EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

All figures in art are an aspect of the artist's self. This little-known but essential feature links artists of very different cultures around a unifying idea. They know this because they themselves always have art on their mind. Rembrandt clearly did. Anyone aware that "every painter paints himself" should have no trouble seeing that the oddly-shaped hat of Rembrandt's beggar......

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.......is in the form of a Greek or Roman torso, headless and limbless. Topped by a fragment of feminine scupture, the artist's androgynous mind thinks 'art'.

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Knowing this, other hats on Rembrandt's peasants etched in the same years can be seen as antique torsos too. The one at upper left is seen from the back; the short, thick vertical line in the center is a shadow near the torso's spine. This hat resembles a feminine version of the Belvedere torso (lower left) in a rear view. The hairy hat on the right is torso- and breast-shaped as well with the breast in profile facing leftwards. Perhaps the hat's hirsute texture is intended to convey androgyny.

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The trio of prints, however, are more than a hat trick. These peasants not only conceive new artworks in their heads but are, as artworks themselves, being conceived...by Rembrandt. In a fragmentary, proto-Cubist appearance Rembrandt's own face is suggested in our first print, in the scratched lines of the beggar's clothing. His veiled "eye" is symbolically constructed out of the beggar's hands (see diagram, lower left) to signify, as always, the unity of craft and perception. While the "beggar", like an artist, picks up odds and ends for use elsewhere and thinks about ancient art, Rembrandt himself is conceiving the beggar as his own self-representation. He appears out of "Rembrandt's own head."

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If we "see" this early etching by the wise young artist in the proper perspective, we see that moment when the work itself was created, a moment forever present in an endless "now". In his own way Rembrandt advises us, along with philosophers from almost all the world's major traditions, that the only moment that ever really matters is the present one. Be awake in the present, he advises us. This little etching is, like so much great art, full of wisdom for minds in search of truth.