Mysteries of the Monogrammist I.S.

I first heard about the Monogrammist I.S. as a Ph.D. student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in the mid-1990s, from my advisor Volker Manuth, Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art. Newly-arrived from the Freie Universität in Berlin, he brought with him extensive knowledge of Rembrandt, and his circle of friends, pupils and followers, some of whom were still quite obscure. In connection with a striking painting in the collection of Alfred and Isabel Bader, of Two Scholars in a High Room, Manuth pointed out the artist’s singular oeuvre, and the many unresolved questions about his biography, including the idea that he may have hailed from Scandinavia. The costumes in various of his works had been linked to Sweden, and a large number of his paintings were located in Swedish public and private collections. His name and origins, however, remained unknown.

One of the great mysteries in my chosen field of Dutch art of the seventeenth century begins with a cryptic entry in the inventory of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s paintings taken in Antwerp in 1659, for “A Portrait on Wood of an Old Woman Wearing a Fur Coat and on her Head a Shawl with Many Colours”, by “I.S.”, and dated 1651. It was only in 1904 that a distinctive artistic personality began to emerge, when an art historian linked this painting to others by the same hand, many of them bearing the same neat, tiny monogram. Over forty works are now given to this artist, almost all showing a similarly sober palette and decisive rendering of forms and textures in fine detail. He evidently learned how to paint in Leiden in the early 1630s, with an artist close to Rembrandt, possibly Gerard Dou, or David Bailly, also represented in the exhibition. At the same time, the powerful and distinctive aesthetic sensibility expressed through a great command of the medium of oil paint suggest that he also studied the works of Rembrandt and Jan Lievens. These inspiring models, as well as his own native talent, contribute to the remarkably high level of his works.

Unforgettable on their own, and now brought together in substantial quantity, the Serlachius Museum’s presentation of this artist’s works (the first ever), achieved the tour de force that I anticipated. The paintings lined the walls of a gallery in the main museum facility, built onto the historic house of paper magnate Gösta Serlachius, in a beautiful lakeside setting in the forest outside the mill town (itself quite industrial in character). The visitor, steered through the curtained entrance, first encounters the early paintings, including two images of young students, one of 1633 from Munich, with a dutiful figure at a desk shown in profile, with vanitas motifs, and the remarkable, and utterly unique variation on the theme, showing a frustrated young man at his desk, glowering at the viewer, with clenched fist, and leg shackled to a large wooden block, but most remarkably, without a shirt, revealing fleshy breasts. This set of traits even prompted a fellow attendee of the opening, himself a plastic surgeon, to propose a diagnosis of XXY chromosome. The more conventional interpretation, of a young man not benefitting from regular exercise, and figuratively burdened by the knowledge acquired through study (recalling St. Paul: “much studying is a weariness of the flesh”) likewise does not detract from the powerful impact of this relatively early work. It is clear that the artist sought to address more than just a single instance, looking more widely to examine the human condition, in the young man’s uncompromising and unforgettable gaze.

Perhaps the single most impressive aspect of this artist’s talent is one often overlooked: composition. In nearly all of his works he achieves remarkable concentration. Even when he is taking his pictorial idea largely from Rembrandt, in his recasting of the master’s early Baptism of the Eunuch in Utrecht, he declutters the pictorial space and isolates the Deacon Philip’s head against the backdrop of the hill behind him. One does wish however that he had given the Eunuch greater prominence, as Rembrandt had. And also that this painting had not suffered so much from surface wear. In many works his heads fill the frame for monumental effect, as in his singular masterpiece, the Old Woman in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna: in this respect he clearly follows Lievens, a point driven home by the astute inclusion of his early Prophetess from the Rijksmuseum (on loan to the Lakenhal).

The exhibition also makes clear at the same time that this artist cultivated an appetite for a variety of personal types. There is little sense of repetition as we move from one striking visage to the next. In this aspect we come closer to Rembrandt again (Lievens was more willing to repeat types and ideas) and his openness and pursuit of universality. The artist’s scholarly bent is not radical, however, but often quite pious, as when he renders the two scholars in the evocative painting from the Bader Collection in Kingston, Canada, who very much look like they must be ecclesiastics, but also in the other painting by him in the same collection, simply of an old woman singing, even more clearly in a spiritual context. In other instances, however, such as the so-called Abbess in the museum in Stockholm, the dress is secular, and the moral message does not extend beyond the Vanitas reference of the skull on the table.

The exhibition was an opportunity to take stock of the geographic references in the dress of many this artist’s paintings. The prevalence of tall hats, long kaftan-like coats and colourful shawls lead scholars to point to Scandinavia. Fortunately, costume specialist Marieke de Winkel took on the challenge of analyzing the available evidence, and was able to draw links to costume in present-day Poland, Estonia, and Latvia, in the catalogue essay. This appears to support the notion that our anonymous artist travelled to those regions.

The works contain further clues to the artist. Another Stockholm painting in the exhibition, the Man with a Growth on his Nose, attests to a possible medical background of the artist, as suggested by Manuth and De Winkel in the catalogue essay. The same applies to the deeply moving Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, a recent brilliant acquisition by the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. Very prominently on the eyelid to the right, there is a red growth, painstakingly observed. The suffering of this imperfection only adds a note of pathos to the powerful sense of meditative calm and assurance projecting from the woman’s expression, with pursed lips, lowered eyelids, and slightly raised head and tilted gaze. This last device was borrowed from Jan Lievens, who regularly used it to endow his faces with grandeur and a sense of aspiration. The artist’s remarkable pursuit of emotional effect likewise surfaces in the newly-discovered Man with One Eye, with the head tilted down and the eyebrows slightly pinched. Together with the Vienna painting, of a handsome and vibrant old woman with only a web of wrinkles, these works make clear that this uncompromising artist deserves to take a place among the most talented artists in the circle of Rembrandt and Lievens. And make the puzzle of his identity even more compelling.