REMBRANDT’S PORTRAIT A Biography <i> by Charles L. Mee Jr. (Simon & Schuster: $19.95) </i>

There isn’t a word to be found here about the Dutch School or the baroque movement. The author is too involved in Rembrandt’s life and art to pull back and bother with archetypes and other artificial divisions. This is a sensuous book, evoking moods as well as the sights, sounds and smells of Rembrandt’s 17th-Century Amsterdam: Odors of roses and tulips in the fields at the edge of town, of fish and salt water, of wet wool in the market squares. Colors of red dish-brown brick warehouses, black, gray and brownish-yellow clothes. Soft and round shapes-- big-bottomed boats, kegs and baskets. Charles Mee, a playwright and narrative historian, makes us feel we can reach out and touch this town; similarly, he portrays Rembrandt’s life in familiar terms, recounting struggles similar to those of today’s visual artists. Rembrandt often experienced the tension between creating art and making a living, for instance. As a young artist, he satisfied his patrons by rapidly producing paintings. But soon after he began “searching deeper into his subjects now for some less superficial effect, for some more complex inner drama,” his productivity slumped and he nearly went bankrupt.

The intimacy of “Rembrandt’s Portrait” is all the more remarkable when one considers that Rembrandt left only his paintings and a few documents when he died in 1669 (to be buried in an unmarked and unrecorded grave). Mee demystifies the life of the compassionate artist through a serendipitous blend of investigative journalism, art criticism and educated guessing. Above all, though, this book is about the coming-of-age of a true artist. Rembrandt’s early self-portraits were brash and pretentious: He’s alternately laughing and sneering, holding a come-hither look and flinching like a wounded animal. A later self-portrait, however, composed after financial ruin, shows a man who has been through the wars. And yet Rembrandt, while battered, is not beaten. “This is the largest self portrait Rembrandt ever painted,” Mee writes. “It is a picture of a man who, though his kingdom may have been taken from him is still, like Lear, assertively, the king.”