The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp

The subject of the shared moment that Rembrandt’s extraordinary painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (1632) recreates is clearly the cadaver, the focus of the participants’ keen attention. Their instructor, Dr Tulp, and the book in the painting’s bottom right corner are secondary. The collective audience is a distant third; each member is so engaged in the moment of concentration that they appear unaware of one another.

Yet the subject of the painting is surely these viewers themselves. In the act of looking, they are transformed. As engaged participants in a shared moment, each individual becomes a fascinating subject, full of expressive character. As our eyes flick between the wrapt faces, it’s hard not to feel that we are joining the group from behind the artist’s shoulder. By looking at them, looking at the cadaver, we, too, have become active participants in the scene.

The cadaver, so central to the painting’s action and, ironically, central to the animation of its living participants, acts as little more than a catalyst to the painting’s narrative. 

Back in 2009, in a nod to these layers within Rembrandt’s painting, Tom Wexler and I made a KMA interactive installation called Strange Attractors; The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp that introduced a large prone figure into the centre of a public artwork, a time-based audio-video installation. The figure was intended to attract and maintain a crowd, whilst imperceptibly transforming its audience from viewers into participants. This piece was a forerunner to KMA’s better-known work Congregation (2010), which borrowed and refined many of the ideas we began to explore in Strange Attractors: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.

At the time, the idea that the audience might become the subject of a work was central to our thinking.  I still like that concept. 

But what interests me most now is that Rembrandt’s painting allows all of these transformations to be performed simply by the act of looking or being looked at. As we crowd around the cadaver to join Dr Tulp’s attentive audience we are invited to read each individual’s gaze. Each face transitions from viewer to viewed precisely because we share the focus of their attention. We don’t necessarily know anything about these men but we do know what they’re looking at, and, because of that, we can read their faces. In each instance, their personality jumps out, defying space and time.