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Portland and Amsterdam go Dutch

Rembrandt’s just an entry point in touring Rijksmuseum exhibit

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, May 29, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Jim Clark / pORTLAND TRIBUNE

Portland Art Museum employees Rachael Denny (left) and Matthew Juniper hang Rembrandt’s self-portrait under the watchful eye of Laurent Sozzani, a painting conservator of Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam. The painting’s show opens June 3.

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The title of the show is “Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures From the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.”

And that’s a big “and.”

Out of the 90 works on display this summer at the Portland Art Museum, there are only six Rembrandt paintings and eight Rembrandt master prints. But anyone arriving just to see the famous artist’s work probably will come away enlightened by the carefully crafted traveling exhibition.

Dutch scholar Ruud Priem has designed the exhibition to use Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) as a guide through the material. He pops up in each section as the show expands outward from self-portraits to still lifes and on to city and rural scenes.

Greeting the visitor up front and center is Rembrandt’s “Self-portrait as the Apostle Paul” (1661) in which he frankly depicts his own middle-agedness, while imagining himself as a preacher not of Christianity but of humanism.

His ability to show psychological nuance in facial features has defined portraiture ever since, and worn hands and old faces were not painted with much affection until Rembrandt and his peers came along.

(One of the museum’s own treasures, a pair of portraits painted by a peer of Rembrandt that most likely depict Rembrandt’s parents dressed up in their fanciest clothes, sits just outside the exhibition.)

Last week several visiting Rijksmuseum staff watched as the St. Paul painting was uncrated by workers in latex gloves and laid out to be inspected by Dutch conservators, like a victim on the slab in an episode of “CSI.” Once he was on the wall several onlookers applauded.

The show is here because the Rijksmuseum (literally the state museum of the Netherlands), which opened in 1885, is partially closed until 2010 for renovation.

Portland is the last stop for this iteration of the show, after Dayton, Ohio, and Phoenix. Masterpieces such as the “The Night Watch” and “The Jewish Bride” never will be allowed to travel outside the Netherlands.

Jan Rudolph de Lorm, director of exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum, was in Portland in March to run the rule over the museum.

“I said I wouldn’t touch the top stuff, but I broke my promise,” he says with a smile, “in order to make the show really outstanding. The head of the Rijksmuseum is angry that ‘Paul’ is not in the Philips Wing” (which remains open in Amsterdam).