These paintings by Rembrandt, Lucian Freud and Titian convey tenderness, honesty and complexity.
“Titus, the Artist's Son,” by Rembrandt. The boy is thought to have been 16 when his father painted the picture. In his final weeks of high school, my son began reading Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” for a school assignment. One night last week he looked up and said, “Dad, listen to this.”
I think Rembrandt knew this. A few months before our son was born, I was living with his mother in London, where I loved going to the Wallace Collection, a gorgeous house museum in Marylebone. One of the Wallace Collection’sTitus’s mother was Saskia. She had four children with Rembrandt, but Titus was the only one who made it past infancy. The boy is thought to have been 16 when Rembrandt painted the picture now at the Wallace Collection.
Rembrandt liked getting his sitters to dress up in costume. So he had Titus don a brown cloak with a big gold chain — deliberately evoking the Venetian portraits by It was Freud’s son. He was a trained dancer, tall and thin, and in the painting he stands, naked, his chest flat and bony, his ribs revealed. His long, veiny arms hang by his side, and his relaxed, raw-looking hands casually frame his genitals. His stance lacks the grace or ease you might expect of a dancer.
This has always fascinated me — the idea, as Bellow put it, that “continual intimacy, familiarity, and love can result in falsehood”; that as an artist you can love a subject too much, and that so much feeling might get in the way of your work’s truth-telling power. Last year, I took my son to the National Gallery in D.C. I wanted to show him my favorite painting in the world: Titian’s portrait of Ranuccio Farnese. But it wasn’t on the walls that day, and is still in conservation.
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