KASSEL, Germany, and UTRECHT, the Netherlands — A brief concluding display in the exhibition Rembrandt 1632: Creation of a Brand makes a clear point: Rembrandt is, and has long been, a name that sells. The case includes advertisements for Rembrandt-branded tobacco, toothpaste boxes, and even a television — a product whose name suggests plenty of drama, if not always clear picture quality. The exhibition argues that Rembrandt’s own first attempts to turn his name into this kind of commercial force began in 1632, when he left Leiden for Amsterdam.
Stretching along a generous, purple-walled corridor in the Wilhelmshöhe Palace in Kassel, Germany, the exhibition traces Rembrandt’s emergence as a self-fashioned, first-name-only celebrity as he confronted the Amsterdam art market. In that productive year, he worked across media and genres, creating etchings, history paintings, portraits of himself and others, and tronies, the distinctly Dutch bust-length studies of anonymous but highly individualized character types.
To present this early Rembrandt as ambitious and entrepreneurial, the exhibition opens with two self-portraits. In one, he appears in a steel gorget, bathed in a worshipful beam of light that settles on his youthful face and reaches the crystalline depths of one eye. In the second — and more unsettling — self-portrait, he wears a plain brown jacket, with highlights in his unruly curls scratched into the wet paint to expose the red ground beneath.
In that image, most of his face disappears into shadow, while his eyes become dark voids, lending him a searching, intense, and almost feral presence. Together, the two works establish the exhibition’s portrait of an artist learning not only how to paint, but how to make a name. They also underscore the exhibition’s central suggestion: that Rembrandt understood the value of self-invention as early as 1632.
