Rembrandt had a huge impact on twentieth century
and contemporary art
but it's not that obvious.
I think his interest in the ageing process:
decay, mortality, morality
come through in twentieth century art
in a strong way, but perhaps you wouldn't identify
any Rembrandt technique or approach
directly in many of the artists
who were working in the twentieth century in Britain.
After the Second World War
There's a big resurgence in interest
in Rembrandt's work
Think of Leon Kossoff,
Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach
All artists who had
lost family members, lost friends
in Germany
and they looked to Rembrandt, really
as the master of the art of self-examination.
Rembrandt had an important influence on,
not just on painters and etchers
but on sculptors
and there's one sculptor in particular, Jacob Epstein
who was born in the 1880s
who lived in Britain
and there's a work which is in our collection
which is of the physicist, Einstein.
which came out looking like a Rembrandt, even.
It's done in that sort of fingered way,
the way that Rembrandt would scoop the paint around
with his brush, sort of mix it up
and then you can see the brushwork is very visible.
That's a sort of trademark of Rembrandt's work.
His impact now has sort of grown and grown,
especially during the twentieth century
when art and painting specifically
has become far more interested in the brushstroke
and the idea of the artist being an expressive individual
that wasn't just telling a story,
but was telling a story in the way they handled the paint.
My particular style of drawing is very different to Rembrandt.
I would call myself a Baroque painter and drawer
In that I like curves, and I like sense of movement
and I like the light and dark
but Rembrandt's marks tend to be very jerky
and not very fluid
and so, when I use Rembrandt as a model
I'm always sort of adding
a great deal more curvature
and a great deal more movement.
Almost animating Rembrandt's animation even more
to sort of highlight that sense of fluidity
in the mark making
I think more what I do with Rembrandt
is sample him,
it's almost like a mix or mash-up.
I take different paintings by Rembrandt
and join them together.
The idea was to do six
quite straightforward portraits,
but in the process of doing the etchings
we sort of accidentally, discovered that
actually, if you printed one etching over the top of the other
That it made it more interesting.
It made them completely abstract in some cases
but you still had a sense in which they were a portrait.
