The Man with the Golden Helmet

The Man with the Golden Helmet: Rembrandt

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Rembrandt Oil Painting - The Man with the Golden Helmet

Keywords: Man, Golden, Helmet

Work Overview: The Man with the Golden Helmet
Artist Circle of Rembrandt
Year c. 1650
Dimensions 67.5 cm × 50.7 cm (26.6 in × 20.0 in)
Location Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Berlin

The Man with the Golden Helmet (c. 1650) is an oil on canvas painting formerly attributed to the Dutch painter Rembrandt and today considered to be a work by someone in his circle. It is an example of Dutch Golden Age painting and is now in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

This painting was documented by Hofstede de Groot in 1915, who wrote:
"261. AN ELDERLY MAN WITH A GILT HELMET. B.-HdG. 356. He is turned a little to the right ; his eyes are cast down. He wears a dark coat with purplish-red sleeves. On his head is a richly wrought gilt helmet with ear-pieces and a plume of short white and red feathers. Dark background. Strong light falls from the left at top on tin helmet and, touching the face as it passes, on the breast. Life size, half-length. The sitter is identified as Rembrandt's brother Adriaen. But as Adriaen was a poor shoemaker in Leyden while Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam, and as moreover Adriaen van Rijn died in 1652 while this model occurs in pictures of the year 1654, the identification is not very probable. Painted about 1650. See the notes to 384 and 442 ; cf. 420, 423.
Canvas, 26 1/2 inches by 20 1/2 inches.
Exhibited at Amsterdam, 1898, No. 75.
Mentioned by Bode, Oud Holland, 1891, p. 4 ; by Dr. Laban, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, 1898, pp. 73, etc.
Acquired from the De Bockart collection, Fribourg, Switzerland, by the London dealers P. and D. Colnaghi ; bought from them in 1897 by the Kaiser Friedrich Museumverein, Berlin, and since exhibited--
In the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, 1911 catalogue, No. 8llA."

Rembrandt's portrait was particularly admired by the generation of Impressionist painters as a model example of their own view of art. It has lost none of its popularity, despite commercial exploitation, although it is questionable whether this has contributed to a genuine appreciation of the picture. All too many reproductions have given the public a preconceived image of it, before actually seeing the original. It is therefore all the more necessary to try to make a detached assessment of the work.

Bode regarded the helmet as primarily an artistic end in itself. His generation, too, may have viewed the work in a more sentimental light, associating it with knights of yore and deeds of heroism. It was precisely these associations that prompted attempts to rob the unknown man with the sinister expression of his anonymity and to link him with the personal life of the painter; the theory that the man was Rembrandt's brother, Adriaen, a cobbler in Leiden, has never been substantiated.

The painting is not a portrait in the strictest sense; it was not commissioned, as so many portraits were, by prosperous Dutch citizens. The artist has captured not the splendidly armoured figure of an officer or general of his time but the tired features of an old man, who occasionally sat for him, and the gleaming splendour of an old helmet, which was part of Rembrandt's collection.

The painter's tendency to change the normal appearance of people - himself not excluded - by the use of finery and costumes is noticeable in a number of his pictures. Nevertheless, one cannot afford to neglect the motives which first inspired the artist to choose his theme, even if it offers little scope for original interpretation. Was it Rembrandt's intention to portray the unknown man as Mars? The God of War, richly helmeted, is by no means unknown as a theme in Dutch painting. The fact that such questions of interpretation are posed at all is characteristic of Rembrandt's art, in which the material and the spiritual are indissolubly linked.

Recently the attribution to Rembrandt has been questioned by both art historians and conservators.

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