The Restoration of Rembrandt’s Syndics

Esther Van Duijn

doi:10.52476/trb.9763

Abstract

This article focuses on the reason why a cleaning controversy about the restoration of Rembrandt’s Syndics broke out nearly two and a half years after the work was completed in 1929 and how Rijksmuseum director Frederik Schmidt-Degener dealt with the challenges. Initiated by local artists from the Amsterdam artist society Arti et Amicitiae, the controversy was fuelled by provocative questionnaires circulated among artists and restorers by the daily De Telegraaf. A vindictive letter by Rijksmuseum restorer Pieter Bakker, who restored The Syndics in 1929, but left the museum on mental health grounds in 1930, fanned the flames still further, even though it was not published in the end. This cleaning controversy was not unique; arguments about the supposed dangers of cleaning paintings were fought out in public in European countries throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After a cleaning controversy about Frans Hals paintings in Haarlem – which dragged on between 1909 and 1927 – The Syndics cleaning controversy was the second in the Netherlands. It was also the last. This previously unexplored episode in the Rijksmuseum’s conservation history carries a lesson in open communication regarding the restoration of cultural heritage. It is a lesson that is still valid today.

Highlights

I n the nineteenth century, the art world in many European countries, France, England and Germany among them, was shaken by what were known as cleaning controversies – public debates about the cleaning of old master paintings in national collections that were fought out in the press.[1]
The Netherlands did not experience its first controversy of this kind until the first decades of the twentieth century, when lengthy discussions about the treatment of Frans Hals’s large group portraits of civic guard companies and governors of institutions featured in newspapers in Haarlem between 1909 and 1927.3 Paintings by Dutch seventeenth-cen tury artists like Hals and Rembrandt van Rijn have been the subject of cleaning controversies relatively often, in the Netherlands and beyond, because it was generally believed that these artists had used oil paint, and resinous glazes and intermediate varnish layers that dissolve more than oil paint.[4]
In 1911 this issue had been brought to the attention of the Committee of Supervision and Advice for the Paintings of the City of Amsterdam, by one of its members, the art historian the rijksmuseum bulletin and Rembrandt connoisseur Abraham Bredius (1855-1946).[6]

Summary

Introduction

I n the nineteenth century, the art world in many European countries, France, England and Germany among them, was shaken by what were known as cleaning controversies – public debates about the cleaning of old master paintings in national collections that were fought out in the press.[1]. In this article the author investigates why a cleaning controversy broke out during the autumn and winter of 1932 about a restoration treatment that had taken place nearly two and a half years earlier, the role Amster dam artists played in this debate, and how Rijksmuseum director Frederik Schmidt-Degener (1881-1941) dealt with the ensuing challenges

Results

Conclusion