File:Rembrandt van Rijn - Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) - RR-111 - Leiden Collection.jpg
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Captions
Summary
editRembrandt: Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Artist |
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Title |
label QS:Lde,"Der bewusstlose Patient (Allegorie des Geruchs)"
label QS:Lfr,"L'Odorat, ou le patient inconscient"
label QS:Lnl,"De flauwgevallen patiënt (Allegorie van de Geur)" |
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Part of | The Senses | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Object type | painting | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Genre | allegory | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Description |
Allegory of Smell features a young man wearing a colorful, loosely-draped housecoat, who has fainted and is slumped in a chair. An extremely worried old woman wearing a fur-trimmed hooded mantle tries to revive him by holding a white handkerchief to his nose, presumably one containing smelling salts. An equally old man, his right hand covered by a white cloth, holds the youth’s bare right forearm and anxiously awaits to see if the woman’s efforts succeed. His colorful wardrobe, earring and gold chains, as well as the knives, scissors, razors and lotions displayed in a large wooden cupboard, identify him as a barber-surgeon, a profession renowned for its quacks. The position of the young man’s exposed forearm indicates that before the youth fainted, the quack was preparing to draw blood from one of the large veins in the patient’s arm, a practice called bloodletting.11 The quack would have used his white cloth to wipe up the blood after completing his procedure. Patients being bled were generally portrayed with their lower arm exposed, exactly as in the image of another bloodletting (fig 8).12 Once pricked with a lancet (a two-edged surgical knife or blade with a sharp point), the blood would drip into a bowl often held by an assistant. Occasionally patients would faint at the end of a bloodletting, a condition deemed to indicate the treatment’s success. Here, however, one sees neither wound nor blood, neither bandage nor bowl, which means that the young man has not fainted in reaction to such a session, but in anticipation of it. Rembrandt’s image, indeed, not only mocks the elderly woman’s excessive concern about the patient’s condition and the quack’s profession, but also the young man’s lack of inner fortitude. Each of the three panel paintings in Rembrandt’s series of Five Senses in The Leiden Collection feature three tightly-cropped figures who focus on a shared experience in a dark, undefined space. Rembrandt robed his figures in bright pink and light blue attire, which, lit by artificial light sources seen and unseen, provide splashes of color that greatly enliven the images. These surgeons, patients, and singers—young, old, male, female, crude and refined—are unforgettably expressive characters involved in activities that connect the senses of smell, touch and hearing in ways both humorous and empathetic. |
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Date |
between 1624 and 1625 date QS:P,+1624-00-00T00:00:00Z/8,P1319,+1624-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1326,+1625-00-00T00:00:00Z/9 |
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Medium | oil on panel | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dimensions |
height: 21.5 cm (8.4 in) ; width: 17.7 cm (6.9 in) dimensions QS:P2048,+21.5U174728 dimensions QS:P2049,+17.7U174728 |
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Collection |
institution QS:P195,Q15638014 |
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Accession number |
RR-111 (Leiden Collection) |
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Object history |
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Exhibition history | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Inscriptions | Soon after the acquisition of the Allegory of Smell in September 2015, Rembrandt’s monogram, RHF, was discovered on a drawing of a man wearing a tabard and fur hat attached to the wooden cupboard at the upper right, making it the earliest signed painting in the master’s oeuvre. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Notes |
When this series was dispersed is not known, but probably not before the early eighteenth century, at which time, it seems, all of these compositions were expanded after Rembrandt’s original panels had been set into larger ones. These later additions have been removed. Just how Rembrandt devised the various scenes in his series of the Five Senses, and the sequence in which he intended them to be viewed, is not known. Nevertheless, it is clear that with the exception of Allegory of Smell, the young master loosely followed long-established iconographic traditions for his compositional inventions. For example, a number of sixteenth-century artists based their depictions of the Allegory of Touch on Lucas van Leyden’s The Stone Operation. |
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References |
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Source/Photographer | https://web.archive.org/web/20171018143435/https://www.rembrandthuis.nl/nl/bezoek/tentoonstellingen/rembrandts-eerste-schilderijen-de-vier-zintuigen/ | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Other versions | https://teylers.adlibhosting.com/ais6/Details/museum/35624 |
Annotations InfoField | This image is annotated: View the annotations at Commons |
Rembrandt’s monogram, RHF
Licensing
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This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".
This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details. |
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Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
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current | 20:18, 18 June 2022 | 2,500 × 3,026 (3.45 MB) | BotMultichill (talk | contribs) | Uploading based on Wikidata item Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) (Q27885055) from https://www.theleidencollection.com/wp-content/uploads/downloadable/RR-111-Rembrandt_van_Rijn-Allegory_of_Smell.jpg |
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File usage on Commons
The following 7 pages use this file:
- Paintings by Rembrandt
- File:Leiden Collection.1.JPG
- File:Rembrandt-SMELL.jpg (file redirect)
- File:Rembrandt van Rijn - Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) - RR-111 - Leiden Collection.jpg
- File:Smell, by Rembrandt.jpg
- File:The fainted patient, by Rembrandt.jpg
- Category:Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) by Rembrandt
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