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Lot Essay
The Beggar with a Wooden Leg is one of the largest and most impressive of Rembrandt's prints of beggars and tramps, offered here on a beautiful sheet with wide margins. This particular figure was identified in Clement de Jonghe’s inventory as capteyn eenbeen ('Captain One-Leg'), who seems to have been a notorious beggar from the streets of Amsterdam. Holm Bevers rightly remarked that ‘…the man is not a real invalid, because his leg has not been amputated, but is just bent back behind him, and because of this he would fall into the category of dishonest beggars, who supported themselves using cunning and deceit.’ (quoted in: Hinterding, 2008, p. 331).
Jacques Callot’s famous etching series Les Gueux ('The Beggars') of 1622 were certainly an inspiration for this motif, and examples are known to have been in Rembrandt's collection. Rembrandt's treatments of the subject were created as stand-alone works rather than as parts of a series, and are usually modest in scale and show the subjects as isolated figures with no precise indication of setting. During his Leiden period, between about 1628 and 1631, Rembrandt was especially preoccupied with the subject. He was fascinated by the humanity and diverse experiences expressed in the faces and physiognomy of the beggars, tramps, street musicians, hawkers and other vagabonds, who lived on the fringes of society and were readily seen on the streets of Leiden and Amsterdam. Beggars had already been depicted in the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but were generally portrayed as deserving moral censure or derision. Rembrandt's figures, in comparison, possess greater naturalism and personality than those depicted by other artists as a vehicle for social comment, as Simon Schama observed: 'There is something about the spectacle of human ruin, the type that is at the opposite extreme to the classical hero, that Rembrandt found authentically heroic…[his depictions were] not, moreover, the tamely deferential pauper of the charity houses and Sunday preaching, but the real thing: crook-backed, panhandling, foulmouthed, and scrofulous; ungrateful, unrepentant, dangerous...' (Schama, 1999, pp. 304).
Jacques Callot’s famous etching series Les Gueux ('The Beggars') of 1622 were certainly an inspiration for this motif, and examples are known to have been in Rembrandt's collection. Rembrandt's treatments of the subject were created as stand-alone works rather than as parts of a series, and are usually modest in scale and show the subjects as isolated figures with no precise indication of setting. During his Leiden period, between about 1628 and 1631, Rembrandt was especially preoccupied with the subject. He was fascinated by the humanity and diverse experiences expressed in the faces and physiognomy of the beggars, tramps, street musicians, hawkers and other vagabonds, who lived on the fringes of society and were readily seen on the streets of Leiden and Amsterdam. Beggars had already been depicted in the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but were generally portrayed as deserving moral censure or derision. Rembrandt's figures, in comparison, possess greater naturalism and personality than those depicted by other artists as a vehicle for social comment, as Simon Schama observed: 'There is something about the spectacle of human ruin, the type that is at the opposite extreme to the classical hero, that Rembrandt found authentically heroic…[his depictions were] not, moreover, the tamely deferential pauper of the charity houses and Sunday preaching, but the real thing: crook-backed, panhandling, foulmouthed, and scrofulous; ungrateful, unrepentant, dangerous...' (Schama, 1999, pp. 304).