This superb catalogue of a J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition, curated by Stephanie Schrader, tells a complexly interwoven story of early modern global art exchange by juxtaposing twenty of Rembrandt's pen-and-wash drawings of Mughal rulers with exquisite examples of the types of miniature painted portraits that inspired them. The book designer uses vibrant magenta, teal, and saffron yellow—startling in the context of Rembrandt—to drive home how colorfully exotic Mughal miniatures must have looked to him. Rembrandt never left the Netherlands; these wonders of India came to Amsterdam, brought from the Dutch trading post in Surat by the Dutch East India Company.
Rembrandt's curiosity about distant cultures is evident in his art and in the inventory of his vast collection, made on the occasion of his bankruptcy in 1656, which lists costumes for an Indian man and woman, as well as Indian weapons, fans, boxes, and baskets. His thousands of works of art on paper, by or after the likes of Mantegna, Raphael, Titian, Lucas van Leyden, Rubens, and Van Dyck—a virtual history of art for his time—were housed in his kunstkamer, in seventy kunstboeken. One of these albums contained “curious drawings in miniature,” perhaps Mughal paintings that Rembrandt owned. Continuing their journey, some of these may have ended up pasted to the walls in Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, in the eighteenth century. “Perhaps” and “may have” reflect long-standing uncertainties surrounding Rembrandt's drawings, including their attributions, which the authors handle well.
Rembrandt employed visual stimuli of all kinds, yet these creative copies are so exceptional—they are his only close copies after the art of such a foreign culture—that they raise unique questions, including whether he made them for a client, to satisfy his curiosity, or for specific artistic purposes. Exploring Rembrandt's drawings and the Mughal portraits from a variety of approaches ranging from the connoisseurial to the globally expansive, this book's introduction and four essays situate both in “the array of artistic and cultural knowledge systems at play” (1). Schrader's illuminating essay, “Rembrandt and the Mughal Line: Artistic Inspiration in the Global City of Amsterdam,” sets the international stage by probing the presence of Asia in the merchant culture of the Dutch Republic that “employed the use of exotica to advertise its global reach” (13). Insights into how Rembrandt encountered and evaluated portraits of such near contemporaries as Shah Jahan (r. 1627–58) lead to the conclusion that Rembrandt's drawings, many of them on Asian paper, represent a more “considered, cohesive response to Indian art” (5) than has been recognized.
Whether or not Rembrandt knew it, the Mughal miniatures that he copied were themselves complexly cross-cultural. Two scholars of South Asian art provide fascinating and complementary views into their functions, engagement with European sources, and dissemination. In “Mughal Masterworks in Rembrandt's Hand,” Catherine Glynn explores, from the point of view of their materials and techniques, production in the Mughal imperial atelier and courtly function in India—the portraits of emperors Akbar (r. 1556–1605), Shah Jahan, their heirs, and some Sufi mystics were among the first Mughal paintings to reach Europe. In “The Global Aspirations of the Mughal Album,” Yael Rice situates the Mughal imperial paintings as made specifically for a particular kind of object, Mughal albums, “codices (stitched books) containing assemblages of paintings, drawings, calligraphies, and European prints” (61), which were themselves intended to circulate widely.
William Robinson's essay, “A Book of Indian Drawings by Rembrandt, 25 in Number,” which takes its title from an English sale catalogue of 1747, zeroes in on Rembrandt's drawings. Robinson, whose expertise is Dutch drawings, sensitively argues for the attribution of most of the Mughal copies to Rembrandt based on compelling comparisons with documented works of ca. 1655–65. He makes the case that Rembrandt regarded both his unusually refined and detailed drawings and their models as exceptional. Although Rembrandt's voracious collecting was a cause of his bankruptcy, Robinson questions whether he could afford rare Mughal paintings and suggests, instead, that his copies “served as substitutes for unobtainable originals.” Rembrandt's responses to the inspiration of India, however they came about, “represent his aspiration to gain knowledge of the world” (55).
