How not to buy a Rembrandt

Picture: Wales Online

Two big Rembrandt deals have been announced recently. Both reveal wastefulness and foolishness in public art acquisitions.

The UK government has placed a temporary export block on Catrina Hooghsaet (above), which is being sold from Penrhyn Castle. The Telegraph reports that a private buyer has agreed to pay £35m plus sales tax of £660k. The painting is exempt from sales tax, so presumably £660k is due on agent's fees of £3.3m. UK buyers have until 15 February to register interest in buying the picture. 

I hope no one does. The picture has been openly marketed for years; the Rijksmuseum came close to buying it. There was ample opportunity to negotiate a friendly deal without the need to pay millions to Sotheby's. I don't begrudge dealers' mark-ups or agents' fees, which are fairly earned in a competitive market. But British institutions have a woeful history of waiting until the last minute and then declaring a national emergency, when a bit of foresight would save millions. If anyone wanted it, the should have said so earlier. They will seem incompetent if they only raise their hands now. 

The other element I find objectionable is the smoke-and-mirrors approach to funding acquisitions. An element of tax that's been deferred could potentially be removed from the sale price, making it cheaper for a British public collection to buy the picture. But the real cost to the UK taxpayer doesn't actually change. It makes no financial difference if the tax is collected and then spent on a painting, or if the tax isn't collected in the first place. But it does give an artificial incentive to buy pictures subject to tax deferral, which is an arbitrary way of choosing acquisitions. I've written more about it here, and discussed on the BBC's One Show here.

Finally I don't think it's the best way to spend £35m. It's a fine picture, and I'm a great Rembrandt fan. But it's not one of his best, and we've got quite a lot in the UK already. Spend the money on other things, and please try to buy wholesale not retail. Lots of great pictures are sold for surprisingly modest prices, and £35m could fill some serious gaps in British public collections.

Picture: Dutch News

The French and Dutch governments have jointly bought this pair of full-length portraits by Rembrandt from the Rothschilds for €160m. The Dutch came up with €80m shortly after buying a Adriaen de Vries bronze for almost $28m, yet they are so short of funds for operating costs that they have to close at 5pm each day to cater for private events. When you consider the value of the Rijksmuseum's entire collection, there is no way that they money they're getting from plutocrats and celebrities can cover the cost of capital for the public asset they are exclusively enjoying. But every day the oiks are kicked out in the late afternoon so the privileged few can party away in evening. 

It's a chronic problem in the art world that money can be raised from public funds and private donors for big acquisitions and flashy extensions, but no one wants to pay for more modest acquisitions or for the running costs of all the new wings. The Dutch government should have spent the €80m on opening later so the public can enjoy what's already there. 

My other concern with this dumb deal is that the pictures will be shared in perpetuity, meaning that these large and fragile pictures will be moved between Paris and Amsterdam every few years. There will always be minor damage when big pictures like this are shipped hundreds of miles. But what happens if they become too fragile to move? And what happens if the museums disagree on restoration? Or if one museum wants to lend them elsewhere, to the Louvre Lens for example? What will happen if the Louvre wants to rent them out to a foreign museum? Or if the two countries fall out. It is inconceivable in the medium term, but forever is a long time and who knows what will happen in 300 or 500 years. Shared ownership of art is an absolutely terrible idea. When a crisis happens, it will seem obvious in retrospect. But right now the deal is being naively praised as 'saving' the Rembrandts, as if any other buyer would destroy them. I'd certainly be sorry to see them disappear to a private collection, but I'd be much happier if they'd both been bought by the Getty or the Kimbell. 

Rijksmuseum to public: "If you don't like it, buy your own Rembrandt"

Picture: MS

It's a cliché that blockbusters are overcrowded, but Late Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum was the worst I can recall. It's more spaced out than the London leg of the show, but that extra space isn't to give the pictures room to breathe. It's to cram in the maximum number of people. There were far, far more people per picture than in London (which was also badly crowded). The room above has just three pictures in it. There were rarely fewer than a dozen people in front of each of them. 

There have been many complaints. A Dutch newspaper headed its report of the show with a visitor quote, "I could have punched someone". Director Wim Pijbes responded to criticism by saying that if you want a contemplative experience you should buy your own Rembrandt. That must be the most disgusting thing I've heard from a museum. When Anatole France said, "The law, in its majestic majesty, forbids rich and poor  equally from sleeping under bridges" it was satire, criticising the economic inequality that mocks formal equality. Pijbes offers a grotesque perversion of this, offered not as criticism but as fact. He implies that the democratic experience must be raucous and crowded, describing the 'great buzz' at the show.

But of course Pijbes, art historian and museum curator, recognises the pleasure of looking at pictures rather than jostling with 'buzzy' crowds, and another comment he made last week is revealing. He explained that the reason the Rijksmuseum closes so early (5pm) is to give them time to set up for the 500 or so private evening functions they host each year. The contemplative experience is so valuable and so desirable that they can charge a fortune for it, reserving it only for the rich.

Meanwhile those of us stuck in the third class carriage get an experience that is deliberately degraded. Not only must we contend with crowds. Flash photography is permitted at the Rijksmuseum, including at their special exhibitions. The official regulations still say no flash, but there are no signs up and people were freely using flash in front of guards. There are also red focus dots on many modern cameras that linger on the surface of the pictures you're struggling to see. Between the red spots and the bright flashes, pictures were arbitrarily illuminated several times a minute. Here's a two minute clip of the Washington Self Portrait. People are more willing to move aside to let people take pictures than to allow people to look at pictures, so it's easier to snap pictures than to look at them. It helps move people through more quickly and more predictably, but trying to focus on looking at anything is impossible. 

Museum overcrowding is a problem with no easy solution. Some want to build more extensions, but even if there's more room to show Troost people will still crowd around Vermeer. It's the same handful of famous masterpieces that draws the crowds; as the Rembrandt show illustrates, the extra space in the Amsterdam leg just meant even greater overcrowding. But the answer can't be to reject a contemplative experience (actually never mind a contemplative experience; I'll settle for just being able to see the pictures). Treating people like cattle and encouraging a more superficial engagement for the masses and charging through the nose actually to see things is an absolute perversion of what museums ought to be, and a degrading way to show great art. Pijbes' vile elitism adds insult to the injury of the Late Rembrandt experience.

Rembrandt's Themes, and other recent books

Picture: Amazon

Richard Verdi Rembrandt's Themes: Life into Art Yale University Press 2014 £25

This is a magnificent short study of Rembrandt's subject matter. He returned to the same themes again and again, seemingly by choice rather than from commission. The evidence is that he had a degree of freedom in what he painted, and his chosen subjects reveal a Mennonite sensibility. I really recommend that you buy this above the Late Rembrandt catalogue. It's beautifully produced and illustrated, finely written and truly illuminating. 

Rembrandt scholarship has been rather consumed by acrimonious debates about attribution. No one enjoys attribution controversy, debate and acrimony more than I do, but it's a welcome change to read a book that steps back from all that to focus on Rembrandt's underlying genius. A good proportion of his output is portraiture, including some of his most famous pictures. But it's in the narrative pictures that we see the full range of his genius and his humanity. Verdi's splendid book ranges from detailed discussion of the genesis of some of his pictures, to the recognition that some masterpieces like the Return of the Prodigal Son "require few words, so serene and holy does it seem". That's an experience I often feel with Rembrandt, which has struck me a few times in the National Gallery's Late Rembrandt show. 

The book is based on a series of lectures, and it is an exploration rather than a definitive study. I think that's the best way of approaching Rembrandt, for he will always resist definitive systematisation. His history paintings began with animated crowd scenes that were noticeably more effectively and dramatically orchestrated than his peers' from an early date. But it's the more introspective and profoundly emotional late masterpieces that best show his unique genius. This book explores the genesis of these greatest of paintings, explaining their context in Rembrandt's development and the themes he pursued. 

A late entry to my mental list of 'best books of 2014'.

Picture: Amazon

James Hamilton A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth Century Britain Atlantic Books 2014 £25

James Hamilton is an academic, but this is a collection of anecdotes about art and commerce in Victorian Britain rather than an academic study. There's some interesting material here and I enjoyed reading it, but it's not quite the comprehensive account I'd hoped for. Hamilton has some strange literary foibles that start to jar, like long and irrelevant lists. For example, we are told that the new rich filled their villas with art "in Ealing and Hackney, Blackheath and Roydon, Herne Hill and Tottenham, Birmingham Bristol and Hastings" (p. 60). He never uses one example or one adjective when he can fit in six or seven (the Victorian art world includes "patrons, financiers, collectors and industrialists; lawyers, publishers, entrepreneurs and journalists; artists' suppliers, engravers, photographers and curators; hostesses, shopkeepers and brothel-keepers; quacks, charlatans and auctioneers", p. 3). It's an oddly old-fashioned affectation, redolent of nineteenth century British novelists like Dickens.

The book's strength is in its primary material; I found many of Hamilton's conclusions and generalisations too sweeping, such as the surprising claim that in the 1820s and 1830s collectors avoided old masters because they were too risky, concentrating instead on contemporary (p. 172). I thought that the great contemporary boom was late in the nineteenth century, and the '20s and '30s were a golden age for old master collecting as great works continued to flow into London from continental Europe, with the resumption of trade following the Napoleonic Wars.   

One of the most interesting sections concerns the moving of pictures, a hazardous business then as now. By the 1850s and 1860s specialist vans fitting with deep shelves were available for transporting pictures, but there are alarming tales of pictures damaged in transit, such as James Ward's Waterloo Allegory: "the  figure of Belona cracked by rolling yesterday - obliged to scrap[e] it off", wrote the artist (quoted p. 273). And as today, pictures were sometimes hastily cleaned for exhibitions. "Some picture cleaners might have been scrubbing floors", says Hamilton (p. 272). A Turner that came loose in its packing case damaged several pictures returning to London from Dublin in 1865, and were presumably sent to the National Gallery's repairing room, where robust 'repairing practices' were adopted (p. 283).

There's much else of interest, but it might better have been structured as a blog rather than a book. Lots of interesting material to dip into, but little evidence of underlying organisation. 

Picture: Amazon

A.N.Wilson Victoria: A Life Atlantic Books £25

This is an endearingly old-fashioned book in tone and style, and it's a fine and readable biography enlivened with idiosyncratic asides about the tendency of whisky to increase hot-temperedness and lack of charity (p. 324) or the lineage of 'celebrated photographer' Patrick Litchfield (p, 284), or his views on her title 'Empress of India' ("a title which many people would consider more appropriate for a railway engine, or possibly a pig, but it was the consummate cupola on the Victorian political endeavour", p. 368). Quite verboten in an academic study, but I'm sure his readers will share my delight in having such an opinionated and articulate guide to Queen Victoria's life. 

I've wanted to read a good biography of Queen Victoria for a while, hoping for more insight into nineteenth century Britain. The Victorian age was a fascinating dynamic period of economic growth, political intrigue and social transformation. But this book confirms to me that Queen Victoria was just a cypher, a dull dim woman at the top of her society but not at all at the centre of it. Wilson is mostly honest about her shortcomings, but sometimes tries to hard to make more of her than is really there. Sometimes he writes utter nonsense: "Queen Victoria was not a cerebral political analyst; yet she was developing, after nearly fifteen years on the throne, a symbiotic sense of her subjects, and what they felt" (p. 169), implying that she was a Princess Diana avant la lettre. She was a very average person, but that is not at all the same thing as the thoughtful (or sometimes plain cynical) empathy of the modern celebrity. 

There are plenty of examples quoted where Victoria was out of touch, or plain naive. The book also gives some feel for how quickly things were moving in the nineteenth century, and the canniness of the statesmen of that age are fine foil for the Queen's dullness. He quotes Victoria's favourite Lord Salisbury: "The classes that represent civilisation ... have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither control to guide them nor stake in the Commonwealth to control them" (p. 434). It's interesting on many levels. It immediately strikes the modern reader as grotesquely elitist, but the fact that it was stated at all reveals a degree of defensiveness against populist pressure, real and perceived, which was relieved by a series of preemptive reforms. Nineteenth century Britain had a succession of outstanding parliamentarians but, Wilson's pleas notwithstanding, the Queen at the top was an increasingly irrelevant figurehead who increasing withdrew from even a ceremonial role.

Wilson speculates that she was sometimes 'out of her mind', on the evidence of letters written in the 1860s showing a complete loss of control, scrawled in blue crayon and barely legible. Perhaps some echo in Prince Charles's spidery missives to ministers today? 

Picture: Amazon

I read Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy on my flight to the US. I don't think it's aged well, and its flabby plot needed a good editor. But I still enjoyed it greatly, an epic tale of pursuit of the American dream gone bad. Among other novels I've read recently, Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov stands out, a fictionalised biography of a Russian dissident who is unsavory on many levels, interspersed with autobiography reflections on writing the biography. It has been extremely well reviewed, rightly so in my view. Carrère is apparently already well-known if France. This book deserves to make his reputation in the anglophone world too. Another French novel I read in translation is Baise-Moi by Virginie Despentes. I previously read and enjoyed her Apocalypse Baby, but Baise-Moi was her most famous and controversial book. I enjoyed it much less, finding it a rather predictable Thelma and Louise style schlocker. Skip it, but do have have a look at Apocalypse Baby if you fancy some grim French nihilism. 

At the National Gallery

Picture: National Gallery

This rediscovered Pontormo has been on loan to the National Gallery since 2009. It's a fantastic picture, and it stands out for its fine condition. Its varnish is discoloured, but it's escaped the devastating scrubbing that ruined so many of the NG's own pictures. It's a shame that it's stuck in a corner - it really needs to be appreciated from both sides. Maybe they could swap it with the Franciabianco nearby. It's been published in the Burlington and exhibited at the National Gallery for years, but it's still not as well known as is its desert. Many people neglect it because it's less bright than the over-cleaned pictures nearby, and it's also competing with Raphael, Sebastiano's Raising of Lazarus and Bronzino's Allegory. But it holds its own even in that august company. There's a very damaged Pontormo portrait coming up at Christie's later this month with an estimate of $300k - $500k. This well-preserved one is worth a hundred times more. 

I'm delighted that the awful glazing on the Rembrandts that I complained about recently has gone. They were glazed for an exhibition, using poor-quality glass that gave off distracting reflections, short-changing the exhibition's visitors. The glass was left on after the exhibition, but has now wisely been removed. They now look fantastic - great paintings, well-framed and well-hung.

Picture: National Gallery

There are two new loans in the British Paintings gallery, a Reynolds and a Lawrence. Reynolds' Captain Keppel (above) is from the National Maritime Museum. I don't care for it. The wall text remarks on its debt to the Apollo Belvedere, but to my eyes its attempt at recreating an ancient heroic pose for an eighteenth century English gentleman is faintly ridiculous. Reynolds' art historical appropriations weren't always successful (and I can't forgive him his alleged experimental destruction of a Rembrandt!). The Lawrence, on the other hand, is spectacular. Despite the youth of his subject, Lawrence's dashing pose is wholly successful, and it's brilliantly painted. There's another version next door at the National Portrait Gallery, but I still hope the NG can acquire this one. So much better than the minor little Lawrence they acquired recently, which is quite out of its depth among the highlights of British art that are one display in that room.

Visiting the NG at this time of year is a particular pleasure, so far from tourist season. Its director, Nicholas Penny, is the best of his generation, as you'll see from this wonderful recent interview. They just need to repaint the ghastly purple walls, go back to 10am opening rather than five or ten past, move the Portormo, transfer all of its conservators to the security department and have them guard the pictures rather than 'restore' them to death and buy the Lawrence and the Pontormo. Easy! 

Mind the Gaps at the Louvre

Picture: MS

Drost's Bathsheba is lonely. She used to be flanked by two of the Louvre's great Rembrandts: his version of Bathsheba on the right, and St Matthew and the Angel on the left. The St Matthew has gone to the Louvre's new branch in Lens, the Bathsheba is 'being examined'. Lots of pictures are being 'examined' at the moment; my guess is that they're being prepared for transport to Lens. Instead of an opportunity to see rarely exhibited pictures from the basement, there are great big gaps in the displays. And what can compensate for the loss of Bathsheba and St Matthew from the Rembrandt room? The Louvre has some fine Rembrandts, but it's an area of relative weakness and these are two of the three highlights; only the late Self Portrait at the Easel remains.

Other pictures have recently returned, but the captions haven't been updated. There's a sign in the Ingres room advising that Monsieur Bertin is in Lens. But previously it didn't hang in the Ingres room; it was in the large format French paintings room, to which it has now returned. Unless you know the picture you wouldn't realise, though, because the captions haven't been updated. Here he is, with his 'caption':

And here is Raphael's Baldassare Castiglione, which was removed early from the Late Raphael exhibition for its rendezvous in Lens, with a detail of its caption:

and here is Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People:

Unbelievable that the Louvre would fail to give Liberty Leading the People its caption!

The Louvre used to be the greatest encyclopaedic museum in the world. Now it's a brand, selling merchandise and shipping art between its branches. Coherent groups of objects are being broken up to satisfy political and economic imperatives. The Louvre has acquired most of Fragonard's series of Fantasy Portraits, which look fantastic as a group. But now the most famous of them all, the portrait of the Enlightenment encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, has been separated from its companions and sent to Lens. 

The main reason for my visit was to see Raphael drawings, and I'm pleased to say that the print room remains an oasis of culture and civility. I look forward to some more upbeat posts about the drawings by Raphael and his school that I saw.