Rembrandt’s Standard Bearer: On Costume, Comedy, and Self-Portrayal, circa 1627–1637

After its controversial acquisition in January 2022 and a triumphal exhibition tour through all twelve provinces of the Netherlands (fig. 1), Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Standard Bearer—previously not a familiar masterpiece—has become one of the best-known works of art among Dutch citizens (fig. 2).¹ The Rijksmuseum and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science presented the subject of the painting as a symbol of the heroic fight against the Spanish in the Eighty Years’ War, decisive for the birth of the independent Netherlands, and as an image of the strength and courage of civic guard companies and the intrepidity of the standard bearer, their most perilous office.² In this article I examine the painting within the context of theatrical comedy, rather than the framework of military heroism, which leads to an entirely different interpretation.³

The attribution and quality of The Standard Bearer, dated 1636, are beyond dispute,⁴ but other aspects of the painting deserve closer attention. In Part I of this article, I analyze the ensign’s pose, dress, and attributes to clarify that we are looking at a standard bearer in a comical role. Subsequently I inquire into the painting’s relationship to comedy and farce as performed in the Amsterdam theater and discuss the image of the conceited, bragging standard bearer on the stage. I conclude this first part by demonstrating how Rembrandt (1606–1669) showed off his virtuosity and rivaled Frans Hals (1580–1666) by satirizing the Haarlem artist’s magnificently painted “real” standard bearer of the so-called Meagre Company.

In Part II, I discuss the painting within the context of Rembrandt’s idiosyncratic early production of self-portraits. The exceptionality of these works—the great self-consciousness and unremitting zeal with which he created them—cannot be emphasized enough.⁵ Accordingly, I situate The Standard Bearer within a group of comical self-portrayals in “military” attire, arguing that Rembrandt provocatively presents himself as the vain comedian-painter.

Part I

Costume, Pose, and Banner

By the 1630s, many group portraits of civic guard companies had been painted in Amsterdam, Haarlem, and other Dutch cities.⁶ In these, the standard bearer (ensign) stands out as the young officer, always a bachelor, responsible for leading a troop of soldiers into battle under his banner in times of war. Some standard bearers had their portraits painted separately in the decades before Rembrandt made The Standard Bearer; we know of several full-length portraits and one half-length portrait of men proudly posing with their banners, such as the one painted in The Hague by Evert van der Maes (1577–1656) in 1617 (fig. 3).⁷ The contrast with Rembrandt’s painting is striking; the contemporary art lover would have seen immediately that it was an entirely different affair. The standard bearers of the civic guard companies were always dressed in the latest fashion. No schutter (civic guardsman), nor any Dutch officer or soldier from the period of the Eighty Years’ War, looked like the one painted by Rembrandt. That said, the pose, seen from the side with one elbow akimbo and his face turned toward the viewer, would have been familiar. The shape of the sleeve and the large knot of the white sash on his back were not unusual either, nor was the gorget—though late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century schutters wore it with a fashionable collar.⁸ The rest of his appearance, however, would have looked strange, even to those art lovers who knew the fanciful costumes in Rembrandt’s work. Connoisseurs would have recognized the fastening of the standard bearer’s jerkin with horizontal frogging as exotic Central or Eastern European aristocratic and military dress (fig. 4; see also figs. 13 and 19).⁹ But what signals did the peculiar beret, the huge drooping moustache, and the codpiece convey? And the white banner with a colorless band of ornamental stitching? Art lovers who were acquainted with Rembrandt would have recognized his face, and those who did not would have been told of his identity when they admired the painting.

This standard bearer bears no resemblance to the contemporary officers and soldiers that collectors knew from the many guardroom scenes and related paintings by artists such as Pieter Codde, Willem Duyster, Jacob Duck, or Pieter Quast—“generic soldiers,” as Alison McNeil Kettering called them, stereotypes that referred to professional military men of the time, the second quarter of the century (fig. 5).¹⁰ The connoisseur must also have realized that this standard bearer’s dress and pose diverged considerably from the best-known sixteenth-century images of standard bearers in prints by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Lucas van Leyden (1494–1533), and Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617). Rembrandt, who knew these prints well, deviated consciously from the way those ensigns were represented. Dürer had introduced the image of the standard bearer in about 1500 with the depiction of a lithe young man (fig. 6) standing in a contrapposto that refers to the Apollo Belvedere, foreshadowing the ideal anatomy of Adam in his engraved Adam and Eve of 1504. This youthful standard bearer represents a symbolic image of the landsknecht (lansquenet, or mercenary soldier); he holds a fluttering standard with the emblem of the lansquenet.¹¹ His tight jerkin and hose define his body clearly and emphasize the classical ancestry of his posture. Lucas van Leyden soon followed suit (ca. 1508–1512) with a standard bearer as young and slim as Dürer’s—his clothes are just as tight, albeit with slits here and there (fig. 7). Lucas depicted his ensign striding forward, thus changing Dürer’s classical contrapposto into a more natural pose suggesting movement. Both soldiers wear the prominent codpiece that had become fashionable.

Three-quarters of a century later, in the 1580s, Hendrick Goltzius self-confidently emulated both Dürer and Lucas, producing no fewer than five designs of standard bearers: three engraved by himself and two by Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629). The earlier two varied on Dürer’s contrapposto (fig. 8); the other three transformed Lucas’s striding ensign into stylized virtuoso performances (fig. 9).¹²

Unlike Dürer’s and Lucas’s standard bearers, but like most of those in German prints produced between about 1510 and 1560 (discussed below), all five stand or walk with one elbow akimbo. Goltzius’s ensigns, however, no longer wear the lansquenet costume; by his time that attire belonged to another era and culture, although fashionable extravagance would remain characteristic for the standard bearer. The costume of Goltzius’s ensigns resembles the contemporary outfits worn by the officers in civic guard companies, in which the youngest men, among them the standard bearer, wear similar highly fashionable clothes, as shown in the schutterstukken by Cornelis van Haarlem (1562–1638), Cornelis Ketel (1548–1616), and Pieter Isaacsz (1569–1625) (fig. 10). Similar poses and modes of dress are displayed by the spectacular standard bearers walking with proud strides in Jacob Savery the Elder’s (1566–1603) huge engraving representing The Triumphal Entry of Leicester in The Hague (fig. 11).

Rembrandt’s corpulent standard bearer, with his large, notched beret and drooping moustache, contrasts sharply with these elegant, fashionable young men. Indeed, he seems to mock their inordinate youthful grace. Rembrandt’s aims must have been entirely different when he conceived of this figure. Nevertheless, the authors of the third volume of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (1989), as well as Pieter van Thiel in the catalogue for the major Rembrandt exhibition in Berlin, Amsterdam, and London in 1991, assumed that the ensigns by Dürer, Lucas, and Goltzius were, even in their costume, Rembrandt’s sources of inspiration.¹³ They also equated the meaning of Rembrandt’s painting with the inscription in Latin under Goltzius’s 1587 print: “I, standard bearer, provide formidable courage and daring: as long as I stand firm, the line holds out, as soon as I run from the enemy, the line will flee.”¹⁴ “Therefore,” Van Thiel concluded, “Rembrandt’s painting should be understood as a symbolic representation of the qualities of every true standard bearer—the courageous hero running the greatest risk (in practice the standard bearers were for that reason always bachelors) and whose intrepidity had to guarantee the valor of the whole troop.” Thirty years later, the Rijksmuseum and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science connected this misconception to the Eighty Years’ War and “the birth of the Netherlands” in order to supply a nationalistic argument for The Standard Bearer’s acquisition.

The appearance of Rembrandt’s standard bearer has more similarities with the many landsknechte in lesser-known German prints published between about 1510 and 1560, even though his attire deviates in several respects from the distinctive garments of the soldiers in those images.¹⁵ Some characteristics of the typical lansquenet’s garb resonate in Rembrandt’s painting, such as the combination of the large, notched beret, drooping moustache, and codpiece. Volker Manuth and Marieke de Winkel suggest that Rembrandt based The Standard Bearer almost literally on a woodcut after Jörg Breu the Younger (1510–1547) (fig. 12).¹⁶ The woodcut is part of a print series of lansquenets in which each figure bears an absurd name and is characterized, mostly mockingly, in a short poem by Hans Sachs.¹⁷ This one is called Stoffel Allweg vol (Stoffel always soused), referring to one of the negative traits associated with the lansquenet, who often embodied all the vices a burgher could imagine: drunkenness, vanity, pride, conceit, extravagance, and dangerousness. The Standard Bearer’s similarity to this woodcut led Manuth and De Winkel to remark that the humorous nature of Rembrandt’s source puts the heroic meaning that has been attached to Rembrandt’s painting in a different perspective.¹⁸ This pertinent observation leads us in a promising direction and offers an entirely different angle on Rembrandt’s intentions and the connotations the painting had for its intended audience.

Even though Rembrandt’s standard bearer is similar to Breu’s lansquenet in his pose, the shape of his body, and the comparable beret, moustache, and codpiece, we may question whether Rembrandt needed this particular print to arrive at the same solution. Two years earlier, in 1634, Rembrandt made an etching depicting an exotic potentate with a large sword, whose figure has a similar shape and posture but does not seem to be related to Stoffel (fig. 13). And does knowledge of Breu’s woodcut also underlie the etching of the outrageous Quack Selling His Wares of 1635 (fig. 14), in which the figure’s pose is comparable and who, like Stoffel, sports the codpiece and unruly moustache as well as the diagonal chain, the scalloped border of the armhole, and the raised arm? It is possible, but a perusal of related images by Rembrandt and the many prints of lansquenets—most of them holding their arm akimbo and wearing a notched beret, and all of them with codpieces—indicates that we cannot pin The Standard Bearer’s appearance down to this single source. To retrieve some of the associations this painting might have evoked, and Rembrandt’s intentions in making it, we need to pay closer attention to his standard bearer’s costume and pose.

The astounding number of German prints with lansquenets, often accompanied by short poems, demonstrate that, in the first half of the sixteenth century, not only the lansquenets’ garb but also their free life and deviant behavior had captured the imagination of the art-buying burgher.¹⁹ In the second quarter of the century, the negative, satirizing approach to the lansquenet gained the upper hand in text and image. In the decades after the middle of the century, the often outrageously ornate dressed lansquenets disappeared from the European armies; by 1590 he had become a historical curiosity. However, the mocking and condemning view of lansquenets survived into the seventeenth century. Many elements of their garb lived on in paintings and prints and, in particular, on the theater stage.²⁰

One of the most striking parts of the costume in The Standard Bearer is the large, notched beret. This type of beret, of which the notches create flat loops along the rim, was, in combination with large feathers, a familiar attribute of the lansquenet in prints made between about 1520 and 1560. In most cases, the beret is poised obliquely in an elegant way. Such wide, notched berets do not appear in sixteenth-century Dutch civic guard paintings, nor in other Dutch portraits of that period. Although berets were a part of the typical male costume in sixteenth-century Holland, they were always much smaller, without notches, and placed flat on the head. Rembrandt used the flamboyant notched beret with one or two feathers in several paintings, prints, and drawings (I am distinguishing it here from the simple, soft beret that is more common in Rembrandt’s self-portraits and character-heads). He reserved it for military types or for exotic dress in general, which, like costumes used in the theater evoke past times.²¹ Before 1636, for example, we see it in the so-called Leiden History Painting (1626; Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden); in his earliest known character-head, Man with Gorget and Plumed Beret of about 1626/27 (fig. 15);²² and, as a soft velvet version, in Self-Portrait with Saskia as a Soldier and His Sweetheart in a Tavern (also known as The Prodigal Son in the Tavern) of about 1635 (see fig. 40).²³

We come across it in some drawings as well; a good example is the soldier at the right in Three Sketches of a Soldier Fondling a Woman of about 1635 (fig. 16).²⁴ It also appears in etchings: on the head of a threatening soldier behind Christ in Ecce Homo (1636) and on his own head in Self-Portrait with Saskia, in which both figures are clad in “historical” dress (see fig. 43).

Rembrandt was not the first artist to use the notched beret of the German lansquenet. It had already been appropriated by Caravaggist painters for roguish soldiers, bravi,²⁵ and had been picked up by Jan Lievens (1607–1674) in The Cardplayers (ca. 1625; The Leiden Collection, New York).²⁶ The same painters also used them in history paintings as the headgear of brigands and dubious soldiers, often in subjects like the mocking of Christ and the denial of St. Peter. Lievens used this type of beret also in a history painting a year before Rembrandt’s Leiden History Painting: on the head of Haman in Banquet of Esther of about 1625 (fig. 17).²⁷ By the late sixteenth century, the notched beret also appeared regularly in pictures of buffoons, comedians, and quacks: from the left figure in Jacques de Gheyn’s Music Making and Dancing Buffoons of about 1595–1596 (fig. 18) to the figure of Lecker-beetje in the middle of Jan Miense Molenaer’s (1610–1668) The Final Scene of Bredero’s Lucelle of 1639 (fig. 19), one of the few paintings depicting a theatrical performance.²⁸ Later in the century, comedians in Jan Steen’s paintings wear them, including ones with his own face, and later still we see it often in works by such artists as Godfried Schalcken and Carel de Moor.

Jan Lievens, The Banquet of Esther, ca. 1625, oil on canvas, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Jan Lievens, The Banquet of Esther, ca. 1625, oil on canvas, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Fig. 17 Jan Lievens, The Banquet of Esther, ca. 1625, oil on canvas, 163.8 x 130.8 cm. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh [side-by-side viewer]

Jacques de Gheyn II, Music Making and Dancing Buffoons, ca. 1595/96, engraving, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacques de Gheyn II, Music Making and Dancing Buffoons, ca. 1595/96, engraving, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 18 Jacques de Gheyn II, Music Making and Dancing Buffoons, ca. 1595/96, engraving, 23.8 x 17.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam [side-by-side viewer]

Jan Miense Molenaer, The Final Scene of Bredero’s Lucelle, 1639, oil on panel, Bijzondere Collecties (Collection Theater Institute Netherlands), University of Amsterdam

Jan Miense Molenaer, The Final Scene of Bredero’s Lucelle, 1639, oil on panel, Bijzondere Collecties (Collection Theater Institute Netherlands), University of Amsterdam

Fig. 19 Jan Miense Molenaer, The Final Scene of Bredero’s Lucelle, 1639, oil on panel, 81 x 100 cm. Bijzondere Collecties (Collection Theater Institute Netherlands), University of Amsterdam [side-by-side viewer]

Among all the notched berets worn in pictures of lansquenets, bravi, and comedians, however, the beret of Rembrandt’s standard bearer stands out. Instead of resting flat on the head or set at jaunty slant, the frontal part of his beret—consisting of three broad, rather messy-looking loops—stands up almost vertically, while at the side the loops hang down, forming a sloppily undulating brim. Rembrandt seems to underscore that the viewer is looking at a comical figure. Closest in appearance is the beret of Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s (1564–1638) wide-eyed, Shouting Lansquenet—probably a comical representation of Ira (Wrath)—painted in the 1610s or 1620s (fig. 20).

The drooping moustache in Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer, which is remarkably like the one in Brueghel the Younger’s Shouting Lansquenet, has comic connotations as well. Drooping moustaches are rare exceptions in the seventeenth century. We do not see them among military men, either among the generic soldiers depicted in the many guardroom scenes of the 1630s and 1640s, among the scenes of fighting cavalrymen,²⁹ or among Caravaggist soldiers, let alone in portraits or civic guard paintings. Large moustaches abound, but they are always of a horizontal shape or curl upward. In the sixteenth century we do find such moustaches in images of lansquenets, and it was even fashionable among aristocrats for some time.³⁰ In the seventeenth century, however, they appear only a few times, in images of men considered laughable simpletons or misbehaving fools, such as in Jan van de Velde’s (1593–1641) The Drinker and The Gambler in the booklet Spigel ofte Toneel der Ydelheid ende Ongebondenheid onser Eeuw (Mirror or theater of the vanity and profligacy of our age) by Samuel Ampzing, published in 1633 (fig. 21).³¹ In Rembrandt’s work there is only one other instance of a drooping moustache: the etching Pissing Vagabond of 1630 (fig. 22).

A conspicuous part of the standard bearer’s costume is the codpiece (or braguette); it might have been more visible originally, as in the drawn copy from Rembrandt’s studio (fig. 23). A codpiece is also prominent in the theatrical garb of the comical Quack Selling His Wares (see fig. 14), a tiny etching of 1635 with which The Standard Bearer shares many motifs, several of them deriving from the lansquenet’s costume.³² The codpiece had been fashionable among aristocrats and military men during the greater part of the sixteenth century, and we often see quite sizeable ones in German pictures of lansquenets. After the middle of the sixteenth century, a small one still appears every now and then, but by the 1580s they disappear.³³ By the seventeenth century the codpiece had become a comical piece of clothing that, then as now, aroused giggles.³⁴ From the late sixteenth century onward, it appears primarily in costumes of buffoons and comedians. The same fool sporting a notched beret in Jacques de Gheyn’s print Music-Making and Dancing Buffoons also possesses a sizeable braguette (see fig. 18).³⁵ The codpiece apparently survived on the comic stage in particular. In the elaborate and entertaining print Village Kermess by Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg (1580–1612) after David Vinckboons (1576–1632), with numerous carousing peasants, we discern at the right a farcical rederijkers parade preparing to go onstage (fig. 24). The first three actors approaching the stage—a soldier in full armor, a drummer, and a peasant-like man carrying the blazon—wear codpieces; there is also a standard bearer with feathered beret who seems to have a codpiece as well. In Rembrandt’s work, apart from the droll Quack Selling His Wares etching (see fig. 14), we find the codpiece only in a few drawings of comedians, including The Actor Willem Ruyter in a Peasant Role, dressed for a performance in a farce (fig. 25).³⁶ In Rembrandt’s other drawings of comedians, resembling types derived from the stock “Capitano” or “Pantalone” characters (fig. 26), or funny quacks, all datable to about 1635–1636, we discern protruding forms in their respective crotches.³⁷ All of them hold one arm akimbo, the posture of the proud “renaissance elbow,” here used as a satirical motif.

Copy after Rembrandt (Ferdinand Bol?), The Standard Bearer, ca. 1636–1640, pen and India ink and wash, The British Museum, London

Copy after Rembrandt (Ferdinand Bol?), The Standard Bearer, ca. 1636–1640, pen and India ink and wash, The British Museum, London

Fig. 23 Copy after Rembrandt (Ferdinand Bol?), The Standard Bearer, ca. 1636–1640, pen and India ink and wash, 22 x 17.1 cm. The British Museum, London, © The Trustees of the British Museum [side-by-side viewer]

fig. 24. Swanenburgh-Kermess

fig. 24. Swanenburgh-Kermess

Fig. 24 Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg after David Vinckboons, Village Kermess, ca. 1610, engraving, 44.5 x 71.2 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Detail of a group of rhetoricians in costume preparing to go on stage [side-by-side viewer]

Rembrandt, The Actor Willem Ruyter in a Peasant Role, ca. 1638–1639, pen and brown ink, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Rembrandt, The Actor Willem Ruyter in a Peasant Role, ca. 1638–1639, pen and brown ink, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Fig. 25 Rembrandt, The Actor Willem Ruyter in a Peasant Role, ca. 1638–1639, pen and brown ink, 17.7 x 14 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London [side-by-side viewer]

Rembrandt, Actor in the Role of Pantalone, ca. 1636, pen and brush in brown, Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Rembrandt, Actor in the Role of Pantalone, ca. 1636, pen and brush in brown, Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Fig. 26 Rembrandt, Actor in the Role of Pantalone, ca. 1636, pen and brush in brown, 18.5 x 11.9 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg [side-by-side viewer]

The figure’s costume makes clear that Rembrandt took care to emphasize that The Standard Bearer should be perceived as a comical painting. The banner, which he holds in a peculiar way, not resting on his shoulder, as in all other images of ensigns, also needs our attention. Why should a standard bearer have a white flag decorated with a white strip of embroidered ornament (fig. 27)?³⁸ Another peculiarity is the substantiality of the fabric. Standard bearers’ banners were made of thin silk, because they had to be as light as possible.³⁹ The ensign needed to be able to hold it up for a long time with one hand (see fig. 11). In most paintings of standard bearers, the fabric of the banner is clearly rendered as a thin and shiny silk. This one is not, which cannot be ignorance on Rembrandt’s part. The lengthwise strip of embroidered ornament comes close to what we see on the bed linen in Rembrandt’s Danaë (the cushion was painted in 1637) (fig. 28) and the Woman in Bed (1647; National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh).⁴⁰ This raises the question of whether the flag in The Standard Bearer is actually a bedsheet. Experts in historic textiles have confirmed that it, indeed, resembles a large luxury bedsheet, made of fine, supple linen, a material that falls in a way that is similar to the drapery on the standard bearer’s arm and hand (figs. 29 and 30).⁴¹ Such bedsheets consisted of two parts that were connected lengthwise by a tussenzetsel, a band of detailed ornamental cutwork (sneewerk) and/or white-embroidered work (witborduurwerk), like the bands at the side of the cushions in Danaë and Woman in Bed.⁴² The most elaborate ones were made in Friesland. That this standard bearer’s banner looks like a large luxury bedsheet might be less unlikely than it sounds.

fig. 27. Rembrandt-StandardBearer-detail

fig. 27. Rembrandt-StandardBearer-detail

Fig. 27 Rembrandt, The Standard Bearer (fig. 2), detail of the banner’s strip of embroidered ornament [side-by-side viewer]

Danae

Danae

Fig. 28 Rembrandt, Danaë, 1636–ca. 1643, oil on canvas, 185 x 203 cm. Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Image from Wikimedia Commons [side-by-side viewer]

Draped corner of a luxury bedsheet of fine linen, 17th century, probably made in Friesland, Private Collection

Draped corner of a luxury bedsheet of fine linen, 17th century, probably made in Friesland, Private Collection

Fig. 29 Draped corner of a luxury bedsheet of fine linen, 17th century, probably made in Friesland, 268 x 200 cm. Private collection [side-by-side viewer]

fig. 30. Rembrandt-StandardBearer-detail

fig. 30. Rembrandt-StandardBearer-detail

Fig. 30 Rembrandt, The Standard Bearer (fig. 2), detail of the folds of the standard bearer’s banner [side-by-side viewer]

The Standard Bearer and Comedy

The many commonalities between the standard bearer’s appearance and those of comedians and buffoons, some of them by Rembrandt’s hand, as well as the standard bearer’s bedsheet-like banner,⁴³ prompts investigation into the role that the character of the ensign played in comedies and farces. Indeed, one finds a reference to standard bearers in one of the most beloved comedies of the time: Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero’s Moortje, published in 1617, a play that remained popular throughout the first half of the seventeenth century.⁴⁴ Bredero had adapted Terence’s Eunuchus (via a French translation) and amplified its characters extensively.⁴⁵ The silly, boasting Hopman Roemert (Captain Rummer) is a familiar stereotype in comedies.⁴⁶ This braggart is in love with the play’s central figure, the prostitute Moy-Aal, and plans to lay siege to her house with a militia company made up of tramps. He distributes their respective functions and ranks, such as lieutenant-general, captain of horse, sergeant-major, corporal, and so on. When commanding this mock militia to march, he exclaims: “Where are your proud standard bearers in their liveries and with their sashes? / Raise your banners and unfold your bedsheets, your aprons and diapers. / Go to it, place your people in their full splendor.”⁴⁷ The scene is a variation on Terence’s example, but this inclusion—and ridiculing—of ensigns with their bedsheets is entirely Bredero’s invention.⁴⁸ Part of Bredero’s joke might even have been the notion that bedsheets could be used as a white flag that functions as sign of surrender.⁴⁹ We do not know whether Rembrandt had this scene in mind when painting his standard bearer, but it is not impossible that it had captured his imagination.⁵⁰ In any case, the scene demonstrates that, in the context of a satirical image of vain ensigns, the bedsheet banner was an appropriate attribute.

The musical farce Singhende klucht van Pekelharing in de kist (Singing farce of Pickled Herring in the chest), a popular play by Isaac Vos, underscores the standard bearer role as a target of ridicule.⁵¹ A ludicrous officer, nameless but clearly indicated as standard bearer (Vaendrager), constantly brags about his intrepidity and his numerous heroic deeds. Naturally, he proves to be a coward who runs into trouble when his beloved has to get rid of him on the sudden return of her husband; she had hidden Pekelharing, her other lover, in a chest when the standard bearer arrived. This farce was based on a German comedy published in 1620, which in turn was an elaboration on an English jig, Singing Simpkin, of around 1596.⁵² Isaac Vos’s play was printed in 1648 and was staged often in the Amsterdamse Schouwburg as of that date.⁵³ It is likely, however, that an earlier version had already been performed for some time without being printed.⁵⁴ Only in the Dutch version is the soldier identified as a standard bearer, and only there do we find his long, blustering monologue. The standard bearer had thus become an object of ridicule as a version of the boasting officer or soldier, a stock figure of farces and comedies since antiquity.

In the 1630s Rembrandt  demonstrates great interest in comedians and their poses and expressions. Willem Ruyter in a Peasant Role (see fig. 25) is one example; additional drawings of the mid-1630s, by Rembrandt and his contemporaries depict the same actor in other comical roles.⁵⁵ Apart from Rembrandt’s drawing of an actor as a Capitano-like character lounging nonchalantly in a chair⁵⁶—one can almost hear him bragging—and four drawings of actors in a role resembling Pantalone (see fig. 26),⁵⁷there are also two funny quack-like actors⁵⁸ and picaresque-like mummers,⁵⁹ as well as actors dressed as “Orientals” (including Willem Ruyter).⁶⁰ In a few drawings of carousing or music-making soldiers with their lovers, one recognizes actors by their distinctive costumes (see fig. 40).⁶¹ Some of these figures might be comedians from Ruyter’s group, or from Robert Reynolds’s company, “meester van de Engelsche commedianten,” with which Ruyter was in contact.⁶²

The Standard Bearer and Frans Hals

We may wonder why Rembrandt chose a standard bearer, looking like an actor in a comedy, as the subject for a spectacular painting that displays his virtuosity as a painter. Frans Hals’s standard bearer in The Civic Guard Company of Reinier Reael and Cornelis Michielsz Blaeuw (in later times called The Meagre Company; fig. 31) comes to mind as an image of a standard bearer flaunting his position and commanding presence. There is little doubt that Rembrandt considered Frans Hals the most gifted painter in Holland, worthy of emulative competition. It is likely that Rembrandt and Hals were in contact around 1634/5, when Rembrandt was still working in Hendrick Uylenburgh’s studio. According to Sebastiaan Dudok van Heel, Frans Hals probably worked and lodged in Uylenburgh’s house for some time when painting The Meagre Company.⁶³ It was then that Hals must have portrayed the standard bearer of the company at the far left of the painting (fig. 32).

This splendid figure may have fired Rembrandt’s imagination. Hals painted him with bold, seemingly rapid brushstrokes that create a breathtaking vivacity and lifelikeness, displaying a handling—Hals’s “signature style,” as Christopher Atkins called it⁶⁴—that was recognized by contemporaries as uniquely his. Theodorus Schrevelius wrote in 1648 that “through an unusual manner of painting that is entirely his own, [Hals] surpasses almost everyone, because there is so much power and life that he seems to defy nature with his brush; all his portraits testify to this . . . which are painted in such a way that they seem to breathe and be alive.”⁶⁵ Hals’s standard bearer, identified as the cloth and wool merchant Nicolaes van Bambeeck, is conspicuously dressed in high fashion befitting a wealthy bachelor; he wears a lace collar over a glistening silver-gray silk doublet with a slashed front and sleeves trimmed with gold braid, ribbon rosettes with silver pins hanging down at the tips, and an orange sash tied around his waist. He nonchalantly carries a huge banner of an almost translucent, blazingly orange silk, lightly falling in soft folds on the ground; he holds the outer corner of the flag in his right hand. Hals outlined the figure of the ensign sharply against the black of his neighbor’s costume and the smooth greenish-gray stone of the building in the background. This consummate image of a standard bearer defiantly awaited, as it were, a response from the ambitious painter from Leiden, who was almost a quarter of a century younger than the Haarlem master.⁶⁶

Hals’s standard bearer confronted Rembrandt with a virtuoso performance radiating virility and pride. Rembrandt’s interest in theater could have inspired him to rival Hals by engaging with the standard bearer’s vainglorious image in comedies and farces, as well as with the long tradition of boasting military men onstage and in print. Rembrandt echoed the pose of Hals’s standard bearer, which was, as we have seen, highly conventional for military men and other men who wished to be portrayed impressively. Nicolaes van Bambeeck’s fashionable hat, with its enormous brim standing up in front, was originally even larger (as can still be observed in the painting today) and must have been downsized, perhaps by Pieter Codde (1599–1678) when the latter finished the painting in 1637, to make this figure a bit less marked in relation to the other men. The ensign’s hat seems to have been an easy target: in his own The Standard Bearer, Rembrandt replaced it with a floppy notched beret standing up in front (fig. 33). He transformed the ensign’s carefully turned-up moustache into a drooping monstrosity and changed the elegant silvery grays of his clothing into a totally unfashionable color, though still of costly material.⁶⁷ The trim, slender body of Hals’s soldier was exchanged for a fleshier one,⁶⁸ and a codpiece was added. Hals’s eye-catching orange sash has become a rather colorless striped material (that seems strangely unrelated to the knot on the standard bearer’s back), and the beautiful orange silk of the flag that Hals painted as resting securely on the shoulder of the standard bearer has been turned into an awkwardly held banner that looks like bed linen. Instead of the austere architecture, the viewer discerns a dilapidated column with dents and cracks, a symbol of crumbling fortitude.

Rembrandt’s main goal, however, was arguably to demonstrate—in competition with Hals—his unique manner, his own “signature style,” which was different from the style of any other painter at that moment. He displayed it in a pointedly matchless way. Although both artists painted in a rough manner, Rembrandt’s handling has little in common with Hals’s technique, the most conspicuous and distinctive aspect of which is its finishing layer of seemingly rapid, unblended brushstrokes.⁶⁹ Rembrandt’s manner, in contrast, is geared toward an exceptionally subtle observation of “broken colors” and houding—a breathtaking ability to create space through an infinite differentiation of color and tone.⁷⁰ At the same time, Rembrandt shows off his equally virtuoso use of visible brushstrokes. Connoisseurs and artists would have loved discussing the differences in handeling of the two masters, both of whom created “so much power and life” in their figures that they seem “to breathe and be alive,” each of them achieving this “through an unusual manner of painting that was entirely his own.” Apart from enjoying both virtuosity and comedy, Rembrandt’s clients might also have been amused to recognize his face in his painted standard bearer. The fact that copies were made (see also figs. 23 and 45) implies that this masterpiece, a novelty in many respects, was a success.⁷¹

Part II

The Standard Bearer and Self-Portrayal

Rembrandt’s face in The Standard Bearer is somewhat disguised by the theatrical moustache, slight fattening of the jaw, and ruddy, somewhat saggy skin with which he adapts his countenance to the character of a comical ensign (fig. 34).⁷² That he depicted his own features⁷³ is confirmed by a drawing and several etchings of around the same time (fig. 35).⁷⁴ From his first self-portrayals, Rembrandt showed himself in what his contemporaries would have recognized as theater dress.⁷⁵ In two early drawings we see the ornamental frogged closures used on costumes associated with exotic, mostly Eastern European military figures from the stage (fig. 36, see also fig. 19).⁷⁶ Thus Rembrandt seems to proclaim through these self-portraits that he, a painter, like an actor, possessed the sensibility and capacity needed to imagine and convey passions, moods, and character, to create an illusion the viewer could believe. But why did he depict himself in this role?

The singularity of Rembrandt’s self-portrayals has been argued by H. Perry Chapman in her groundbreaking book of 1990.⁷⁷ Nonetheless, over the last decades many scholars maintained that, especially with regard to the early heads,⁷⁸ Rembrandt “simply used” his own face, it being the most easily available and patient model for studying and solving artistic problems.⁷⁹ According to this view, Rembrandt generated a market-driven production of self-portraits as collector’s items, since connoisseurs appeared to be interested in such works. I agree with Chapman that the uniqueness, endless variation, and “tremendous thought and effort” that Rembrandt put into making his numerous painted and etched self-portraits belie such an interpretation.⁸⁰

Rembrandt must have been aware of the novelty of studying each slight muscle movement in his face, and how these contributed to conveying affects and moods, while researching the effects of light and shade on his features. He presented these observations with intense dedication through paintings and etchings, creating an audience that enjoyed recognizing, possessing, and interpreting the artist’s likeness. Thus, the young Rembrandt discovered the mirror as a means to control and manipulate his image as the uniquely talented and unconventional artist who made the work. This implies an enhanced self-consciousness during the process of making.⁸¹ While doing so, he transformed conventions of self-portraiture and of study and character heads, or tronies.⁸²

Rembrandt chose the still-young tradition of tronies as a carrier of his self-portrayals and also made use of aspects of a Caravaggesque type: the anonymous half-figure in theatrical dress.⁸³ Both had been introduced in Leiden by Jan Lievens.⁸⁴ Rembrandt was also aware that in Haarlem this Caravaggesque type had found a distinctive lineage in Frans Hals’s work. Moreover, it is evident that he was familiar with the comical character heads of peasants popularized by the Brueghel family, which found its apex in the 1620s and 1630s with Adriaen Brouwer (1605–1638). Brouwer presented them mainly in his series of the Seven Deadly Sins, in which emotions and moods are heavily emphasized in a farcical low-life context.⁸⁵ Merging such existing types, inserting his own face, and producing them as autonomous works of art, Rembrandt radically personalized these depictions of anonymous men and women. The only contextual hold for the viewer was the likeness of the artist himself (that is, for those in the know) wearing costumes that evoked characters in the theater. In his early works, this was often a “military” costume.

A Theatrical Type: The Comedian in Military Costume

Among Rembrandt’s single-figured self-portrayals, The Standard Bearer stands out not only because of its format and theatrical military dress, but also because the banner gives this figure a specific context. This conspicuous attribute and the figure’s comical nature recall two highly unusual self-portraits: the pendants that Louis Finson (before 1574/76-1617) and Martin Faber (1586/87-1648) painted when they were in Aix-en-Provence in 1613–1614 (fig. 37).⁸⁶ Finson, especially, would have been of interest to Rembrandt, whose two masters, Jacob van Swanenburgh and Pieter Lastman, were acquainted with this well-known copyist of Caravaggio.⁸⁷ Finson knew Caravaggio personally and brought important works by him to Amsterdam, where he arrived in 1615; he would die there in 1617.⁸⁸ Rembrandt might have seen a copy of the self-portrait in which Finson presents himself as a comic military figure from a distant past.⁸⁹ Baring his shoulder, chest, and arm, he wears a wide leather belt and a helmet with a large feather, and he holds a mace, a medieval weapon. He smiles slightly, and his gesture and brow express pensiveness, completing the suggestion of role playing.⁹⁰ Finson’s singular self-portrait—inscribed “suo se penicillo pinxit”—seems to respond to the provocative self-portrayals that Caravaggio made in his youth, reportedly “from his own reflection in the mirror.”⁹¹

Hearing about, or seeing, such examples of astoundingly novel ways to depict one’s own image could have incited Rembrandt to explore the possibilities of acting and rendering characters and expressions “from his own reflection in the mirror,” confronting his audience with unusual, even provocative, images of the artist himself.⁹² To give just one example: Rembrandt’s early desire to situate himself into a tradition of such singular artists is apparent from his Laughing Self-Portrait with a Gorget in the J. Paul Getty Museum (fig. 38). Although small, it is an ambitious and wittily innovative self-portrait. The choice to make a painted self-portrayal—plausibly his very first⁹³—with this striking expression must have been instigated by Karel van Mander’s noteworthy description of two laughing self-portraits by Hans von Aachen (1552–1615) (perhaps Rembrandt saw a copy of one of them).⁹⁴ Von Aachen’s paintings are without precedent.⁹⁵ According to Van Mander, the young Von Aachen aimed to show off his exceptional talent with the first of the two.⁹⁶ This painting has been lost, but the one he made a few years later, which adds a woman playing a lute to the composition, still exists (fig. 39).⁹⁷ Rembrandt emulated this second painting, as described by Van Mander, in his 1635 painting, Self-Portrait with Saskia as a Soldier and his Sweetheart in a Tavern (fig. 40).

Van Mander presents Hans von Aachen’s two self-portrayals as highly significant accomplishments in the artist’s early career, stressing that he painted his laughing face from life with a mirror. Van Mander’s account that Von Aachen later served Emperor Rudolph II, “the greatest and highest placed art lover in the whole world,”⁹⁸ and established a friendly relationship with him, like Apelles and Alexander, would have impressed the young and highly ambitious Rembrandt, who had already won the admiration of important connoisseurs in Leiden and The Hague and sought the attention of the court in The Hague.⁹⁹ The boisterous laugh, with teeth bared, belonged to the tradition of rendering crude peasants, drunks, and children, but the esteemed Von Aachen turned his own image into an uncouth spectacle, inviting the viewer to laugh at his folly.¹⁰⁰ These exceptional works would have been admired as comical inversions, representing the artist as a drinking and carousing rake, which was at that time a familiar stereotype for painters.¹⁰¹

Rembrandt understood that, by mocking the pride and vanity of self-portraiture, Von Aachen meant to be admired by contemporaries and future generations. In a self-portrayal, the artist is trying “in vain” to capture transience through a mirror image,¹⁰² which Van Mander connected to Narcissus admiring his own mirror image.¹⁰³ Like Von Aachen, Rembrandt laughs at his own vanity and simultaneously chooses the role of the comical soldier to frame his self-portrayal.¹⁰⁴ He shows himself as an actor who transformed himself into this vain, swaggering character, the riotous captain, that will make his audience laugh.¹⁰⁵ Art lovers—some of whom might have known Van Mander’s description of Von Aachen’s laughing self-portrait—would have enjoyed and admired such a transgressive self-portrayal by this highly talented young artist.¹⁰⁶

Rembrandt’s earliest head study, the dashing officer boldly eyeing the viewer (see fig. 15), painted one or two years before his first self-portrayals in a military guise, also represents a comedian. We recognize the soldier’s dress as a theatrical costume, showing remnants of the lansquenet’s garb, while the shining gorget is contemporary. This piece of plate armor, used here by Rembrandt for the first time, gives him a chance to demonstrate “gleaming and shining, reflecting and reverberating [light on metal].”¹⁰⁷ This soldier, who holds a sword under his armpit and sports the notched, feathered beret at a jaunty slant, recalling Jacques Callot’s print representing the Capitano (1619), fits into the long tradition of the swaggering, vainglorious soldier.¹⁰⁸ Naturally, such a soldier hits the bottle, as the reddish nose of Rembrandt’s officer indicates. He represents “the more than foolish pride of the arrogant and supercilious captain, of whose silly conceitedness everyone should take a warning, and humbly recognize one’s shortcomings,” as Bredero describes the role of Hopman Roemert in the introduction to Moortje.¹⁰⁹ Bredero thus underscores how a moral is connected to each (stereo)type.

Although referring to the many comedies and farces in which a vain captain or some other conceited soldier is satirized as a bragging boozer, the Getty painting is at the same time a portrait of Rembrandt himself laughing (see fig. 38), which was, Van Mander warned,  a particularly difficult affect to depict.¹¹⁰ In making this painting, Rembrandt seems to have interacted with Fran Hals’s laughing half-figures, in particular Hals’s two compositions of a laughing actor as Pekelharing (presently in Leipzig and Kassel) (fig. 41).¹¹¹ Both are generally dated around 1628–1630. Through the convincingly rendered movement of throwing back his head, and the application of an adventurously visible brushstrokes, in which he seems to compete with Hals, Rembrandt managed to prevent the expression from becoming a frozen grimace—a danger he could not entirely avert in the frontally posed etching of 1630 (Self-Portrait with a Cap, Laughing) or the Laughing Soldier in the Mauritshuis of around the same year.

About eight years later, probably in 1635, Rembrandt once again depicted his own laughing face (see fig. 40). By that time, he had made a career in Amsterdam as a highly successful portrait painter. In the same year, he also produced a few unprecedentedly ambitious history paintings.¹¹² In his Self-Portrait with Saskia as a Soldier and His Sweetheart in a Tavern, he shows his own countenance in a large painting meant to demonstrate that he could be as brilliant in comedy as he was in scenes of tragedy. After all, ingenuity, naturalness, and passion were considered just as imperative for the depiction of farcical situations as for serious history paintings.¹¹³ He shows himself as a swanky, high-spirited officer inviting the viewer to drink with him, while his sweetheart addresses the viewer with a faint smile.¹¹⁴

As noted above, Van Mander’s description of Hans von Aachen’s laughing self-portrait while raising his glass in the company of a courtesan (and perhaps a copy of the painting) must have been decisive for Rembrandt (see fig. 39).¹¹⁵ As in comedies on the stage, the foolishness and consequences of roguish behavior were self-evident for the viewer, who was entertained by comedy built on an obvious moral.¹¹⁶ Again, for those in the know, Von Aachen’s and Rembrandt’s paintings simultaneously satirize the stereotype of the painter as a drinking profligate,¹¹⁷ as well as the vanity of their self-image-making. In Rembrandt’s painting, this underlined by the stuffed peacock sitting on its pie. The artist-comedian and his handsome wife—the latter commenting ironically on this image of foolishness and vanity—directly involve the viewer in this foray into theatrical comedy. Works by Hals, such as the so-called Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart (1623, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the aforementioned paintings of Pekelharing (see fig. 41), seem to have pushed Rembrandt to depict such boisterous comedy. Seeking to rival Hals, Rembrandt engages the viewer even more pointedly by including his own face and that of his wife.

In the same year—or the next, 1636¹¹⁸—Rembrandt blew up the single-figure self-portrait in a comical military role into a knee-length format for his brilliant The Standard Bearer. The comedy is apparent less through the facial expression than it is through the standard bearer’s pose, the shape of his body, and his costume. The face asks for closer inspection. In several earlier self-portraits Rembrandt had experimented with a kind of backlighting.¹¹⁹ In those works, the light falls from a high point at the upper left and heavily shades one side of the face, while hair or protruding headwear casts a shadow over the eyes, hiding the viewer’s most important point of connection to the painted face. In The Standard Bearer, not only the eyes but also the front of the body are cast in the shadow (see fig. 34). The high light source causes the light to reflect on the floor in front of the figure, slightly lightening up the facial features, especially the eyes, from below. The standard bearer’s proper right eye catches a tiny spot of reflected light, which gives his gaze a much stronger focus than that in the workshop painting Self-Portrait as “Polish” Captain, in which Rembrandt had done something similar a year earlier (fig. 42).¹²⁰ In The Standard Bearer, the figure’s eyes draw attention through the suggestion of transparency of the iris around the pupil, and the reflected light on the lower eyelids and between the eyes and eyebrows. The eyebrows are raised, as in the much earlier self-portraits in Nuremberg and The Hague in which Rembrandt portrayed himself as an arrogant officer;¹²¹ in those paintings, the eyebrows play a much more conspicuous role, with the light accentuating a slight frown. They recall Van Mander’s statement that in raised eyebrows one may observe especially: “Haughtiness, which has here / Its seat, though it has its origin in the heart, / It has climbed to this highest place, where it has its residence.”¹²² This standard bearer’s haughtiness, however, seems rather fragile.

In the year Rembrandt completed The Standard Bearer, he featured the same shaded eyes in the etched Self-Portrait with Saskia (fig. 43), in which the artist and his wife are, again, both clad in theater dress.¹²³ Rembrandt appears not as a soldier, although the large, notched beret with a feather echoes that association, but as an artist wearing fantasy dress referring to some indefinite past. With a rather sharp turn of his head, and his eyes lighting up a little in the dark, Rembrandt has given himself a tense expression that contrasts markedly with Saskia’s calm pose. This concentrated intensity is entirely absent in The Standard Bearer, in which Rembrandt’s characteristic mouth, with its somewhat protruding upper lip, is not as resolutely closed as in most other self-portraits—nor do the slightly opened lips suggest that he is on the verge of speaking, as in Self-Portrait as Warrior (probably 1634, Gemäldegalerie, Kassel)¹²⁴ or Self-Portrait with Soft Beret and Fur Collar in Berlin (fig. 44). In The Standard Bearer, his mouth creates an impression of slow-wittedness. This seems to be emphasized by the visibility of the undersides of the rims of the pupils, which, as in the Self-Portrait as “Polish” Captain (see fig. 42), appear to make the subject’s gaze a bit glassy, if not drunken. The image of haughtiness and pride is further subverted by the rather fat jaw and the rotund body,¹²⁵ which, as we have seen, contrasts sharply with the elegant, fashionable men that constituted the contemporaneous image of the standard bearer—not to mention the silly beret, the drooping moustache, the codpiece, and the white, bedsheet-like banner, all discussed in Part I. In a seventeenth-century copy in Kassel (fig. 45), the fatness of the chin and the glassiness of the eyes seem to be exaggerated, probably to emphasize this expression of sheepish tipsiness.

At the time of its acquisition in 2021, The Standard Bearer was approached within the framework of military heroism, which led to a nationalistic interpretation (see fig. 1). I have argued that, to the contrary, this self-portrayal should be considered within the theatrical context of comedy. This hardly makes the painting a less important addition to the collection of the Rijksmuseum and the Dutch State. It remains a brilliant painting, with an exceptional form and content that only Rembrandt could have invented. Rembrandt must have meant The Standard Bearer in the first place as a display of unrivaled virtuosity. He proudly showed off how he outstripped even Frans Hals in a breathtaking achievement of paint handling that was entirely his own. At the same time, he satirized the image of the vain ensign, and he also made fun of his own vanity—the undertone of any self-portrayal—while nevertheless promoting himself as comedian-painter. Like “A Comedian” depicted in a poem from Constantijn Huygens’s Zedeprinten, Rembrandt transforms his personality temporarily into another character, but “hidden under his guise [he] remains the same man.”¹²⁶ That man is the great painter who is visible in every aspect of this painting. In contrast to the actor’s temporal transformation, Rembrandt’s can still be admired. In many respects, The Standard Bearer is the culmination of a group of self-portrayals, some of them in comic roles, that shaped an image of artistic brilliance and provocative unconventionality.