] Van de Wetering, Ernst, p. 161
[4] Bouleau, Charles. Painters Secret Geometry. ISBN-13: 978-0486780405
[5] Vasari et al. Lives of Titian (lives of the Artists). Series, Lives of the Artists. ISBN: 978-1606065877. J. Paul Getty Museum; 1 edition 2019.
If you have any comments or questions, please contact me: alaingavin@alaingavinstudio.com
Student Regina Gately. Portrait of John, oil on canvas 40 x 40 inches, Rembrandt & Lempicka workshop.2019.
