There’s an exhibition called Love, Loss and Intimacy currently showing at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). It consists of prints and drawings from the Gallery’s collection that feature an artist’s family and other intimates. Slicing the collection in this way turns up some strange wall-fellows including Rembrandt, Augustus John, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Picasso.

As an exhibition, it doesn’t overcome this oddness, nor the heavy-handedness of the premise: that artists using the drawn line, the most intimate of techniques, to portray their families may give us a special insight into “love, loss and intimacy.”  However, it does throw up some curious gems.  One of them is the sad history of Rembrandt’s children, and a tiny dynamite etching of his mother.

Three Cornelias

The man who became known as Rembrandt van Rijn was born in 1606 into a well-off family.  In 1631 he moved to Amsterdam and maried Saskia, the cousin of the art dealer in whose premises he took a studio. Rembrandt and Saskia’s first child, a son, Rumbartus, died in 1635 only two months after his birth.  Their second child, a daughter, Cornelia, died in 1638 only three weeks after her birth.  Their third child, a daughter they also named Cornelia, died in 1640 one month after her birth.

Their fourth child, a son, Titus, born in 1641, was the only child to survive into adulthood.  This time, however, it was the mother,  Saskia, who died shortly after the birth.

After a messy relationship with Titus’s nurse, in the late 1640s Rembrandt met the woman who would be his companion until death, Hendrickje Stoffels.  The exhibition doesn’t refer to it, however, Rembrandt and Hendrickje, though they never married, had a daughter together in 1654.  Guess what they named her?  Cornelia.

It must have been third time lucky for this Cornelia, because there’s no mention of her dying young like her namesakes.  Yet, contemplate for a minute, what Rembrandt could have been thinking and feeling to have given his third daughter the same name as the doomed first and second daughters.  Is it love, loss or intimacy, or some more deeply human mixture?  I think it’s the latter; some combination of grief and memorialisation and, surely, sheer bloodymindedness. As if Rembrandt van Rijn were shaking his fist at the universe in defiance, or rage at being thwarted in his intention to father a daughter named Cornelia.

The courageous wrongness

There’s something ambivalent in the portrait of his mother too.  There are two of these portraits in the exhibition. One is correct and dignified, his mother in mourning for her husband.  The other is sly, unorthodox.  This one, titled amusingly An Old Woman’s Head, Full Face, Seen only to the Chin, Rembrandt’s Mother, is a mere 63 x 65mm, like a large postage stamp, and within this extravagantly modest frame, Rembrandt squashes her face into a corner and cuts her off at the chin indeed.  Her eyes don’t meet his, and there’s something withheld about her mouth.

Is it resignation or unknowability that he shows here? Is it the love and intimacy promised by the title of the exhibition that he feels here?  To my eyes, it’s the little seed of the courageous wrongness only the great artists deal in.

*****

Images: In the exhibition, Love, Loss and Intimacy, National Gallery of Victoria (images by me) (top and middle); Close up of An Old Woman’s Head, Full Face, Seen only to the Chin, Rembrandt’s Mother (courtesy of Rembrandt van Rijn) (bottom)