Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

image to the public, in other words, tied to the art market and Rembrandt’s social
aspirations (7).
As various critics have noted, many of the myths around Rembrandt were
probably directly derived from his self portraits, that is, from the view of himself
that the artist wanted to propagate and disseminate. 176 Thus, for example the myth
of Rembrandt as the isolated genius did not first emerge in the Romantic era, but
was fostered and developed by the artist himself. In an image such as the 1930
etching Self Portrait as Beggar, Rembrandt portrays himself as beggar snarling
defiantly into the viewer’s face, fostering the view of the anti-bourgeois and
social outcast. However, during the latter decades of the twentieth century
Rembrandt scholarship has not only de-mythologized much of this romantic view
of Rembrandt, but has substituted a rather negative view of Rembrandt as a
“bitter, vindictive, […] underhanded and untrustworthy” person. 177 Moreover,
scholars have begun to question Rembrandt’s authorship with regard to several
acclaimed paintings previously attributed to him, such as the Polish Rider and the
Man with a Golden Helmet. 178 Thus, for a poststructuralist scholar like Mieke Bal,
Rembrandt functions like “a cultural text, rather than a historical reality” and his
name stands as shorthand for the complex of works attributed to him, as a title of
a text rather than that of an individual. 179
176 E.g. Christopher Wright, Rembrandt: Self-Portraits (New York: Viking, 1982) 23.
177 Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, his Paintings (New York: Viking, 1985) 362.
178 Cf. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1988) 2.
179 Mieke Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1991) 7.
157