Why Rembrandt's Self Portraits Are So Disturbing?

[00:00:00]Look at this face. This man has just gone bankrupt. Every painting he owned, every object he spent 20 years collecting, auctioned off to pay his debts.

[00:00:09]The woman he loved was summoned before a church court for living with him without being married.

[00:00:14]>> [music] >> His reputation, which was once the best in Amsterdam, was somewhere between ruined and forgotten.

[00:00:20]And he sat down and painted this. He didn't dress it up, didn't put on a costume, painted exactly what he saw.

[00:00:28]A man who had lost almost everything staring back. Rembrandt van Rijn painted himself more than any other artist in history before the modern era. 80 self-portraits across 40 years.

[00:00:41]For a long time the explanation was simple, ego, vanity. A man so in love with his own face he couldn't stop painting it. That explanation is wrong.

[00:00:50]And in a moment I'll show you what a Harvard neuroscientist [music] found in 2004 by going through all 80 portraits in sequence. Something that had been hiding in every single one of them for 350 years, hiding in plain sight, and nobody had formally documented it. But to understand why that discovery matters, you first need to understand what everyone assumed for centuries and why they were wrong.

[00:01:16]Rembrandt started painting himself when he was around 19 or 20, back in Leiden before he moved to Amsterdam.

[00:01:23]And these early ones, you can see why people assumed ego. Look at him. He's performing, open mouth, raised eyebrows, different expressions [music] in everyone. Sometimes in exotic costumes, velvet berets, military armor, gold chains. [music] But in the 1620s and 1630s, self-portraits weren't just [music] about the self. They were also about practice and commerce. Hiring a model cost money. Rembrandt cost nothing. He could test expressions [music] and lighting at any hour without paying anyone.

[00:01:54]And in Amsterdam's booming art market, the largest in the world at the time, being recognizable had real commercial value. [music] A self-portrait was essentially a business card. By the late 1630s, Rembrandt was the most sought-after portrait painter in Amsterdam.

[00:02:10]A large house, a wife from a good family, commissions coming faster than he could fulfill them.

[00:02:17]The self-portraits [music] from this period show exactly that.

[00:02:21]Authoritative, confident, the face of a man who knows he's at the top.

[00:02:25]That's the version of Rembrandt most [music] people know. And then everything collapsed. But here's what I want you to hold on to because it becomes the whole point of this video.

[00:02:35]Throughout everything that's about to happen, the self-portraits kept [music] coming.

[00:02:40]Not for clients, not for commissions, not for money.

[00:02:44]Nobody was paying him to paint [music] an unflattering picture of himself going broke. What he was actually doing with them, and why researchers [music] now read the late ones completely differently from the early ones, is something we'll get to after the collapse. In 1642, Saskia died. She was 29.

[00:03:03]They had been married for eight years.

[00:03:05]Of their four children, only one had survived infancy. A baby boy named Titus, less than a year old when his mother died.

[00:03:13]That same year, Rembrandt delivered what should have been his greatest triumph, The Night Watch.

[00:03:19]18 figures, life-size in motion, lit in a way nobody had seen in a group portrait before.

[00:03:25]The response was mixed. [music] Several of the men who paid to be included were unhappy with how they were depicted. Commissions started to slow.

[00:03:33]He took a housekeeper named Geertje Dircx [music] to help raise Titus. Their relationship collapsed into a legal dispute, ugly enough for the courts.

[00:03:41]Then came Hendrickje Stoffels.

[00:03:44]They couldn't marry because of the terms of Saskia's will.

[00:03:47]In 1654, the Reformed Church summoned Hendrickje before a council and formally reprimanded her for living with him outside of marriage. And the money, Rembrandt spent his entire career buying things he couldn't afford. Art, antiques, ancient busts, curiosities, weapons, seashells. He kept spending when the commission slowed. He borrowed, then borrowed more. In 1656, it broke. He filed for insolvency. An inventory was taken of the house.

[00:04:16]Everything listed, then sold. His paintings, his collection, his house, all of it.

[00:04:24]Hendrickje and Titus, his now teenage son, legally set up an art dealing business with Rembrandt as their employee, so future earnings couldn't be seized.

[00:04:33]The most famous painter in Amsterdam on his own son's payroll to stay solvent.

[00:04:39]In 1663, Hendrickje died.

[00:04:42]Probably plague. In 1668, Titus died. He was 27.

[00:04:47]He had married just months before.

[00:04:48][music] He never met his own child. In 1669, Rembrandt was alone.

[00:04:54]He had outlived his wife, his partner, his son, and most of his contemporaries.

[00:05:00]And I'll tell you in a moment what's in the self-portrait he painted that year.

[00:05:04]Because there's something in it that art historians have been arguing about for decades. And it's the detail I haven't mentioned yet. But first, where he ended up when he died. That's the last detail in this story, and we'll get there.

[00:05:16]Before any of that, though, we need to look at what the 80 portraits actually show when you study them in sequence.

[00:05:23]Because that's where the answer to the title of this video lives. When researchers started studying the full sequence of 80 self-portraits in order, something became visible that doesn't appear if you just look at individual paintings. The early ones are performances, testing expressions, lighting, costume.

[00:05:42]The middle ones are image management. He wants to look successful, but starting in the late 1640s, right when Saskia dies, right when the [music] commissions slow, something changes. The performances stop. 1652, look at the posture, face forward, [music] no theatrical angles, no flattery. A man looking at himself and deciding to paint exactly [music] what he sees. 1659, the year after the bankruptcy auction.

[00:06:12]He looks tired in a way that goes beyond physical tiredness. His expression, researchers have spent a long time trying to describe it. The closest I've seen, he's not trying to appear to be anything.

[00:06:23]Whatever he was performing in the early work, he stopped. Now, here's what the Harvard neuroscientist found. In 2004, Margaret Livingston published a study on Rembrandt's self-portraits and identified something that had been present in every single one of them across 40 years, something no one had formally documented. Rembrandt had exotropia. One eye points slightly outward rather than both pointing forward together. [music] Look at any self-portrait, early or late, it's there every time.

[00:06:54]One eye looking straight at you, one eye drifting very slightly to the side.

[00:06:59]He painted it >> [music] >> every single time. No other artist painting their own face in this era did this. Self-portrature meant idealization.

[00:07:10]You painted your best version. Rembrandt painted [music] his eye condition into every portrait he ever made. Not once in 40 years did he correct it.

[00:07:19]Livingston's broader finding was that exotropia means the brain often suppresses one eye to avoid double vision, giving you effectively flat monocular vision, which when you're trying to render a three-dimensional scene [music] onto a two-dimensional surface is actually a significant perceptual advantage. But that's almost secondary to what it reveals. 80 portraits, [music] every time he looked in the mirror, he painted what he saw, including the thing about his face that was different. Including the flaw. For 40 years.

[00:07:51]Art historians and psychologists who've studied the late series describe what they see as someone using self-portraiture the way we'd now describe journaling or therapy. A compulsive act of self-confrontation.

[00:08:04]Making himself look.

[00:08:05]Making himself paint what he saw.

[00:08:07]Refusing to look away from whatever was happening inside. Not ego, the opposite of ego. Rembrandt died in October 1669.

[00:08:15]These two self-portraits are from that same year.

[00:08:18]Possibly painted within months of his death.

[00:08:21]His face is barely recognizable as the young man performing expressions in Leiden in the 1620s.

[00:08:28]The paint is applied loosely, rougher than his earlier precision.

[00:08:32]Whether that's age or speed or something else, nobody knows. But look at the expression. This is the detail I said I hadn't mentioned yet.

[00:08:40]He looks like he might be smiling.

[00:08:42]Very slightly.

[00:08:44]Just at the corners of his mouth.

[00:08:46]Art historians have argued about this for decades. Is he smiling?

[00:08:50]Is it the way the paint sits after 350 years? Is it resignation? Peace? Some read it as someone who has made peace with something.

[00:08:59]Others read it as the face of a man simply too tired to perform anymore.

[00:09:04]And that what we're seeing is what a face looks like when there's nothing left to hide. He never explained it. He left almost no writing, no diary, no account of what the paintings were to him, or what the 40 years of looking at himself had added up to. And now where he ended up. Rembrandt died in a house he was renting.

[00:09:23]He was buried in a rented grave at the Westerkerk Church in Amsterdam.

[00:09:28]Rented graves in the 17th century were exactly what they sound like.

[00:09:32]You paid for a plot for a period of time.

[00:09:35]When that period ended and the rent went unpaid, the grave was cleared.

[00:09:40]The remains were moved to make room for someone else. That's what happened.

[00:09:44]Rembrandt's grave was cleared. His remains were moved.

[00:09:48]The exact location of where they went was never recorded. The most famous painter in Amsterdam died in a rented house, was buried in a rented grave, and today nobody knows where his remains are. There's a version of this story where 80 self-portraits is a monument to ambition. A man documenting his own greatness across four decades. But, that's not what you see when you go through them in order. What you see is a man who started by performing for an audience. And somewhere around the time everything started falling apart, stopped performing and started looking.

[00:10:21]Just looking at whatever was actually there.

[00:10:26]The late self-portraits weren't commissioned. Nobody was paying for unflattering paintings of a bankrupt old man.

[00:10:32]He made them anyway.

[00:10:34]Through the bankruptcy, through Hendrick dying, through Titus dying, the self-portraits kept coming. What researchers who study the psychology of creative work describe is something close to self-regulation.

[00:10:47]Painting yourself to confirm you still exist. To keep confronting what you're becoming instead of looking away.

[00:10:54]Whether Rembrandt understood that about [music] himself, we don't know.

[00:10:58]What he left was 80 self-portraits. The most complete visual record of a mind under sustained pressure that any painter has ever made.

[00:11:06]Not a monument to ego, a document of survival, and eventually of not surviving.

[00:11:12]He kept painting himself until he had almost nothing left. And those paintings are now worth more than everything that was ever taken from him.