Philosopher in Meditation

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Philosopher in Meditation: Rembrandt

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Rembrandt Oil Painting - Philosopher in Meditation

Keywords: Philosopher, Meditation

Work Overview: Philosopher in Meditation (Interior with Tobit and Anna)
Rembrandt
Date: 1632
Style: Baroque
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil, board
Dimensions: 28 x 34 cm
Location: Louvre, Paris, France

Philosopher in Meditation (Bredius 431)[1] is the traditional title of an oil painting in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, that has long been attributed to the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt.

It is signed "RHL-van Rijn" and dated 1632, at the time of Rembrandt's move from Leiden to Amsterdam.[2] Recent scholarship suggests that the painting depicts "Tobit and Anna waiting for their son Tobias" instead. This interpretation appears in the first known source, an auction catalogue from 1738 (see "Subject matter").

The painting appeared in Paris around the middle of the 18th century and made the rounds of aristocratic collections before being acquired for the royal collections housed in the Louvre Palace.[3] The presumed subject matter, the finely graded chiaroscuro treatment and intricate composition were widely appreciated in France and the painting is mentioned in the writings of many 19th- and 20th-century literary figures, including George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Jules Michelet, Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, and Aldous Huxley.

The popularity of the painting may be measured by its presence on the internet, where it is often used as an emblem of philosophy, or interpreted along esoteric or occult lines.

Painted in oils on an oak panel measuring about 11 x 13 in. (28 x 34 cm), the painting depicts in slightly accelerated perspective two figures in a partially vaulted interior that is dominated by a wooden spiral staircase. The architecture includes stone, brick and wood, with arched elements (window, vault, doors) that create an impression of monumentality. On the pre-iconographic level, this is one of the most "graphic" works painted by Rembrandt, in the sense that it contains many straight, curved, circular, and radiating lines: from the lines of the flagstones to those of the window, the bricks, the wainscotting, and of course the staircase. As in the staircase and the basketwork tray at the center of the composition, the curved lines can be said to organize the straight lines.[4] The first figure is that of an old man seated at a table in front of a window, his head bowed and his hands folded in his lap. The second figure is that of an old woman tending a fire in an open hearth. A third figure—a woman standing in the stairs carrying a basket and turned to the spectator—is visible in 18th- and 19th-century engraved reproductions of the painting, but virtually invisible in the painting's present state.[5] As it is, the overall painting is quite dark due to the aging of the varnish.

While the traditional title Philosopher in Meditation has to a large extent been responsible for the painting's popularity, it is iconographically untenable. The painting shows none of the conspicuous attributes of scholarship or philosophy—books, globe, scientific instruments, etc.—and the presence of at least one other figure involved in domestic tasks does not fit in with the solitude associated with study and meditation.[10] Though a large book and a quill seem to be among the few objects on the table in front of the main figure, they are summarily depicted and impossible to identify more precisely: a Bible alone would not suffice to make the figure depicted a scholar or "philosopher." Staircases—whether spiral or not—were not an attribute of philosophy in the early 17th century. Similar observations argue against identifying the main figure as an "alchemist," a subject that would allow for other figures, such as an assistant tending a fire. The objects depicted suggest a domestic setting, yet the improbable architecture speaks more for a history than a genre subject. The French art historian Jean-Marie Clarke[11] argues that the scene is ultimately derived from the Book of Tobit, one of Rembrandt's favorite Old Testament sources.[12] The sole objection to this interpretation is that, apart from the two main figures—the blind Tobit and his wife Anna— there is no identifying attribute, such as Anna's spinning wheel. Nevertheless, a plausible interpretation of the scene is Tobit and Anna waiting for the return of their only son, Tobias, a scene that Rembrandt had already represented in another version in 1630.[13] This is supported by an 18th-century source identifying a painting of the same dimensions by Rembrandt representing a "Composition with Tobit and a winding stair."[14] Earlier inventory mentions of a "winding stair with an old man sitting on a chair" or "winding stair" attributed to Rembrandt are vague and might even refer to the companion painting long attributed to Rembrandt, but now given to Salomon Koninck.[15] Although the title in the Louvre's publications remains Philosophe en méditation, catalogues of Rembrandt's painted oeuvre, starting with Bredius (1935) identify the subject more soberly as a "Scholar in an Interior with a Winding Stair."[16] With the rejection of the attribution to Rembrandt by the Rembrandt Research Project in 1986, the title became "Old Man in an interior with a winding staircase."

In a lecture given at the Goetheanum in Dornach (1916), the ex-theosophist and founder of the Anthroposophical Society, Rudolf Steiner, described the Louvre Philosopher as the "purest expression of light and dark... All that you see here—the architecture and all the other features—merely provided the occasion for the real work of Art, which lies in the distribution of light and dark." This, he held, was precisely the essence of Rembrandt's art. As it was, he showed only a "lantern slide" of the companion painting by Salomon Koninck discussed above.[33] With his inversion of the title, Aldous Huxley (1954) sums up most of the "deeper" interpretations of the painting: "There hangs in the Louvre a Méditation du Philosophe, whose symbolical subject-matter is nothing more or less than the human mind, with its teeming darknesses, its moments of intellectual and visionary illuminations, its mysterious staircases winding downwards and upwards into the unknown.[34] The caption to an illustration of the painting (reversed) in the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung's Man and His Symbols (1964) reads: "The inward-looking old man provides an image of Jung's belief that each of us must explore his own unconscious."[35]

Jean-Marie Clarke (1980) advanced a psychological interpretation based on the circular form of the composition and the Yin-Yang-like distribution of light, reading the painting as a Mandala in the Jungian sense: an archetypal symbol of the integrated Self. The chiaroscuro treatment and the presence of many straight lines that are structured by curved lines speaks for a deliberate effort at reconciling the Opposites. Further, Clarke interpreted the concentricity of the composition and wealth of circular motifs as metaphors for the underlying theme of the painting: the eye and vision. Like Julius Held,[36] Clarke believes that the drawing dated ca. 1630 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Benesch 64) with the caption "HARMAN GERRITS van der Rhijn" written in Rembrandt's hand that shows his father in a pose similar to that of Tobit here, suggests that he may have been blind at the end of his life.[37] Accordingly, the figure of the blind old man (Tobit) stands for Rembrandt's father (d. 1630), who opposed his son's wish to become an artist and whose vision the young Rembrandt (Tobias) "healed" with the help of the archangel Raphael (a name that symbolizes Art).[38] More recently, Clarke published an interpretation on the internet that relates Rembrandt's composition to the design of his signature in 1632.[39]

Jean-Pierre Dautun (1983), a student of the French philosopher Raymond Abellio, offers a detailed phenomenological reading along Gnostic lines, interpreting the central motif of the painting (the basketwork tray) as "the navel, the omphalos of the luminous hermetic secret that Rembrandt wishes to transmit: the phenomenological secret that the eye of the genius will be given to those who will conquer the genius of the eye. It is the ineffable secret of this transmission itself, the 'thou art that' of this mutus liber that is his painting, as if to permit an Occidental satori to a koan of his own devise."[40] The French philosophy professor Régine Pietra (1992) published an essay in which she used the painting to illustrate the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis;[41] Rembrandt's painting, with its interplay of light and dark, renders the experience of philosophical meditation visually perceptible.[42] The Dutch philosopher Otto B. Wiersma (1999) published an article on the internet that he summarizes in these terms: "The painting of Rembrandt Philosophe en méditation (1632, Louvre Paris) can be characterized as a pictorial meditation on the miracle of vision. A better title would be Méditation visionnaire, because the painting catches the eye in more than one sense."[43] A discussion of the Philosopher in Meditation along essentially Gurdjeffian lines can be found on the Objective Art website (2011).

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