REMBRANDT'S PORTRAIT
Charles L. Mee, Jr.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988
336 pp.$19.95
Charles Mee, Jr.'s, Rembrandt's Portrait is the kind of book that gives biography a bad name.
Mee begins by describing eleven self-portraits--all etchings--done at the beginning of the Dutch master's career, each of these works displaying a dramatically different Rembrandt. "Somewhere in all these pictures," Mee asks, "is it possible to find the authentic Rembrandt?" Of course, like anyone else who raises this kind of question, Mee believes that it is quite possible, and that conventional biographical means are sufficient both to find and to represent the "real" figure behind that proliferation of self-images.
Mee's book, a lively but superficial narrative, would have been more interesting and even more profound had he been willing to confront some of the problems raised by his opening question. Is his subject's self necessarily single and unified, or might it be multiple and discontinuous? What is it exactly that biographers have at stake in their insistence on a unified self? How can a biographer use external means--anecdotes, documents, paintings--to arrive at the subject's interior life, however defined? But Mee is less concerned with contemplating difficulties than he is in reassuring us that "the authentic Rembrandt" is buried somewhere in the pictures and scholarly commentary.
The case of Rembrandt, however, poses special problems that might give a biographer pause. For one thing, it is not certain which of the works we call Rembrandts are authentic products of the master's hand, as opposed to say, paintings done by his students and signed by the teacher. "Rembrandt" is a name that belongs to more than one painter. For another, not all that much is known about Rembrandt van Rijn--probably a bit more than we know about the life of Shakespeare, but a lot less than we know about the life of Picasso.
In writing the life of a modern artist like Picasso, a biographer confronts a massive heap of material and is challenged to shape and interpret the information into a moving and credible narrative. If one function biography serves in our culture is to reassure its readers that heroic individuals can struggle up out of the drift and anonymity of modern life, then modern biographies, their thickness emblematic of the heroic scale of their subjects, risk losing their heroes in a flood of deadening empirical detail. With an earlier figure like Rembrandt, the problem is one of scarcity rather than abundance; here the biographer risks losing his subject in a flood of speculation.
Ezra Pound once fondly recalled the days when "historians left blanks in their writings. . . for the things they didn't know." One way to write biography would be to build an acceptance of the limits of our knowledge--factual or interpretive--into the project, perhaps thereby producing an innovative turn into what has remained a stubbornly conservative literary form. Mee's fast-moving narrative constantly pulls to a halt before gaps--chasms, really--in our knowledge of Rembrandt, only to begin again by tossing speculative rope bridges across the
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