Vanitas: An Old Man and a Young Lute Player

Beauty Fades: a Vanitas by Jacques de Rousseaux, Rembrandt’s Pupil.

A handsome young man plucks the strings of a lute, propping his elbow up on a table decked with a carpet. He plays from a songbook held in front of him by an old man standing beside him to the left, who sings along. Their clothes are linked to their ages: the young man wears a flamboyant and elegant green and red doublet and a bluish beret, emphasizing the vigour and beauty of youth. The old man by contrast exercises restraint, sporting a simple skullcap and cloak of muted hue. Although it is not immediately obvious, the two present the theme of Vanitas, pointing to the transience of earthly life in the face of the hereafter, by reminding us that the young man will eventually become old as well, and that human life passes like the momentary sound of the music they make. This was a deliberate choice of the artist, in which he creatively stepped away from his models.

When this painting was exhibited in Raleigh NC in 1956, it was in the context of Rembrandt and his circle, and Wilhelm Valentiner had ventured an attribution to Gerrit Willemsz. Horst, one of Rembrandt’s earliest pupils in Amsterdam¹. Sumowski took it up in 1989, recognizing its connection to Leiden, and not Amsterdam, when he assigned it instead to Jacques des Rousseaux². His judgment, based on stylistic comparison, would later be confirmed when the removal of varnish and accumulated overpaint in a cleaning revealed the monogram of this artist.

It was not Rembrandt whose guiding role as master and model is revealed here, however, but instead that of his friend and associate in Leiden, Jan Lievens. Rousseaux borrowed directly from his painting of a Lute Player in Baltimore, for the young lutenist in his own painting (fig. 1)³. Most prominently, he took over the profile pose facing left, and the frame-filling format of the figure, in half-length. While adopting the idea of the beret, however, he introduced an outlandish and fanciful twist, incorporating a zig-zag line in the edge. He likewise came up with an even more flamboyant doublet, the green leather slashed to reveal strips of a bright shirt underneath, conspicuously in the complimentary colour, red. Rousseaux appears to accentuate the spectacle of youth in order to heighten the contrast with old age, emphasizing transience, and underscoring the moral message of vanitas. He may have been looking at another painting by Lievens as well, of An Old Man Holding a Skull (fig. 2), for the moralizing message, but also for his stern and unidealized rendering of the head of the old man⁴.

Moralizing scenes did not become Rousseaux’s primary artistic pursuit, but instead reflected early experiment with various artistic options. We see this especially in the close relationship of this painting with another one of the same year, showing four figures making music (fig. 3)⁵. With nearly the same dimensions, but painted on canvas, it very likely still formed a pair with the painting of two men. Rousseaux even included the same young man as a model, to the left, leaning over the songbook held by the young woman seated at the table. He also wears a beret, but without the fancy edge. The green-and-red slashed doublet however, is worn by the other male figure, a young boy playing a flute, seated in profile in the foreground right. Perhaps even more strikingly, Rousseaux depicted precisely the same carpet on the table, of a contemporary Persian type⁶.

Rousseaux was trying out something quite different in this second conception, however, based on another model. He derived the crowded figured composition and three of the four figures from Rembrandt’s early painting of A Musical Company, of 1626, in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 4)⁷. The young woman with her “Guidonian Hand” counting the beat is a more modest and everyday reworking of Rembrandt’s outlandish damsel with her Phyrgian cap alluding to Antiquity. Even more obvious is the adaptation of the old woman in Rembrandt’s painting, likewise leaning in from the right, but now joining in song, rather than playing the procuress. Lastly, the young man is loosely derived from Rembrandt’s harp player, who appears to bear the features of his friend Jan Lievens. The erotic suggestions of Rembrandt’s painting, in the young woman’s bosom, initially shown bare (as indicated in x-radiographs)⁸, and the obscene gesture of the harp player, are here replaced with a scene of familial harmony, furnishing a positive moral example.

It is a matter of speculation as to which painting came first. As Rousseaux’s 1630 painting of a young man leans more toward Lievens, chances are higher that he was first following this artist, and first painted the scene with the old and young man with the lute. He would then have started looking to Rembrandt, who was by then proceeding with complex, multifigured compositions with a smaller figure scale, with which he earned the astonishingly high praise of Constantijn Huygens, the secretary to the Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, admittedly deservedly so⁹. Subsequently, in the years 1630-1631, Rembrandt and Lievens proceeded to create parallel works, in a friendly but earnest competition, that may well have been prompted by Huygens, following as it does upon his famous comparison of the two budding giants in his manuscript autobiography. Best known among these are their paintings of The Raising of Lazarus (figs. 5–6)¹⁰. It may well have been in the spirit of this comparison, and the studio discussions it undoubtedly entailed, that Rousseaux created his two musical scenes.

This brings us to a longstanding question, of whether Jan Lievens and Rembrandt shared a studio. When Constantijn Huygens discussed and compared the two artists, it was in the same section of his autobiography, and he even referred to them as a painting duo¹¹. While this is not conclusive, it is supported by the work of several other pupils of this period, who like Rousseaux incorporated elements from the manner and work of both artists. For his 1632 painting of The Widow’s Mite (private collection), Paulus Lesire followed Rembrandt’s 1631 depiction of Simeon’s Song of Praise (The Hague, Mauritshuis), but for his earlier Quill Cutter (Kingston ON, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, gift of Isabel Bader, 2024) the model was Lievens’s painting of St. Mark in Bamberg (Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, on loan to Residenz Bamberg)¹². Also, Rembrandt made a drawing of Lievens at work that closely resembles his famous painting of The Artist in his Studio, with what appears to be the same easel and the same large paint preparation stone on a box base (figs. 7–8).

In choosing Lievens’s painting as his model for one of his two musical scenes, Rousseaux joined a lineage going back to Caravaggio, and his painting of a Lute Player in the Hermitage. There is an important intermediary between Lievens and Caravaggio, namely the Utrecht painter Hendrick Ter Brugghen, and his Singing Lute Player in the Museum in Algiers, or a painting like it. Ter Brugghen had been to Italy, and gained fame there for his interpretation of Caravaggio’s manner, made even bolder by a large figure scale, rough textures and flickering highlights. Lievens came into contact with Ter Brugghen’s paintings, likely in Utrecht, not long after he returned from Italy in 1622¹³. He adopted strong lighting of figures against a dark background, yielding sharp contrasts, also in the modelling of figures, with large areas obscured in shadow, traits shared with other followers of Caravaggio in Utrecht, such as Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen. However his use of a large figure scale, and rough handling, seem to have come more specifically from Ter Brugghen, and shows up even in his earliest paintings. It did not come from his first teacher Pieter Lastman, who adhered to a small figure scale.

Rousseaux made a clear choice in this painting, to follow the Caravaggesque aspect of Lievens’s work. There were other aspects of the omnivorous Lievens that he did not adopt, for instance his study of the work of Anthony van Dyck and Pieter Paul Rubens incorporated into other paintings. Lievens had almost certainly visited Rubens’s studio in Antwerp, around 1623, and made creative copies after some of the head studies that were only available there¹⁴, and had studied a series of the Apostles by Van Dyck in a collection in Utrecht¹⁵. When Rembrandt returned from studying in Amsterdam, first working in his master Pieter Lastman’s style, he soon began to look more to Lievens, and to explore more strongly Caravaggesque elements in his work, especially strong lighting of figures against dark backgrounds. He then studied Caravaggesque models themselves, such as Gerard van Honthorst, more directly, studying his Old Woman Examining a Coin by a Lantern (The Kremer Collection) as a starting point for his Money Changer in Berlin (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)¹⁶. Honthorst painted more smoothly and lavishly than Ter Brugghen, with elegant genre paintings like Caravaggio’s Lute Player in mind, and Rousseaux appears to have studied his work as well, to judge by the elegant handling of the fabric and carpet in his scene of two men in the Gaudium Magnum Foundation, going beyond the smooth handling of the Lievens painting that served as his direct model.

It was a vibrant, energetic and ambitious environment for the young Jacques des Rousseaux in Leiden, working with Jan Lievens and Rembrandt, almost certainly in the same studio, and partaking of discussions of the possibilities of art, including new developments in Utrecht, inspired by a roguish genius who had worked several decades earlier in Naples and Rome: Caravaggio. Rousseaux adeptly navigated the artistic currents flowing around him, as an advanced pupil, likely first of Lievens and then of Rembrandt. After completing his two imposing early multifigured musical scenes, he proceeded mainly to paint tronies. This was likely a strategic choice, following his inclination towards a bold presentation of the figure. He may also have been steered in this direction by Rembrandt, who himself heeded Huygens’s encouragement to paint small-figured history paintings, with acute rendering of emotion. The tronie was aimed primarily at connoisseurs, demonstrating virtuoso challenges related to history painting, such as facial expression, lighting, description of materials and inventiveness in costume¹⁷. In his large panel of a Young man playing the lute and an old man indicating the score in the collection of the Gaudium Magnum Foundation, these elements are already present. But so are elegant beauty in rendering surfaces and forms, bringing the young Jacques de Rousseaux surprisingly close to the spirit of Caravaggio’s own Lute Player, briefly closing the distance between Leiden and Rome.