How Looking at a Lost Rembrandt Can Help Us See

In the early 2000’s the British singer Kate Nash had a song which began “Simply knowing you exist ain’t good enough for me.” The same can be said for art. It simply is not enough to know an artwork is out there somewhere. Art must be seen close up to be fully appreciated. In a world sodden with digital media, the quest to view art in person is a virtue, but developing virtual connoisseurship skills is a necessity and learning to love art we have not yet seen is  something to aspire to. In the new Netflix series This Is a Robbery, the infamous theft of artworks at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum highlights one painting in particular that is easy to love without seeing. Considering this lost object, we might learn something about how to look at art anew. 

Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1633 painting Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee was one of the dozen plus artworks stolen from the Gardner in the notorious 1990 heist. If you are interested in the investigation surrounding this event, Netflix’s new This is a Robbery does an excellent job of outlining key facts, identifying the potential thieves, and detailing the crime with the storytelling of a police procedural. While tempting, it is difficult to highlight any of the stolen artworks as the most important of the lot because they were all significant for different reasons. Of all the missing works, though, Rembrandt’s seascape is in many ways the most beguiling.

Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn, Christ in The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Although we cannot view the painting now, as it disappeared three decades ago, it is easy to see its intrinsic qualities. Though in all likelihood Rembrandt’s depiction of Christ is moldering away in some mafia don’s basement, it is possible to know and to love, even in absentia. Moreover, the strategy in developing an eye for such absent artwork is transferable. As contemporary viewers, we are increasingly faced with digital versions of plastic arts that remain effectively unseen to us. Training the skills of looking is a necessary practice and by looking closely at this missing Rembrandt through archival photographs it is possible to relearn how to look at all art in the virtual world. 

In the Gardner painting, a swelling wave raises up to heave a small vessel filled with Jesus Christ and his tempest-tossed followers. The result is an angular composition which naturally draws our eye across the scene in an exciting way. We are invited to peer into the boat as terror sweeps through the crew of Apostles. In the snapshot the painting captures, Christ is caught in the moment of being awakened. This prompts him to question the faith of his followers. It is the apex of the drama. In the ensuing moments, Christ quells the sea and saves his friends. It is a well-known parable, so the imagery is itself a reminder of the importance of faith rather than a narrative cliffhanger. A devout Christian viewer of this picture would know that all ends well in this stormy sea and would read it as an admonishment to trust in God. 

Other elements of the canvas go beyond the illustrative or theological and towards the sensory. We can feel the salt spray splashing across the creaking deck. We can hear the wet slap of the flailing sails against the mast, which glistens in a shaft of light that breaks through the bleak all-encompassing sky. The howling wind is so real that it chills our bones in the same way it impacts the Church Fathers, who run too and fro in futile attempts to secure the vessel or can be seen to kneel in prayer for salvation.

So, through the image we do have of the painting, taken before its hasty departure from the Gardner, we can learn the basics of its composition and the elements of its value. But how can we deepen that knowledge and how can we enrich our appreciation for this lost masterpiece?

Looking at the many other extant paintings by the Dutch master, one can develop a sense for his technical bravura, including his handling of paint. Without seeing this specific painting, one can imagine the thick impasto of the northern Baroque and the richly painted seascape veiled with tones of brown and gold. With this information in hand, we as viewers can easily imagine the textures of this lost painting and find an appreciation for a great work of art in spite of the fact that many of us were not able to see it before it was yanked from its frame. 

Looking at Rembrandt’s numerous examples of self-portraiture, one can also find the face of the artist in this scene. The artist is depicted as the lone character to stare directly out into our space, to encounter us, and to invite us into the action with his gaze. Through looking at other Rembrandts we can learn the language of his pudgy and expressive face and recognize it again here. He becomes a stabilizing influence, an old friend in a lost ship. 

Detail in which Rembrandt’s self-portrait appears at left, bookend by Christ. In between the two an Apostle heaves overboard while another kneels to pray for the storm to cease.

Through an appreciation for Rembrandt’s larger body of work, too, we might realize that the topic is unusual. We may recognize Rembrandt as a painter of portraiture or history or religious subjects, but we would not be able to put our finger on another instance of him painting a seascape like this one because this was his only such painting. Maybe it is this realization that would crystallize the grief one might encounter when considering the long ago robbery of this painting. Whether it is in a warehouse in the outer boroughs of New York or in a garden shed in Connecticut is irrelevant, because it is now lost to us and to history. The pain of this reality is visceral.

Rembrandt’s Galilean sea looks like a gorgeous and remarkable painting. If it were still in its gold frame in the sumptuous Dutch Room at the Gardner Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee would undoubtedly be one of the best regarded paintings in America. This attribution would not just be because of its rarity, or technical brilliance, or even for its dramatic narrative. If this painting was still on view, it would be loved within and because of the wider context of Rembrandt’s meaty production.

By reconsidering this lost painting, unseen to us now and probably forever, we might find a new appreciation for Rembrandt’s oeuvre and may too find the tools we need to consider other kinds of art. This is not to say that a contemporary painting that lives in a museum hours away is as lost to us as the Rembrandtian fishing boat, but that the skills needed to hewn a sense for one are also key to the other. To know a lost painting like the Gardner’s Rembrandt, one must train their eye and use that knowledge. To get to know art in a digital space without seeing it in real life in a gallery or studio, one must do the same. 

To know that Rembrandt’s painting is out there somewhere is certainly not enough for any of us who love art and who long to see it close up. We would all love to see it again under the glare of gallery lights. After watching This Is a Robbery, we might all pine to go back in time and take one last look at its craquleured surface before the infamous night that two faux policemen strode into Isabella’s museum. To look closely and see the placid face of Christ or the knowing glint in the eye of Rembrandt himself would be a pleasure and a delight.

In the meantime though, it is worthwhile to try and love Rembrant’s picture in the passionate, imperfect way that we can. Through a few digital photos on our screens we can imagine and reimagine a great painting and find a new way of looking at art.

Netflix’s “The Dig” and What History Owes to Art

The author Donna Tartt concluded her 2013 novel The Goldfinch with a line that captures the feelings of most anyone who loves art and history. It is so good that it should really be the raison d'être for any self-respecting art historian. 

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.” 

Netflix’s new film The Dig captures the feeling conveyed in the concluding lines of Tartt’s novel in cinematic form and plumbs the interconnectedness of art, history, and meaning. It is a beautiful and multi-layered exploration of the power of art to act as a historical through line; one which binds all of us to all of our predecessors and one which connects us to those we love. It also hints at the debt that spirituality owes to art and the way in which art and design can materialize ceremony, religion, and even the after life.

The Dig, which premiered on January 29 and was directed by Simon Stone, is based on the novel of the same name by the English writer John Preston. The story is a creative retelling of the events surrounding the discovery of the famed Sutton Hoo hoard by landowner Edith Pretty, played by Carey Mulligan, and amateur archaeologist Basil Brown, played by Ralph Fiennes. The veracity of the film’s depiction of the events that took place in the Suffolk countryside in the lead up the Second World War is somewhat in question. Artistic license has inflected both the book and the subsequent film with details that did not actually take place, but which marble the story with the kinds of romance and conflict necessary to a book or film that might engage with audiences broader than say, the archaeology department at your local university. 

Thankfully, as someone with next to no significant knowledge of archeology, I watched the film with just enough inexpertness to find it enjoyable rather than infuriating. Watching it, too, was a poignant reminder of why art matters to our understandings of history and how art and objects are essential to narrating long forgotten events. In the movie, a widowed landowner with an interest in archaeology hires a journeyman “excavator” to open up ancient burial mounds that swell in fields nearby to her country house. What ensues is an archaeological and art historical discovery that will change the understanding of British history, and unearth a fabulous collection of armor and jewelry buried with an anonymous warrior king.

Within the context of this discovery, the film sets up characters to have probing moments of self-realization. It tugs at the heartstrings, occasionally veering perilously close to saccharine but mostly staying in its lane. The professional archaeologists in the movie meditate on how the finds will change history. The landowner Edith Pretty, herself dealing with a secret health condition, considers her own mortality and the nature of graves such as those being excavated. Brown, her trusty excavator, sidelined by museum professionals, worries about whether his contributions to the project will be remembered. Meanwhile, a fictional cousin of the protagonist makes the unsubtle observation that photographs he is taking of the dig will fix those moments in time, drawing a direct connection between the artistry dating to the 600s with the technology of the twentieth century.

The interlaid storylines of professional aspirations, personal passions, and intermingling desires form a tightly woven story exploring the facets of how culturally significant material like art and design can change how history is written and told. The Dig also explores the conflicts between professionals and amateurs and questions where great artistic finds should reside. Additionally, it considers the issue of “legacy” from multiple fronts. The legacy art leaves to history. The legacy historians leave to the ages. The legacy that love leaves with those around us. 

The objects found by an untrained local “excavator” and a laywoman who reads Howard Carter’s account of opening King Tut’s tomb for leisure are some of the most significant in archaeology and in art history. In particular, the remarkably detailed pieces of goldsmithery procured from the burial mounds shaped new understandings of the history of art in East Anglia and beyond. The interwoven ribbons of Celtic design that mark the surfaces of these pieces are as tightly knit as the new film about their discovery.

Some eight decades on, the art objects found at Sutton Hoo are still inspiring new generations of visitors at the British Museum, where an entire gallery is dedicated to their exhibition and preservation. Netflix’s The Dig, dramatizes the exhumation of these important pieces of art and does so with an emotive lilt that makes archaeological finds seem as thrilling and romantic as anything can be. So, like the work of an archaeologist, an art historian, or a curator, the film becomes a kind of time capsule containing the wisdom of one pinpoint in history. It is, of course, an imperfect piece of history though, because it sacrifices some truths in the service of movie-making. But, it is a movie after all, and one that will move you.

Overall, The Dig is a rich story, which explores important themes and dusts off the world of archaeology with a dose of Hollywood magic. It will remind those who, in the words of Donna Tartt, “love beautiful things and look out for them” why they do what they do and might convince others to do the same.

Both the film and Tartt’s book assert, rightly, that art is a gift to history. A gold and garnet Sutton Hoo shoulder clasp, a 1930’s photograph, a film dating to the year 2021 can all do the same thing. They can tell the stories of the past to both contemporaries and to those who come after. In doing so, all art can deepen our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our collective history. And it can do so in deeply beautiful and resonant ways that will remain as treasures to be found again and again by new generations long after we are gone.

One of the exquisite gold shoulder clasps found at Sutton Hoo, now in the collection of The British Museum.