OLD MAN WAITING FOR HIS DINNER
“I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” —Hunter S. Thompson
The resource image for this post is a painting by Rembrandt. It is small, about the size of a record album cover. He painted it in the 1630s. It has been called “Philosopher in Meditation” and “Tobit and Anna Waiting for Their Son Tobias” But I don’t like either title because there are no attributes (symbolic objects that are associated with particular characters) to justify them. To me, it just looks like an “Old Man Waiting for His Dinner”
Rembrandt was in his 20s when he made this and was beginning to make a good living by painting what sold, so the painting is very much of its time. The work uses chiaroscuro to the point of tenebrism though that may be due to darkening varnish. Either way, it uses strong lighting—bright highlights vs. dark shadows— to make this rather static domestic genre painting feel dramatic.
I thought it would make an excellent basis to practice my digital “pen and ink” technique; to try to draw better and or in this case try to make my crosshatching more like R. Crumb’s brilliant, less cartoony, more realistic work like Introducing Kafka and Art and Beauty.
Of course, I failed. I’m not patient enough to carefully draw parallel lines over and over again. Worse, I can’t see what the various tones and textures need from the lines until I’ve tried drawing some out, so there are many (other people’s) styles of hatching all over the thing. Chaos does not make good art. So for me, the best I can do is just start scribbling without thinking about it and stop when what I see is roughly what I imagined.
I didn’t want to just copy the Rembrandt in Crumb’s style. I wanted to put some me in there as well, so I—philosophically not literally—framed the image then framed that one! Frame 1: A diorama, one of those scenes where there are 3-D objects blending seamlessly into a 2-D background. Life-sized ones are created for museums and making scaled-down ones is a popular hobby. Frame 2: The hobbyist diorama maker interacting with his work.
Hobbyist dioramas are either war-related—mostly a guy thing—or less belligerent kits of cafes, libraries, and studios. But there are no fine-art-inspired ones unless you count the instantly out-of-stock Lego version of Starry Night. There is a market there, people! Who would not want to vicariously join Velasquez as he paints “Las Meninas” or have a cup of coffee with Hopper’s “Nighthawks”?
So we’ve got here a drawing of such a scale model, one based on “Old Man Waiting for His Dinner” and the modelmaker, who’s another old man also possibly waiting for his dinner, too. The scene in the scene is still set in a 17th-century Dutch house, but he’s making some changes from Rembrandt’s original. The old man is now in modern sweats and instead of a book he has a laptop. And the woman in the lower right tending the fire, possibly making dinner, is now in a modern dress and is carrying a suitcase.
“It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably
with darkness, silence, and solitude.” —H. P. Lovecraft
The modelmaker has picked her up. Whether he’s removing her or placing her is unknown as is whether she is leaving or arriving. This kind of ambiguity is decidedly not baroque, it’s modernist in that and its breaking of the 4th wall, and even surreal with the modelmaker staring into the scene from an upper landing of the staircase, where, in the original, a ghostly third person stood.
I’ll also pass on the biblical references and just note that secular philosophers have commented on the work. Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell wrote, “There hangs in the Louvre a Méditation du Philosophe, whose symbolical subject-matter is nothing more or less than the human mind, with its teeming darknesses, its moments of intellectual and visionary illuminations, its mysterious staircases winding downwards and upwards into the unknown.” And Carl Jung used the work as an illustration in his Man and His Symbols captioned thusly: “The inward-looking old man provides an image of Jung’s belief that each of us must explore his own unconscious.”
I like to think that this homage picks up on—exaggerates for emphasis—both the “winding downwards and upwards into the unknown” and the “each of us must explore his own unconscious” musings above, a good kind of charicature, as well as being some good practice for drawing and thinking of, both the light and the darkness, even if only while waiting for my dinner of leftovers to reheat in the oven.
“In solitude, the lonely man is eaten by himself. Among crowds, by the many.
Choose which you prefer.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Philosopher in Meditation” by Rembrandt – Joy of Museums Virtual Tours
Genre Painting: The Aesthetics of the Everyday
Is it Chiaroscuro or is it Tenebrism? – ArtGeek
Robert Crumb: ‘I was born weird
R. Crumb Illustrates Kafka – The Marginalian
29 Best DIY Miniature House Kits For Adults (So Cute!)
All the details not to be missed in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night | Official LEGO® Shop US
Nighthawks | The Art Institute of Chicago
Everything You Must Know About Las Meninas | DailyArt Magazine
Diorama | Accessories | TreeFrog Treasures |
Philosopher in Meditation – Wikipedia
What is fourth wall? – Definition from WhatIs.com
caricature and cartoon | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica
