STORY LINE.(Rembrandt paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"Rembrandt's Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher," at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is a large exhibition of mostly tiny pictures--about a hundred and fifty prints interspersed with thirty-five drawings and twenty-three paintings, only one of which warrants being called a masterpiece: a 1659 self-portrait, from the National Gallery in Washington, in which the fifty-three-year-old painter appears both careworn and radiantly alive. But a Rembrandt show is a Rembrandt show: a chance to revel anew in the genius of perhaps the most interesting or, to be exact, the most interestingly interested visual artist who ever lived. His talent and skill seem limitless, but we are never solicited and are rarely even permitted to stand back and admire them. They are always busily employed in getting to the bottom of something. It might be the quirk of a portrait sitter, the comic or tragic irony in a drama, or the depth charge of a religious subject. Rembrandt is a detective. When I look at his pictures, I feel like Dr. Watson bumbling along behind Holmes. Once exposed by the master, mysteries become as plain as day, but I know that, on my own, I would have missed the clues ten times out of ten....

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