AMSTERDAM — Earlier this month, while announcing plans for his new BBC Series, “The Face of Britain,” and the accompanying exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the historian Simon Schama called on the younger generation to stop taking selfies and to look at each other instead.
“Go and travel on the Tube,” he said, and you will see that “people are losing that sense of actually eyeballing each other.” He added: “It is something which is absolutely elemental, it’s our first human act.”
But does the act of photographing ourselves necessarily mean that we are entirely solipsistic, or could it help us learn something valuable about both ourselves and others?
“The Late Rembrandt” exhibition in Amsterdam (at the Rijksmuseum until May 17) might offer some insight on the merit of looking at ourselves. The 17th-century Dutch painter was arguably the original master of the “selfie,” as well as a master portrait painter. He created at least 80 images of himself throughout his life in oil paints, drawings and etchings, more than any other artist of his era, and perhaps of all time.
Together, Rembrandt’s self-portraits — which are scattered around the world in various museums and private collections — create an autobiography in pictures that began in his early 20s and continued until just before his death at age 63 in 1669, revealing the physical and emotional changes of the artist as he ages.
“The Late Rembrandt” opens with three self-portraits of the artist in his old age that provide visitors a moment to stare directly into the eyes of the master, just before heading into a display of more than 100 paintings, drawings and etchings, many of them portraits of other people.
Throughout his later work, Rembrandt focused on depicting the gaze: usually one that reflects thoughtfulness, suffering or some other implied inner complexity. That is something that is expressed in his self-portraits too, said the Rijksmuseum’s head of fine arts, Gregor Weber, who is also chief curator of “The Late Rembrandt” exhibition, created in collaboration with the National Gallery in London, where it first opened last fall.
“In the self-portraits, he’s getting calmer and calmer,” Mr. Weber said. “In the beginning he’s showing laughter and anger, and he’s trying funny things, wearing funny headdresses and so on. Later on he’s more serious, more calm and he sees himself more in the distance. I think he then has a feeling already that he’s an artist from the past, a figure in the history of art.”
Rembrandt created images of himself for two reasons, according to Ernst van de Wetering, chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project in Amsterdam and author of six volumes of “The Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings,” including “Volume IV, The Self-Portrait.”
First, he used them as a way to study the face, to learn how to depict light and facial expressions. “He was his own most patient model,” said Professor van de Wetering. “Quite a number of what we tend to call self-portraits are in the strict sense not self-portraits, they’re just studies made in the mirror to explore how a human being looks
Rembrandt explored ways of shading his own eyes or wrinkles around his mouth and used those techniques to portray others for commissioned portraits or in historical paintings.
“I can only imagine that thinking about yourself, and suggesting an inner person, a soul or a character, or whatever you want to call it, must have had a pretty profound impact on the way that he presented other people,” said H. Perry Chapman, author of “Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity,” and professor of Northern Baroque Art at the University of Delaware.
The second reason he created self-portraits, Professor van de Wetering said, was to sell “as merchandise” to art lovers, including members of the Italian de’ Medici family, who wanted to showcase their patronage of great artists.
There may also be more than practical reasons that Rembrandt created so many images of himself. “There’s also some inner drive there,” said Professor Chapman. “However much they were marketed and how much he could sell them, the sheer effort and intensity and engagement and how varied they are indicate that he was kind of obsessed with it,” she said.
That focus on himself was probably not an indication of self-consciousness as we think of it in the post-Freudian sense, said Professor Chapman, but rather an interest in establishing his own place in the art historical pantheon. “He’s looking at lasting art by Raphael, Titian, Dürer, and he’s claiming his place in history,” she said.
The “selfie” of the 17th century, which was used to a lesser extent by other artists as well, can also be seen as a parallel development to what was happening in the realms of literature, science and discovery: It was the Age of Reason, the beginning of the Enlightenment, in which the Delphic dictum, “Nosce te ipsum” (Know thyself!) was echoed in universities and philosophy halls.
Writers of the era explored their own personal lives and thoughts in a way that was previously unknown in literature, including Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays,” René Descartes’s “Discourse on Method” — (“Cogito Ergo Sum”) — and the diaries of the London civil servant Samuel Pepys. “Inner-looking was very important at that time,” Mr. Weber said.
Often 17th-century painters sneaked images of themselves in group portraits or historic scenes, too, a tradition going back to the Italian Renaissance. The Dutch artist Jan Steen, who painted scenes of domestic chaos intended to teach moral lessons about civility, often depicted himself as one of the revelers. And Rembrandt used his own face on characters in several biblical scenes.
One fundamental difference between Rembrandt’s self-portraits and the selfies of today, scholars note, is that the artist’s renderings involved a long process of self-examination that was both very deliberate and usually solitary.
“You have to picture Rembrandt alone in a room representing himself on canvas while looking in the mirror, alone with himself and his image of himself,” Professor Chapman said. “I don’t know if the selfie generation is doing it that creatively.” She added that many selfies are taken at the spur of the moment: “You might think you’re taking a picture for posterity, but who knows when it’s going to disappear?”
The most important lesson Rembrandt can teach us about the selfie, perhaps, was that in order to begin to understand others, we must first look at ourselves. But it is a process that begins with really looking, and not just pointing and clicking. Making a self-portrait “involves careful self-observation, and that’s not like making a selfie in a second,” Mr. Weber said. “It has to do with: ‘What truly is happening in my face?”
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