Rembrandt is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith

Author: Russ Ramsey

ISBN: 0310129729

Date finished: 11/12/2023

How strongly I recommend it: 9/10

As an artist, I loved learning the stories of such familiar art pieces. I loved how much surprise this book featured. Ramsey beautifully weaves story and artist yearnings with parallel Scripture. I will be pointing struggling artists to this book.

My Highlights

Forward

Pastor Ramsey writes about art in a way that brings healing by standing under (the true meaning of understanding)

1. Beautifying Eden: Why Pursuing Goodness, Truth, and Beauty Matters

What did Vincent do with his humiliation as a patient at Saint-Rémy? He painted.

During his asylum year, Vincent painted more than 140 paintings—an average of one canvas every three days. Of those works, at least two were self-portraits with his bandaged ear showing. Rather than run or hide from this humiliating series of events, he captured the moment of his greatest shame. It is hard to render an honest self-portrait if we want to conceal what is unattractive and hide what’s broken. We want to appear beautiful. But when we do this, we hide what needs redemption—what we trust Christ to redeem. And everything redeemed by Christ becomes beautiful.

That canvas faithfully captures a defining moment of shame and need for rescue by showing the bandaged side, and it has become a priceless treasure. This is how God sees his people. We are fully exposed in our shortcomings, yet we are of unimaginable value to him. This is how we should see others and how we should be willing to be seen by others: broken and of incalculable worth.

The pursuit of goodness, the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of beauty are, in fact, foundational to the health of any community.

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth [beauty]; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism” [goodness and truth]. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless. (C.S. Lewis quote)

In my experience, many Christians in the West tend to pursue truth and goodness with the strongest intentionality, while beauty remains a distant third.

The pursuit of beauty requires the application of goodness and truth for the benefit of others. Beauty is what we make of goodness and truth. Beauty takes the pursuit of goodness past mere personal ethical conduct to the work of intentionally doing good to and for others. Beauty takes the pursuit of truth past the accumulation of knowledge to the proclamation and application of truth in the name of caring for others. Beauty draws us deeper into community. We ache to share the experience of beauty with other people, to look at someone near us and say, “Do you hear that? Do you see that? How beautiful!” Beauty is a power wielded by the hand of God.

we can use beauty to attract others to what is good and true. For the Christian, this is an important part of what it means to carry out Christ’s great commission, to bear witness to the story and the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus.25 Truth without beauty is not enough. The same goes for good works. They need beauty to accompany them. Without beauty, truth and goodness lie flat, and they were not meant to. They were meant to be adorned. They were meant to be attractive.

Blaise Pascal wrote, “Every man is almost always led to believe not through proof, but through that which is attractive.”

2. Pursuing Perfection: Michelangelo’s David and Our Hunger for Glory

Michelangelo regarded sculpture as the pinnacle of art. He hated painting—oil painting especially, which he described as “suitable for women . . . or for idlers.” For Michelangelo, painting held little virtue. Landscape painting was nothing but “a vague and deceitful sketch, a game for children and uneducated men,” and portraiture was little more than “flattery of idle curiosity and of the imperfect illusions of the senses.”

Did the man responsible for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with its thousand square meters of space and over three hundred individual figures really despise painting this much? It seems so. Concerning that particular project, he wrote, “This is not my profession. I am wasting my time, and all for nothing. May God help me!”

3. The Sacred and The Profane: Caravaggio and the Paradox of Corruption and Grace

Biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon said, “He was a thunder-stroke. There is art before Caravaggio and art after Caravaggio, and they aren’t the same thing. The whole of Rembrandt’s career is a response to the thunderstrike of seeing Caravaggio’s art.”

Rome in those days drew a distinction between the sacred and the profane. The sacred encompassed things set apart for a holy purpose; the profane, by contrast, involved mundane individual concerns. The profane world was composed of what people could know through their senses—the natural world of everyday life that we experience as comprehensible. The sacred world was everything beyond the world we experience with our senses. If knowability was the mark of the profane, then awe and wonder belonged to the sacred.

Though Caravaggio had a gift when it came to painting profane subject matter, and though he was able to sell what he produced, the real money was in religious art. There were, of course, altruistic reasons for this. The church knew these works helped illustrate biblical narratives and religious principles for people who didn’t own Bibles or couldn’t read. Art was a form of evangelism—a pictorial welcome into the faith with the goal of inspiring devotion to God and the church. This is why so much of the art from Europe in the Middle Ages, before photography or widespread travel, depicted biblical narratives in a European context. Much of the architecture, clothing, technology, and even skin tones of biblical characters—Jesus included—looked European to emphasize that the story of Scripture applied to people in their context. Depicting Jesus as he actually was—a Middle Eastern, dark-skinned Jew—wasn’t a value at that time because the goal of art wasn’t historical accuracy; it was accessibility. This is why so many European paintings of biblical stories from that time are so unflinchingly European in appearance.

As viewers developed their visual vocabulary, they could stand in front of a painting and read an entire sermon in a single frame.

By setting the divine rescue in the context of the human agony of the whole situation, Caravaggio tells the sacred story by way of emphasizing the profane, stunning viewers with his intensity and directness. He didn’t want to make art that was only meant to be glanced at. He wanted to create a visceral experience for his viewers—something that would stop them, trouble them, or arouse whatever might be sleeping in their souls. He used real-life models—often prostitutes and peasants—to emphasize the intersection between heaven and earth. He didn’t like the idealized image of humanity and much preferred to paint people as they were, with their flaws and defects on display. He was a painter for the poor, whose mission was to emphasize that the gospel was for poor people. He wanted to leave room for ambiguity, doubt, and sorrow. He wanted the simple difficulty of living in this world to be written on his subjects’ faces.

This is the paradox of Caravaggio—he brought so much suffering on himself, with such bravado and acrimony, yet when he picked up his brush, the Christ he rendered was the Redeemer of the vulnerable.

His reputation was too much to overcome. It would take nearly three hundred years for his name to return and his work to be esteemed. Still, historian Giuliano Briganti said, “After him, painting would never be the same again. His revolution was a profound and irreversible modification of the emotional and intellectual relation between the artist and his subject.”49 How is this possible if “immediately after his death, he was all but forgotten, written off as a wasted talent?”

“What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.”

4. Rembrandt is in the Wind: The Tragedy of Desecration and the Hope of Redemption

“Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses.” Rembrandt van Rijn

5. Borrowed Light: Johannes Vermeer and the Mystery of Creation

To understand Vermeer, we must understand this: technology shapes art. What used to be stationary becomes portable. What once was expensive becomes affordable. What used to take hours to load in an analog world takes seconds to process digitally. Every generation of artists borrows technological progress from the generations before. And every generation advances technology for those who come after them. This reflects the concept of borrowed light—light that filters from one room into another that would be otherwise dark. Rembrandt produced what he did because he studied Caravaggio. Van Gogh studied Rembrandt. And nearly every artist of note in the last hundred years has studied all three.

Another oddity about his work is that all we have are paintings—no drawings. It was common for painters to sketch studies of their compositions and work off those drawings as they painted. No such drawings by Vermeer exist.

So, what did he choose to paint? What would be the subject matter of his artistic vision? He chose the most dignified thing in the world: people in a room doing ordinary things. And to what effect? Awe.

Leonardo da Vinci’s “principles for the development of a complete mind,” written two hundred years earlier, stated, “Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

6. Creating in Community: Jean Frédéric Bazille, the Impressionists,

and the Importance of Belonging

“A proper community is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members—among them the need to need one another.” Wendell Berry

One of the lines of convention Delacroix mastered and then ventured beyond was in his brushwork. His steady hand could produce clean lines and precise detail, but he found that less precise, more active brushwork could render life in ways fundamental precision couldn’t. The brush could render passion.

In the late 1860s, Renoir also shared studio space with Bazille —a nice room at 9 rue de la Condamine. The studio became a hub for this fellowship of artists, which soon began to grow. Other painters, including Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, and Edgar Degas, came over to the studio to spend time with Renoir, Monet, and Manet at Bazille’s place.

They shared a common perspective on where they believed art was going, which Bazille summarized by saying, “The big classical compositions are finished; an ordinary view of daily life would be much more interesting.”

It was imperative for these artists to work in community, not in isolation. They needed one another. They needed to be around each other. They needed to be able to share a common space—a place where they could gather and speak freely. A place where they could show what they were working on to get feedback, encouragement, and pushback. They needed voices that understood what they were trying to do. They needed assurance that they were not fools. And if they were in fact fools, they needed to be a tribe of fools together. They needed a place, and that’s exactly what Bazille gave them.

A French photographer who went by the name Nadar, who had become a fan of this community’s work, offered Monet and his friends use of the second floor of his studio space to hold an exhibition of their own. In 1874, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, and a female painter named Berthe Morisot formed a fellowship they called the Cooperative and Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. Their distinctives were threefold:

“1. The organization of free exhibitions, without juries or prizes, where each of the associates will be able to show his work.

2. The sale of said works.

3. The publication, at the earliest opportunity, of a journal concerned exclusively with the arts.” For it was not enough just to show one’s work; they also had to be shown properly . . . With the works well displayed, the next step was to sell them.

The Anonymous Society were the rejects of the Salon.

If they were going to make it, there was work to be done. “The works also had to be talked about. The artist’s methods explained. The public had to be won over. This was the role of the critics and the press . . . Other champions were needed.”

Emile Zola said, “…They were called Impressionists in a spirit of mockery; Impressionists they remained out of pluck.”

Earlier that year, when Bazille painted the picture of his studio, neither he nor his fellow artists were successful or respected in Paris. But they were friends. They were a band of painters who shared ideas, supplies, and studio space to create some of the world’s most beloved art. And they were at ease with one another. In Bazille’s *Studio; 9 rue de la Condamine*, there is no apparent hierarchy, no apparent leader. Just people who labored together in the pursuit of using their gifts to accomplish something meaningful.

He gave friendship. He provided space. He shared supplies. He welcomed gatherings. He purchased art his friends made. And lest we forget, he fought and died for his countrymen, which is, as Jesus said, the highest form of love—laying down your life for your friends.18 We live in communities that need goodness, truth, and beauty. And we play a role in advancing those transcendentals that make us human. We are to curate them for others. We play a role in blowing on the embers of “whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.” Whatever is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things—and be a part of them. Who knows what could happen?

7. The Striving Artist: Vincent Van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard and The Elusive Nature of Contentment

In 1888, when he painted The Red Vineyard, Vincent was experimenting with the idea that color alone could generate an aesthetic that would capture peoples’ hearts and imaginations.

He was studying color theory through the art and writings of Georges Seurat, who believed the scientific application of color was like any other natural law. Seurat believed knowledge of how the eye and the brain communicated with each other could be used to create a new language of art based on the arrangement of hues, color intensity, and shapes—that there was a scientific reason that art seemed to speak to the soul.

From memory, Vincent set out to capture the way he remembered the colors of the vendage and how they lay against each other. As it goes with so many artists, his composition developed in his mind before it ever made its way onto a canvas. His correspondences show him as a man who was always studying the world before him. He was always thinking, always imagining, always planning his next work.

*The Red Vineyard* relies almost exclusively on the color spectrum between red and yellow. This was a deliberate challenge Vincent set for himself. In his day, the idea of painting a scene from memory based on a desire to use a particular color spectrum was backward. Many artists took their easels and paints outside and captured what they saw. Vincent wanted to capture what he felt as he tried to remember what he saw. This is the very nature of Impressionism—painting not a perfect copy of the thing in view, but an impression of it—the artist’s impression of what he saw in it and how he felt about it.

Vincent believed that although his use of vibrant color made his paintings appear less realistic, it helped the paintings come alive.

This is the mysterious, transcendent quality of art—something in the liniment oil and pigment breaks through the plain of the canvas and penetrates the human soul in a way that suddenly and inexplicably matters. This transcendence is what compels a tourist in a museum to circle back to a particular painting she encountered that day for one last look before she leaves. She may not be able to say why, but she feels she must return. So she does. And feeling as though she is forcing a sort of disconnection when she at last pulls herself away, she vows to remember the piece—to carry it with her in the recesses of her heart. And she does. The work never again appears to her as an ordinary piece of art, but as part of her own collection. When she saw the work the first time, it belonged to the world. But by the time she leaves that initial viewing, it belongs to her.

This is the intangibility of genius—to create work that transfers from the canvas, the page, or the instrument into the heart of another person, arousing a longing for beauty and an end to sadness. This was what Vincent wanted to create—art that would transfer from his easel into someone else’s soul to work as a balm of healing for the broken.

To add to the tragedy of his death, when Vincent shot himself, he was closer than he could have imagined to the recognition he so very much desired. He did not know his work would soon become a staple in the Brussels Art Expo. He did not know that just twenty-four years after his death, in 1914, his letters to Theo would be published in a three-volume set. He would have been in his early sixties had he lived to see this. He did not know that twenty years after that, in 1934, Irving Stone would write a bestselling biographical novel called Lust for Life, based on those letters, or that twenty-two years after that, in 1956, Kirk Douglas would play him in the motion picture based on Stone’s book.

In 1891, the year after Vincent’s death, art critic Octave Mirbeau compared Vincent to his Dutch predecessor, the Master himself, Rembrandt. Mirbeau wrote, “Van Gogh does not always adhere to the discipline nor to the sobriety of the Dutch master; but he often equals his eloquence and his prodigious ability to render life.”

In 1889, Vincent sent off his six paintings, and when the time came, the Brussels Art Expo arranged them as he requested. His canvases were displayed alongside works from Paul Cézanne, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin—all painters on the leading edge of Postimpressionism. Though Vincent himself would become the most celebrated Postimpressionist of all time, the fact that all these names were on the invite list together telegraphed that just as the Impressionists of the 1860s and 1870s overtook Realists and Romantics who came before them, the Postimpressionists would soon surpass the Impressionists as the darlings of European art.

One reason he became the face of Postimpressionism was because his work most acutely displayed the characteristics of that era—thick paint application, vibrant colors, geometric compositions, and distorted details. He employed them all.

Vincent finished around 860 complete oil paintings over the course of his life as a painter.25 During this same period, he also produced another 1,240 works in the form of watercolors, sketches, and prints, and he wrote more than 900 letters—650 of them to his brother and benefactor, Theo. All told, this comes to just over 3,000 individual works of art and writing that we know of from Vincent.

VINCENT VAN GOGH’S BODY OF WORK

860—Complete oil paintings

1,240—Sketches, watercolors, prints

900—Letters (650 to Theo van Gogh)

3,000—Total individual works

Rembrandt produced roughly six hundred oil paintings during his career, which spanned more than forty years. Claude Monet, van Gogh’s contemporary, painted around 2,500 paintings over the course of sixty years. Paul Cézanne painted nine hundred canvases over forty years. On average Rembrandt completed fifteen canvases per year; Monet, forty-two; and Cézanne, twenty-three.

His painting career lasted only nine years, from late 1881 through July 1890. That’s it. He painted from age twenty-eight to thirty-seven.

Now add in the 2,140 other watercolors, sketches, prints, and letters he composed during those nine years, and we’re left with a heartbreaking picture: Somewhere in that flurry of motion between painter and canvas was a man held captive by an insatiable appetite to capture the world he wanted while being unable to connect with the world he had. It seemed to be killing him.

***Vincent said, “Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke.”***

C. S. Lewis wrote, “The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.”

This is the power of art. It happens in time and space, but it points to the eternal. It takes the objects and ideas it finds lying around, the things of the here and now, and assembles them into something that belongs to a world outside of time. The trick for artists is to believe this is the true nature of their work, especially while they are in the process of making it, whether it sells or not.

Sometimes this is the artist’s work—to stand and knock on the door of glory and, whenever possible, siphon little wisps of smoke from those places where we catch a glimpse of the light so that others might see and believe. What can we show each other of glory anyway except light in shadow? What glory can anyone see in any of us except for wisps of smoke, traces of the great burning fire? And is that not enough for now—to show enough to prove there’s more?

8. Beyond Imagination: Henry O. Tanner, Race, and the Humble Power of Curiosity

It wasn’t just the art in Paris that caught his attention; it was also the near absence of racial prejudice. Tanner was accepted in France in ways he never was in the States. For example, as his fame grew, European reviewers rarely referred to his race. He said, “In Paris, no one regards me curiously. I am simply M. Tanner, an American artist. Nobody knows or cares what was the complexion of my forebears. I live and work there on terms of absolute social equality.”

What made Tanner’s African American genre paintings (of which there are only two) particularly innovative was that his natural, dignified depictions of Black people stood in sharp contrast to the typical depictions of his time, which caricatured them as clownlike entertainers. Tanner wanted to show people more. He wanted to show the humanity, pathos, and quiet industry of the African American family—particularly of the men.

Tanner regarded pedagogical themes, as seen in The Bagpipe Lesson, The Banjo Lesson, The Thankful Poor, and The Young Sabot Maker, as a kind of Trojan horse for getting people to reconsider prejudices. Art has always been a means of shaping hearts and minds. Paintings showing the transmission of culture and education from one generation to the next “enabled him to symbolically construct forms of kinship that were both familiar and yet strange to viewers.”

To Tanner, the theme of teaching and learning was a touchpoint of common dignity shared by all. We are shaped by those who come before us, by those who invest in us, by those who teach us skills, by those who hand down convictions, and by those who pour love into us when we are young.

Tanner wanted to teach people a new way to see.

Tanner recognized that his artistic gift was a powerful evangelistic tool. He said, “I rejoice in my ability to give blessings to others . . . I invited the Christ spirit to manifest in me.”

As a painter of biblical scenes, Tanner didn’t just want people to see Scripture; he wanted to show it to them. This is what artists do. He wanted to guide his viewers’ eyes through familiar narratives to curate the story, to make connections, to tell it true.

Henry Tanner wanted to “preach with his brush.”

9. What Remains Unsaid: Edward Hopper, Loneliness, and Our Longing for Connection

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist . . . The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm.” Edward Hopper

One of his friends, fellow illustrator Walter Tittle, said he saw Edward struggle “from long periods of unconquerable inertia, sitting for days at a time before his easel in helpless unhappiness, unable to raise a hand to break the spell.”

“Why I [Hopper] select certain subjects rather than others, I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience.” Following his former teacher’s advice, he was much more concerned about rendering a feeling than a subject.

Many of his locations were places people went to but did not live in: a movie theater, a front porch, a diner, an automat, an office at night, and a hotel lobby. Everyone is moving. No one is settled. Each person carries inside them a world of preoccupation, concern, and loyalties, but seldom do we see these things on display. If, as Hopper said, great art displays the vast and varied inner life of the artist, what he shows us about himself is a profound sense of distance from the world.

It is the potential of the story, not the absence of one, that draws us to Hopper’s work because as human beings, if there’s one thing we know instinctively, it’s that there must be a story. Everything has a story. Everyone has a story. And every story is, in some way, sacred.

Even children pick up on this. In a New York Times article, Robert Coles, a former English teacher, noticed that out on the playground, his students were “marvelously forceful and vigorous storytellers. But when they were asked to write, they commonly became inarticulate, even fearfully so. ‘I can’t write,’ became their refrain.” Coles decided to turn his English class into an informal art seminar and started showing slides of work by Picasso, Pissarro, Remington, Renoir, and Hopper. Coles wrote, “I noticed that they wanted to connect what they saw to stories, which they constructed as I flashed one Hopper slide after another against the wall. It was almost as if this 20th-century American realist painter . . . somehow addressed these children, prompted in them a desire to respond to his pictures by telling of their various experiences.”

Edward’s success as a celebrated artist was not meteoric, but the slow, steady culmination of doing the next thing.

10. Measuring A Life: Lilias Trotter and the Joys and Sorrows of Sacrificial Obedience

[Trotter] wrote, ***“We ourselves are saved to save. We are made to give, to let everything go if only we may have more to give. The pebble takes in the rays of light that fall upon it, but the diamond flashes them out again. Every facet is means, not simply for drinking more in, but for giving more out. A flower that stops short of its flowering misses its purpose.”***

Ruskin believed “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way . . . To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.”

When Lily looked at the world, she saw suffering. Her heart broke for the destitute women in her city. At that time, the YWCA was just getting started, ministering to the needs of poor women in London, and Lilias got involved. She started working for a hostel that brought the prostitutes of Victoria Station in off the street to give them a place to live while teaching them marketable skills. She also helped start the first restaurant for women only in London. Most restaurants then were for wealthy people. Working women would have to bring food from home and often eat while sitting on the sidewalks. She opened a place that would serve them hot meals and provide shelter—both physical and spiritual.

Ruskin’s pursuit of Lilias was not just about her art, but of her singularity of focus. The potential he recognized in her could only come to fruition if she devoted herself wholly to her craft. But he felt Lilias’s ministry was competing with her art, and in truth it was. He told Lilias if she would devote herself to art, “she would be the greatest living painter in Europe and do things that would be immortal.” He wanted her to choose between her ministry and her art—forcing her to face the crisis of her life: What role would her art play?

[Trotter] wrote, “I see clear as daylight now, that I cannot dedicate myself to painting in the way that he means and continue to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

Lilias made up her mind—she would give herself to serving the poor, and in whatever role her art played, she would use her creative instinct and imagination to create places where the downtrodden would find respect, support, and, if God allowed, Christ himself.

…dying . . . the liberty of those who have nothing to lose, because they have nothing to keep. We can do without anything while we have God.”

Her decision to choose mission work over art wasn’t simple, nor was it painless. For the rest of her life, she carried in her heart the ache of not having developed her art. It was the burden many artists, athletes, musicians, and craftspeople come to know when they must set to the side what they once hoped might be their primary calling in order to pursue another path. It is a sacred, lonesome kind of sorrow—always imagining what could have been, always questioning the present, always asking whether the chosen path was the way of wisdom or folly.

And yet on the other side of that sorrow lay her belief that success in God’s kingdom comes by losing, not gaining. Quoting the nineteenth-century priest Ugo Bassi, Lilias wrote in her diary, ***“Measure thy life by loss, not by gain; not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth. For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice, and he who suffers most has most to give.”***

Lilias Trotter revolutionized mission work as we know it. She began her ministry before learning the language, using art to paint the gospel in pictures—effectively inventing wordless evangelism.

Epilogue: A World Short on Masters

The mastery of something leads to a greater enjoyment of it. Singers, musicians, painters, writers, athletes, and artists of all stripes know this. The harder we work at something, the more we are able to enjoy it. Rembrandt knew it too. Later he would advise, “Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.” Annie Dillard said it another way: “Who will teach me to write? The page, the page, that eternal blankness.”