Exhibit of the week: Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference

Getty Center, Los Angeles

through Feb. 28

“Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam was one of the biggest and busiest art enterprises of the 17th century,” said Jori Finkel in The New York Times. Unfortunately for later scholars, “it was not, in some respects, the most organized.” Preparatory drawings created by the master easily got mixed in with those created by his pupils and apprentices, and since few were actually signed, it can now be nearly impossible to figure out who made what. “Art historians have been trying to sort out this mess” for more than three centuries, and the Getty Center now is giving us a peek at that process. This exhibition includes side-by-side displays of 43 drawings—some nearly identical—to show how experts go about determining what’s really a Rembrandt.

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“Figuring out exactly which works are his can be a challenge,” said Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times, but it turns out to be a highly diverting game of art-history “who done it?” Very occasionally, you can pick out the works by lesser-known artists if you happen to know their distinctive tics. “Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, for example, often abbreviated facial features, jotting down the eyebrows and nose as a T-like squiggle.” For the most part, however, you need to keep a look out for certain subtle marks of Rembrandt’s unique style. Besides dynamic compositions and expressive body language, giveaways include “suggestive line, selective detail, and precise rendering of light.”

One pair of drawings contrasts two scenes of saints preaching, said Candace Jackson in The Wall Street Journal. In the one by Rembrandt, St. John the Baptist speaks to a crowd, and “the listeners’ eight faces each have a distinct expression (bored, fascinated, confused, skeptical).” In the other, by an unidentified pupil, “the listeners are roughly sketched, their faces similar.” Likewise, there are two drawings here titled A Quack and His Public, but only the one by Rembrandt is marked by the “defined emotion in the charlatan’s face.” The methods curators use to attribute works are “something the museum world rarely publicizes,” perhaps to hide the uncertainty of the process. That’s a shame: This show proves that by looking more closely at works that aren’t Rembrandts, we can better appreciate those that are.