Gary Schwartz, with Edward Rosser
From a mail of 1 September 2024 from Otto Naumann: “The safest position as a connoisseur is that of a Naysayer. In this position, one doesn’t have to explain oneself, only say something like ‘I know this artist, and this object is not by him.’ But to say that an item can be attributed to a particular artist is quite another proposal, one that needs a lot of explanation.” A case in point. (Not the one Otto was writing about.)
Being asked by the hopeful collector Edward Rosser, a pianist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, if I thought that a painting he had recently bought cheap on eBay might be by Rembrandt, my first reaction, conditioned by many such experiences, was the usual dismissal of the possibility.
The descent from the Cross, ca 1630s
Oil on copper, 36 x 26 cm
Collection of Edward Rosser
Sale Brussels (Drouot), 27 February 2023, lot 216, as Italian school, 19th or 20th century
Sale eBay, Galerie Leon Paris, Crétail, France, 4 December 2023
Private collection
When I responded with the diversionary suggestion that the composition might have more to do with Rubens than Rembrandt, Rosser came back with impressive research of his own, demonstrating numerous correspondences between details of his painting to motifs in paintings, drawings and etchings by Rembrandt. I felt embarrassed that I had brushed off the possibility of a meaningful link to Rembrandt so quickly.
In the table below are details from Rosser’s Descent from the Cross compared to details from work by Rembrandt, in chronological order. All were brought in by Mr. Rosser. The comments are my own.
Upper row: Rembrandt, The baptism of the eunuch, 1626
Oil on panel, 64 x 47.5 cm
Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent (ABM s380)
The older man on the Cross has a counterpart in this early Rembrandt painting, in the head silhouetted against the sky in the upper center. Both show a sense of heightened awareness, in their wide eyes and strained necks. The arm of the young man on the right arm of the Cross is defined in the same sketchy way as that of the rear horseman, with the sleeves pulled up above the elbow in the same way. The hands of the two men as well have similar, not very three-dimensional structure and color.
Upper row: Rembrandt, David bringing the head of Goliath to Saul, 1627
Oil on panel, 27.4 x 39.7 cm
Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel (G 1958.37)
The two figures on ladders in the Descent from the Cross, the young man removing the nail from Christ’s left hand and the gray-bearded man on the other arm of the Cross, lowering his body, have equivalents in the heads in the dead center middle ground of Rembrandt’s David presenting the head of Goliath to Saul. They match not only in physiognomy and hairdo, but are depicted with the same kind of shorthand in suggesting facial features.
Left: Rembrandt, The descent from the Cross, 1632/33
Oil on panel, 89.4 x 65.2 cm
Munich, Alte Pinakothek (395)
The young men helping to lower Christ’s body have the same hirsute look and hunch their shoulders in physical effort the same way.
Right: Rembrandt, Woman reading, 1634, in the upper row reversed, as it was drawn
Etching, 12.4 x 10.2 cm
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (RP-P-OB-737)
The crying Magdalen could have been painted after the same model as Rembrandt’s model for his etching of 1634, Woman reading, with the same expression. A telling correspondence is the way the turban is tied in both works.
Middle: Rembrandt, The Crucifixion (small plate), ca. 1635, reversed, as it was drawn
Etching, 9.5 x 6.7 cm
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (RP-P-OB-319)
Right: Rembrandt, Study for the Hundred-guilder print, ca. 1647-48
Pen and brown ink, with wash, some white body color, 14.4 x 18.5 cm
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett (KdZ 2695)
The weakness of the Virgin at the Passion, to the point of fainting, is a deliberate choice that Samuel van Hoogstraten defines as a specifically Protestant understanding of her nature. The way this is given form in these works is strikingly similar, as is the pose and look of Mary Cleophas in the etching, attending to the Virgin.
Throughout the years, Rembrandt returned to the image of a woman so overcome by grief that she collapses. The position he gives to a sick woman in a study for the Hundred-guilder print is close to that of the Virgin in the Deposition.
Right: Dutch school, formerly attributed to Arent de Gelder, Willem Drost and Rembrandt van Rijn, The adoration of the Magi, seventeenth century
Pen and brush in brown ink, with brown and gray-brown wash, body color, 17.1 x 25.0 cm
Frankfurt, Städel Museum (3084)
By the same token, little tricks like evoking a face and its expression in eight or ten turns of the brush or pen was an abiding element in Rembrandt’s repertoire, which he also taught to his pupils.
Illustrated to show that in this ambitious etching Rembrandt worked on a copper plate of the same dimensions as the painting, with figures on the same scale. Both compositions share the same diagonal accents in the lower left corner and the center.
In August 2024 Mr. Rosser kindly brought the painting to Maarssen, where we and Loekie looked at it together. As impressed as I was and remain by the correspondences in motif with unquestioned work by Rembrandt, and therefore repent of my initial judgment that his painting has nothing to do with Rembrandt, I was unable to find Rembrandt’s hand in the execution of the copper.
One consideration I brought into the discussion is what I see as the weightlessness of the figures. Even the corpse of Christ, the focus of the composition, seems to float. I also see a certain spacelessness. The three ladders are placed rather haplessly. The closest I can come to doing justice to my impressions is that the painting is a copy of a lost oil sketch by Rembrandt of the early 1630s, an alternative to the Rubensesque Descent of about 1633, and therefore of considerable art-historical interest. Mr. Rosser disagrees and considers it out of the question that any painter other than Rembrandt could have achieved such quality of expression on such a small scale.
The question is hereby put into play.
© Gary Schwartz 2024. Published on the Schwartzlist on 2 September 2024
On the recommendation of Evelyne Verheggen, and occasioned by a free Sunday that Nadine Orenstein had in Brussels last week, Loekie and I finally visited the Sint Leonarduskerk in Zoutleeuw, about sixty kilometers east of Brussels. The church somehow was spared the devastations both of sixteenth-century iconoclasm and the French Revolution, so that it preserves some furnishings that can be seen nowhere else. In addition to some glorious triptychs, we also saw this archive chest from the thirteenth century, which I thought was an even more remarkable relic.
Before Zoutleeuw, on the recommendation of Thomas Deprez, who drove Nadine, we visited the Norbertine abbey of Tongerlo. There we saw the best-preserved version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in existence, for which there is strong evidence that it was made in Leonardo’s workshop in Milan for King Louis XII of France.
It is being restored on an elevation above the west door, but the abbey has put a full-size copy, printed on canvas, on display in the tithing shed.
You cannot get closer to that memeish masterpiece than this.
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Keeping an open mind,
A demand that does not come all that easy to me, I’m sorry to admit.
“out of the question that any painter other than Rembrandt could have achieved such quality of expression” –
yet so many works have been or remain in question. Has anyone done the book or show one wants, Rembrandt Look-Alikes? Presumably, many very good painters, concealed from fame by the cult of genius, and by prices.
Richard, I don’t think a book like that would bring anyone joy. I did however enjoy studying one year’s worth of look-alikes: https://www.garyschwartzarthistorian.nl/the-clones-make-the-master-rembrandt-in-1650/
Well, I greatly enjoyed your article and recommend it to anybody pursuing this question or similar ones. Thanks very much.
I’m no expert, much less a connoisseur, but I’ve looked long and hard enough at Rembrandt’s early production to want to give it a shot (a mind too open is a drafty affair, what have I got to lose?).
Judging from the photo, this painting seems too weak to warrant consideration as by R, unless we’re speculating about work previous to 1625. Comparing sketchy details with sketchy details does not prove much. Comparing figures raises the question of whether a particular pose was invented by R. or not. Basically, narrowing down the field of comparisons to a single painter–Rembrandt–is a questionable procedure.
Who knows what R’s very first painting efforts looked like–or those of any other 17th-cent. Dutch painter for that matter? Possibly similar enough not to be identifiable with the later work of any particular artist.
Looks like the Rembrandt virus has struck again! The funny thing is that it works both ways: start casting doubt on an “atypical” work given to R and some people are going to start to wonder…
Jean-Marie, In publishing those comparisons I was not out to prove anything, but to ask what the comparisons, which I find strong and pertinent, may mean for our understanding of Rembrandt.
Of course I would be interested to see comparisons with the work of other artists. But the likelihood that one can find so many in the oeuvre of one other artist seems to me so minimal that I, for one, would not expend the effort to look for them.
Gary
Although I am the owner of the painting, which will naturally lead people to think I am not clear-headed about this, but rather just another amateur who thinks he has a Rembrandt — I stand by my belief that this is, indeed, an early Rembrandt painting. But NOT from before 1625 at all: to my eye, this is far superior to the earliest Rembrandts, and more nearly approaches works from soon before he moved to Amsterdam.
I know I will likely not convince anyone who read this, so I will try to not write too much. But I would like to make a few points. To begin with, it is my experience that details in paintings DO matter; they can tell us a great deal about a painting, and, sometimes, point towards an attribution. And so, first, I would direct attention to the goofy guy with curly hair in the upper right, with his foot sticking out: having studied the early paintings where Rembrandt himself is thought to appear, I am sure this is the young Rembrandt himself — as evidence, consider that outstretched foot: it’s a slightly comic touch that, in my understanding of Rembrandt’s character, is just the sort of thing he would show himself doing in a painting like this. What other artist would dare such comic effect, with such a serious subject? Next, look at the guy in the upper left, who looks straight at us: it’s a face similar to other faces that look directly at us in some of Rembrandt’s early work. (To see a face looking directly at us in a Crucifixion/Descent painting is very unusual; there’s something unsettling about it, I find.)
If you study other Crucifixion paintings, you will basically never see any comical elements — at least, I’ve not come across any; and you will also not see a mixture of cartoon-like faces (like the two faces just mentioned) along with faces that are realistic and deeply felt: I’m thinking especially of the face of Christ, which is a marvel, I think. Other artists tend to make each face in a Crucifixion painting equally realistic (to the extent they are able to make any face realistic); the result is that, in most paintings, our eye goes to no face in particular; it lands on one face, then another. But this is one aspect of the genius of Rembrandt, which we often see in his other works: by making some faces cartoon-like, others realistic, he creates a very subtle compositional device, which serves to direct our eyes to the faces that matter: the face of Mary (whose eyes stare into space: wonderful!), and then up to the face of Christ. Our eyes skip over the cartoon faces, and rest on the expressive ones.
As Gary noted, it is my belief that no one but Rembrandt could paint faces this small, and make them so expressive of emotion. Soon after acquiring the painting, I saw an extraordinary show devoted to Rembrandt’s etchings at the Worcester Art Museum. I was struck by two things: that the scale of the faces in many of his etchings is very similar to the scale in this painting, and that the expressiveness of the faces in the etchings was, to my eye, very much the same. Of course, the depiction of emotion (not motion!) was Rembrandt’s goal, and his gift; he could even depict emotion in faces that are extraordinary small. If anyone in Rembrandt’s circle could do this, I’ve not come across any.
A final, personal note on the cartoon-like figures: I think they are more than a compositional device. To me, they are also an expression of Rembrandt’s deep humanity: as if to say, even the goofy simpleton is worthy of God’s grace. That’s how I finally understand this painting. I think it is wonderful, and I believe it IS Rembrandt.
Glad to give you this opportunity to expand your case, Edward. However, at a given moment you will have to face up to what seems to be the reality – that the only one you have convinced that your painting is by Rembrandt is yourself.
Actually, I HAVE convinced others — but they are not art historians, alas.
Keep your open mind — you were mistaken once, with this painting!
Dear Edward, If and when an historian of seventeenth-century art, a qualified auction house or dealer does come out in print with a substantiation or even seconding of your attribution of the painting to Rembrandt I will eat my hat and apologize to you in public. Gary
NB: Gary, mine was a reply to Mr. Rosser’s contribution.
This “cartoon” aspect is something that I have also noted in Rembrandt’s early work. I am not sure, however, if it was seen or intended as such in his day. There is a presupposition in your argument that “Rembrandt” mastered his pictorial means in details at a time when, as this painting so clearly shows, he didn’t have a grasp of motifs on a larger scale. Hence my suggestion for a much earlier dating (hypothetically)… I have been looking at early Rembrandts for over 40 years and was just in Stuttgart, where there is a picture signed and dated 1627. Rembrandt at that time was still far from the Rembrandt that the world has come to value, yet I would say that he had a very good command of his pictorial means.
There are museums full of pictures by old masters that do not have the quality or qualities of “a Rembrandt,” but that are quite admirable nonetheless . I find it commendable that you can appreciate this particular painting to such a degree. Adding anyone’s name to this experience will not enhance but only detract from it.
Hi Gary,
This is a very thoughtful piece. I agree with you about keeping an open mind when examining items subject to connoisseurship. But I contend that we should also keep an open mind about the status of knowledge claims associable with connoisseurship as a practice. I resigned from the TEFAF Old Masters Vetting Committee after 27 years because I could no longer square connoisseurship practice in those circumstances with my work in analytical philosophy. Since I wrote to you about this in November 2022, following your excellent column on Albert Blankert and Vermeer, I have published the following piece on the topic: “A Seventeenth-Century Likeness of Rembrandt and the Limits of Connoisseurship,” in Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Darren Hudson Hick (New York and London: Bloomsbury Philosophy Library, 2023). It is available (unfortunately, only to subscribers) at: https://www.bloomsburyphilosophylibrary.com/article?docid=b-9781350895737&tocid=b-9781350895737-4000001&st=Ivan+Gaskell. I can make the MS available to you and Mr. Rosser, should either of you be interested. I’m afraid it offers no comfort in the current case.
With my very best wishes to you and Loekie,
Ivan
PS My next book, Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds (University of Chicago Press) is due out in November and can be pre-ordered at: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo236487182.html.
Thank you, dear Ivan. Of course I would like to have the ms of your article, only sorry that it cannot be made available to all. Be assured that I will not put it online. Mindprints – if that’s not something to think about…
Returning very best wishes to you and Jane,
Gary
I’m interested as well: my email is rosser.edw@gmail.com
I must say i find Mr. Rosser’s arguments quite interesting, although stylistically they don’t convince me at all, but i’m no expert either. Whoever the painter is, he (or she – you never know) was a very capable artist, and probably as humorous as Rembrandt was in some of his paintings. In my opinion, the details, interesting as they are, don’t make up for the use of colour and light and the slight awkwardness of the figures. Couldn’t it be a copy or sketch of some Baroque painting?
However, what struck me when seeing the picture, is a resemblance, albeit a very superficial one, to Rosso Fiorentino’s Deposition from the Cross of 1521 in Volterra, which in turn was probably partly based on a Deposition started by Filippino Lippi and finished by Perugino (in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence) in the beginning of the 16th century. Could it be that Mr. Rosser’s painting was inspired by Rosso’s Deposition? If so, the painter must have been either in Italy, or must have seen a painting that was inspired by Rosso’s altarpiece.
I took a look at the Rosso, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volterra_Deposition#/media/File:Rosso_Fiorentino_002.jpg and I can’t see other than a general thematic resemblance, with no detailed correspondences with Mr. Rosser’s painting that come close to those he shows with works by Rembrandt.
If there is any one work that may have influenced the artist of my painting (Rembrandt, I continue to believe), it is a painting by Jan Gossaert, now in the Hermitage :
https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/wcm/connect/b48748d2-8ad6-4b39-86f9-3620c029f33e/WOA_IMAGE_1.jpg?MOD=AJPERES&dcdbd0b1-f7e4-43af-849a-e09d20bf78aa
Could Rembrandt have seen this painting? He certainly knew and (presumably) admired Gossaert’s work.
(Of course, Gossaert’s painting itself likely relates, perhaps closely, to some other work by another artist, so it is not necessarily the inspiration for the painting being considered. But I do think it is quite possible.)
Gossaert’s Descent from the Cross in the Hermitage, Edward, is first mentioned in 1609 as in the Salamanca family chapel in the Augustine church of Bruges. It stayed in Bruges until 1810. I do not agree that it is “quite possible” that Rembrandt saw it.
Thank you for this, Gary — you’ve set me straight. I would say, now, that it is possible that Rembrandt saw a copy of the Gossaert, or something derived from it; a very fine contemporary copy was sold at Sotheby’s in 2021, and I would guess there were other copies out there. On the other hand, Gossaert’s composition is itself based on a Raimondi print from 1515, probably after a design by Raphael; Gossaert’s painting is thought to be the first Netherlandish painting to show its influence. So perhaps the artist of my painting saw some other descendent of the Raimondi/Raphael.
Dear Gary, I’ve been thinking about this conundrum of authenticity. Well I’m going way out on the limb! I think it’s a Francisco Goya bozzetto of a rough Peter Paul Rubens or even a Rembrandt masterpiece that he may have seen in the El Escorial. The painting’s comical faces and style of painting reminds me of some of Goya’s paintings. In addition, Goya in later life was a skeptic of the church and such. It’s a long shot…I know.
Vickie
You could be on to something big, Vickie. When you find the smoking gun, please publish it in the Schwartzlist. Gary
Let me add my belated grain of salt to the interesting discussion about Edward Rosser’s Descent of the Cross. The photograph of the painting on copper immediately alerted my attention. For years long ago, I was searching for the name of a monumental but ignored 1541 altarpiece in the little town where I lived, in France. One of the panels of the triptych showed a Descent of the Cross. (I ended up by writing, not an art historical article, but a novel, Le Maître de La Tour-du-Pin, which is now the name of the artist).
Edward Rosser’s painting also reminded me of a speech I had given, invited by the provincial museum of Gray, Burgundy, about the Rembrandt that was the pride of the town. In my most elegant way I had shown why this was, without doubt, not an authentic Rembrandt self-portrait, but a specimen of what I called the “Rembrandt of 18th century France”. The museum offered me a Burgundian dinner, but never invited me again. No one changed the label on the gilded frame. They loved their Rembrandt. Love makes us blind.
Or, we take magnifying glasses, we see the speck, but not the log. The young Rembrandt’s body of work, as seen today, is very consistent in style and iconography. It reflects the conscious break of his society with some age-old European traditions, political, religious, and economic. Rembrandt offers the visual counterpoint of these social changes. His brand is characterized by the close-up, the zoom-in. His pictures work as little realistic sculptures in paint, or narrative reliefs in paint, to be seen from near. Original compositions attract the eye to curious themes, puzzles, also to be studied with attention, chosen from Bible, Antiquity, or Moral Philosophy. They fit as decoration and meditation in the small scarce-lit rooms of small houses of merchants or scholars. (They should be seen, individually, in small museum spaces with candle light). They are warm and colorful and … intimate. Almost too intimate. They close in, do not open up. Bodies, heads, curtains block every view. There is no “room”. There is no horizon, no perspective, no view point, no space, no air. The weight of the solid flesh is enormous.
Edward Rosser’s Descent from the Cross is all the contrary. The most conventional subject of the century is treated here in the most conventional way. Everything is non-early-17th-century Dutch. Let me mention here as non-Rembrandt only the open air. The convention of the Descent of the Cross was since long conceived as an eye-and-mind-opener onto the world, a “world”scape (with Jerusalem on the wrong side of the Cross). In our little copper, the entire composition with Cross and ladders and people and the pose of the idealized outstretched weightless Christ, is organized to open the space and let the cloudy blue sky be seen, the world in both aerial and linear perspective. Rembrandt has never done such a thing in his whole life. Maybe not one other painter from the Seven Provinces did. The Republic was the exact place where these iron conventions from Catholic countries were broken. And the only place in Europe where a new art was proposed. With Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross, 1634, made for the Stadtholder, as the milestone.
Thank you, Edward Rosser, to give me the occasion to think about the art of Rembrandt. I sincerely hope you will not lose your love for your little altarpiece, that thanks to you became a conversation piece. Thank you, Gary Schwartz, to allow me here to think about art at all. How are you, fifty years after our last handshake?
To begin with the end of your comment, Jan – the last fifty years have gone pretty well. In any case, nothing has happened to keep me from doing what I most like to do, art history. I also liked art publishing, which is how we met and collaborated so fruitfully (reader, see Anthon Van Rappard, companion & correspondent of Vincent Van Gogh: His life & all his works, by Jaap W. Brouwer, Jan Laurens Siesling and Jacques Vis, 1974), but I am not unhappy to have left that stressful career behind.
Thanks for your reflections on Rembrandt and Edward Rosser’s Descent from the Cross. The distinctions you draw between his painting and Rembrandt strike me as being too categorical and mutually exclusive. You leave no room for the question that brought me to place the column: how do we account for the correspondences that I continue to find compelling? But I will certainly think of your characterization of Rembrandt when I am looking at him again.
Het ga je goed, tot ziens, Gary
Dear Gary,
How not to blush out of pure emotion when reading your words? Although the tide of life had since long drifted me away from art history as an academic discipline, over the years I got hints of your admirable path forward in it. I owe you an article I wrote once thanks to your Saenredam book. If you give me a mailing address, I can try to Amazon it to you.
All the best to you and Loekie, and hopefully, whenever I come to Holland, indeed, “tot ziens”.
Jan