The Archangel Raphael in the House of Tobit

Entry

The old Tobit, blinded by a swallow’s droppings, is sitting by a hearth, speaking to the angel standing next to him, while making a gesture with his left hand. Tobit’s wife, Anna, who owing to her husband’s blindness, must now earn a living by weaving, is seated on the left with a distaff in her hand. In the background, the young Tobias is putting on his shoes, preparing to accompany the angel on a journey to Medea to get back a sum of money that his father had deposited twenty years earlier (Tobit 5:23). Tobit ends his conversation with the angel as follows: ‘God send you a good journey […] and the angel of God keep you company’ (Tobit 5:21). He does not know that his son’s companion is the Archangel Raphael, sent by God to help Tobias. Rembrandt identified him as an angel by giving him wings, as every reader of the Old Testament Apocryphal Book of Tobit would have recognized. His true identity was revealed to Tobias and his family only at the end of the story.

The drawing consists mainly of delicate, broken pen lines. Darker accents were added to the figure of Anna and to the motifs in the foreground. Framing lines demarcating the border of the drawing were sketched in before the narrative scene itself was begun. There is another drawing of the same subject in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (inv. no. R 90 recto (PK)), which was reduced on all sides.² It was at first considered to be a copy, but Sumowski (1964) later declared it to be the original. It is remarkable how copyists were able to transcribe Rembrandt’s scenes so precisely. It is, however, possible to recognize a copy by its more careful treatment of line, resulting in a unified pattern of lines that lacks the immediacy and strength of the original. The creative process in which the artist’s vision takes shape is less clearly visible. Some copies can be recognized as such without much difficulty, but this was not the case, initially at least, with the drawings in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

In the Rotterdam drawing, the lines in the upper left-hand area and the chimney have been more spontaneously drawn without interruptions. A more minor difference can be seen in young Tobias’s face: in the Amsterdam drawing, his mouth is indicated with an almost straight line, whereas in the Rotterdam drawing two lines have been used, making his mouth seem open. It is perhaps typical of a copyist to consider Rembrandt’s unique style to be too peculiar, causing him to render a particular shape in a more stereotyped and recognizable way. The difference in the handling of line in the background and in the chimney can also be seen in the line marking the edge of the hair near the angel’s face. In the Rotterdam drawing, this line is darker, while in the Amsterdam drawing it is in the same tone as the surrounding lines.

The stages that led to the handling of this detail can easily be seen in the Rotterdam drawing, making a strong case for Rembrandt’s authorship. The sleeping dog in the foreground and Tobit have been rendered with more sureness of touch. The relationship between the light and dark lines in the figure of Tobit gives him a more rounded quality. All things considered, the Rotterdam drawing seems to be superior in quality to the museum’s drawing and the likely prototype from which it was copied. Whether it should be considered an original drawing by Rembrandt remains an open question; its condition hampers a final judgement. In the opinion of Giltaij, it, too, is a school work, copied, like the Amsterdam sheet, from a lost prototype by the master.

Peter Schatborn, 2018