REMBRANDT

Approaching death, the greatest painter of his age leaves us with a final word of hope for forgiveness and salvation. A son, wretched and wasteful has spent the fortune his father gave him on frivolity and decadence and returns home begging for a lowly position to redeem himself, but is instead welcomed in open arms and embraced not for his sins but his penitence. This is the story that Rembrandt - master painter, portraitist and hero of the Dutch golden age - depicts as amongst the final works before he passes away and it is hard not to read it as a plea for how he will be treated in the afterlife. He does not represent it with biblical accuracy, but brings in unknown characters: a women, barely visible, most likely his mother and a seated figure representing a tax collector and his own ambivalence at the wealth he has built. Rembrandt is both the young son, coming home ashamed, and the older son, dissatisfied with the lack of reward for his loyalty in contrast to his brother. Both need salvation, both hope to come home and both, as Rembrandt, long for the embrace of a loving father to forgive them for the life they have led.

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

Renoir could hardly hold a paintbrush in 1910. Rheumatoid arthritis had rendered his body feeble and the exacting brushstrokes of his youth impossible. Retreating to the French countryside he refused to give up. Instead, in his final years, he developed an entirely new artistic style fitting to the requirements of his ailing body. In his last self portraits, the canvas became a mirror to the soul of the artist, a celebration of the past and a defiant statement of life in the face of increasingly clear mortality. Renoir represented the end of an artistic journey of portraiture that started with Reubens nearly 400 years earlier. He was the last of his kind, a painter steeped in tradition, embrassing tentatively the Impressionist present he found himself in. In this self-portrait, Renoir immortalizes not just himself, but the essence of artistic endeavor—a testament to the enduring dialogue between creator and creation, between past and future, and between the mortal and the immortal.

CLYFFORD STILL

A field of colour, torn at the seams. The movement is visceral across the canvas, almost ominous as the dark blues seem to grow across the background of brightness and then, in the corner, a flash of yellow comes alive, emerging out of the oppression. Clyfford Still may not be a household name in the way that Pollock or Rothko have become, but it was him who laid the foundations of the entire movement. In 1938, years before his contemporaries, he moved away from figurative work into pure abstraction, allowing colours and the movement of paint to communicate emotion quite unlike any had done before. Dragging palette knives across the paint, the works took on a sense of motion. He combined the two styles of ‘Colour Field’ painting and ‘Action Painting’, to create meditative works that felt tangibly alive, even angry, and this influence can be seen across the movements that followed him.