The first encounter took place in the late 1940s, when Alfred Bader was at Harvard for a Ph.D. in chemistry. His professor gently kidded him for taking time out to attend open lectures on art history. His own inclination played a role, and he also a felt connection to the professor of those lectures, Jakob Rosenberg, a Jewish refugee like himself. His own father had been an art dealer, but died when Alfred was only three, and so did not pass any knowledge on to his son. Growing up in the turmoil of Depression-era Vienna, and in the years of being a refugee and then a student at Queen’s University, Bader experienced limited contact with the arts.

It so happened that the young Alfred Bader encountered Jakob Rosenberg at the very moment that Rosenberg’s interest was focused on Rembrandt. He had just published a monograph on Rembrandt in 1948, the impact of which would stretch out over decades, with new editions appearing in 1964 and 1980. His account of the artist was furthermore remarkable for emphasizing human connections, of Rembrandt with his family and neighbours in studies and portraits, and of Rembrandt’s deep meditation on the emotional states and situations of the figures in his narrative paintings. These values would form lifelong collecting priorities and criteria for Bader, as brilliantly illustrated in his first acquisition of an accepted Rembrandt in 1979, the early Head of an Old Man in a Cap.

Rembrandt was long thought to have represented his father in such works, his empathy drawing from a powerfully personal bond. The renowned art historian Julius Held went even further, pointing to the evidence that Rembrandt’s father went blind in his later years, and linking Rembrandt’s interest in the Book of Tobit to the blindness of Tobias’s father Tobit, identifying him with his own father, and himself with the young Tobias. Later, Bader would be open to the realization that Rembrandt’s father looked quite different, and that the young artist here selected a striking local model also deployed in other Biblical roles, such as that of the prophet Jeremiah. The gripping evocation of emotion arose from Rembrandt’s  groundbreaking initiative to systematically scrutinize emotional expression, as recorded in various drawings, etchings, and painted tronies.

Human emotion also projects from the second Rembrandt painting that Bader was able to acquire for his collection, the Head of a Man with Curly Hair of 1659. It is seen as a study of the lighting Rembrandt would use for his St. Matthew in the Louvre, but as it is signed and dated, Rembrandt clearly presented this work as a finished work as well, demonstrating the artistic challenge of lighting as well as emotion. Such character heads, or tronies, were generally aimed at connoisseurs of art, who may not have necessarily been affluent, but were enthusiastic and well-informed, and close to the master’s heart. It was reported of Rembrandt that in his later years he associated mainly with artists and those connected to art. In a sense, Alfred joined this company over three centuries later.

Over the years, he would correspond with over seventy different art historians. This seems astonishing, but makes sense when paralleled to his work at Aldrich Chemical Company. He regularly visited and consulted with chemists in their labs, establishing relationships with them. It is clear that he prioritized interpersonal communication, both in work and research.

While it seems surprising to us today, looking at a collection that is so focused on Rembrandt, Bader spent much of the 1960s collecting widely in the areas of Northern and Southern Baroque.

He valued the empathic expression of emotional experience, against the prevailing taste for more idealizing art, and this required zeal and vision. He found kindred spirits, such as the Chicago opera tenor Harry Moore, whom he would regularly visit to discuss, and trade, paintings. And also Wolfgang Stechow, an art history professor at Oberlin, with a broad interest in Northern Baroque art.

There was a longstanding notion that Rembrandt cultivated a special sympathy for Jews.²Michael Zell, “Eduard Koloff and the historiographic Romance of Rembrandt and the Jews,” Simiolus 28 (2001): 181–197. This derived in part from his treatment of many Old Testament themes, but even more so from the rendering of various figures in these works as Jews, with features likely drawn from models living nearby in Rembrandt’s own neighbourhood, which was transforming into a Jewish quarter with arrivals of Sephardim from Spain and Portugal, and Ashkenazim from Germany and Poland. Such figures, studied from life, also appear in studies and single figure paintings, complete with Eastern European costume details such as tall fur hats. Generally, they are rendered as individual subjects, rather than as stereotypical types. This, for obvious reasons, appealed to the young Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi controlled Vienna, as it had to scholars like Held and Rosenberg.

More recently this relationship has been questioned, citing evidence of several conflicts that Rembrandt had with Jews.³Gary Schwartz, “Rembrandt’s Hebrews,” Wissenschaft auf der Suche. Beiträge des Internationalen Symposiums Berlin — 4. und 5. November 2006, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 51 (2009): 33-38.  A dispute over the likeness of a portrait in 1654⁴Adriaen Lock notarizing Diego d’Andrada’s complaint regarding a true likeness, 23 February 1654, RemDoc.  Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands.  http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e1661. is however a close echo of one in 1639 of the powerful (and not at all Jewish) Andries de Graeff, later burgomaster of Amsterdam, in which Rembrandt also stood his ground.⁵Nicolaes Listingh notarizing a deposition by Hendrick van Uylenburch concerning a portrait of Andries de Graeff, 1659, RemDoc.  Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands. http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e12837. In a similar vein, his dispute concerning costs of construction work on a shared wall would have arisen regardless of the neighbour’s background, as Rembrandt had run out of money.⁶Benedict Baddel notarizing a deposition about the renovation (“timbering up”) of Rembrandt’s and his neighbour’s house, 9 February 1654, RemDoc.  Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands. http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e4647; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e4640.  And when a more distant friend penned a poem meant to be added below the Hundred Guilder Print, with anti-Jewish aspersions, Rembrandt did not print it. Recent evidence has confirmed his repeated contact with the renowned Rabbinic scholar Menasseh ben Israel.⁷Steven Nadler and Victor Tiribás, “Rembrandt’s Etchings for Menasseh ben Israel’s Piedra Gloriosa: A Mystery Solved?,” Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis (2021): 1-17, https://doi.org/10.48296/KvhR2021.01.  Rembrandt’s attitude toward Jews was probably not more than a product of his intellectual openness and enquiry. He likely had contact with Jewish neighbours, much like he maintained contacts with Mennonites, Catholics, and even a pupil who was decidedly libertine and familiar with the radical political thinker Franciscus van den Enden, who was a tutor of Spinoza. His religious paintings reflect a clearly Christian standpoint, unsurprisingly, but it remains interesting in this respect that he did not formally join the Reformed Church.

There are further indicators of this open attitude. Often cited is his Kunstcaemer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, which included objects like shells, armour, and stuffed animals from distant regions, in addition to artist’s paraphernalia such as casts of feet and hands. But it also emerges in his comprehensive range of subject matter, from history to still life. Deeply entwined with this attitude is his pursuit of an art based on study from life, as it was, without selection or idealization. It can fairly be characterized as the single driving artistic principle that Rembrandt observed through the various developments in his art. Rembrandt’s unwillingness to flatter the rich and powerful of his day cost him the considerable social capital that his artistic talent would otherwise have guaranteed, a lament repeated by various writers of the period. Rembrandt’s reputation suffered considerably from criticism of his realism, which was linked directly to his conviction that art should follow life, as reported by his biographers in connection with his unidealized male and female nude studies. His pupil Maes was presented as an example of a shrewd artist who abandoned realism in portraiture in order to deliver the idealizing flattery that clients desired. Clients unlike Alfred Bader. There is no such example by Maes in The Bader Collection, however there are two pieces of his earlier, grittier work when he still followed Rembrandt.

Much of the power of the Head of an Old Man in a Cap derives from Rembrandt’s intensive study of the aged features and the agonized expression from life, of which he made various drawings and even several demonstrative prints. Rembrandt continued to develop ways of evoking life more convincingly throughout his career, including ways of suggesting the liveliness of living beings, and the suggestion of their thoughts and emotions, even fleeting states of mind. The open brushwork of his late style, for instance, served to suggest an emotional state, including dynamic verve, as seen in the brilliant Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo, the last Rembrandt that Bader acquired. The widened range of brushstrokes also brought greater emphasis to the effect of three-dimensional form and space, with bold and forceful impasto strokes visually drawing close to us, and setting out surface direction, against smooth and thin paint application. In general these touches lend the work as a whole a bolder and more vivid presence.

Rembrandt’s achievements in art did continue to draw some appreciation through the 1700s, but it would only be in the second half of the nineteenth century that they came to be fully appreciated again, even more than in his own heyday in the 1630s. Social and political developments in the wake of the French Revolution reversed the negative assessment of his attention to common types and everyday life. Alfred Bader concurred with more than the usual conviction, however, in favouring depictions of old men, often bald and wrinkled, in sombre contemplation. This unusual preference merits explanation, which he regularly offered in public talks on art, art history, and collecting. Much more so than scholarly periodicals, the lecture podium served as the main outlet for Bader’s research and reflections on art, and Rembrandt was a favored topic. There he would discuss his admiration for and acquisition of astonishingly gritty paintings such as the rendering of Mary Magdalene by Rembrandt’s friend and associate, Jan Lievens.

His acquisition of two paintings by the obscure Fleming Jan van de Venne, with brownish palette and rough, stony faces, was entirely in this vein. It was only later that he yielded to the entreaties of Isabel (who regularly protested, “Not another old man!”), and brought works such as the Self-Portrait as St. John the Evangelist by Rembrandt’s brilliant pupil, Willem Drost, into the collection.