Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, oil on panel, 58x46cm

⁸The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together.^a

⁹Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

¹⁰The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.

¹¹Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.

The painting is not an illustration of the text, but inspired by it, creating visual tropes for Jeremiah's internal state. The Old Testament reading from the daily lectionary (in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (and yes, part of my spiritual practice is to pray in the morning over the daily lectionary readings--the Psalms in {very halting} Latin, the Old Testament and New Testament readings in the King James version {because that's the version with which I grew up, and I still find it's language lovely, beautiful, even, pointing to the holy, redirecting my attention from the quotidian language of my every day life}, and the gospel readings in French. Paintings often become a point of meditation for me in this process.) But the Lamentations express in the repetitive, psalm-like ejaculations of grief, Jeremiah's agony over the realization that his prophecies have actually come to fruition.  I can't escape the parallel with the current state of our country, though I'm conscious to resist the presumptuous parallels that the Puritans--and more recent politicians--drew between Israel and Jerusalem and the North American English speakers who became the United States of America. The fall of Judah (Israel had already split off and was suffering its own fate) came as no surprise to Jeremiah.  It was only shocking to his hostile audience, his fellow citizens. 

The painting is small, a little over two feet high, one that I found on my own while wandering in the gleaming forest of the Rijksmuseum's collection in 1973.  Like the portrait of his son, Titus, as a monk, that I've talked about here before, it's an intimate history painting.  A single figure, no action, with the spectacular destruction of the city in flames on the left--just glimpsed in the distance--reclines on, on what? we aren't really shown a furnishing.  Rembrandt only provides diagonal bands of light and dark in his characteristic, dramatic chiaroscuro (contrasting clear/obscure, light and shadow) spotlighting the bald crown of the prophet's head and his hand, limp in impotent despair. He can't resist the gleam on the temple vessels as on the prophet's pate.

I'm sympathetic to arresting grief.  And I love Rembrandt's explorations of internal states in the simplest of dramatic, but often not melodramatic turns, and the subtle moments of emotional transition. My first unschooled responses to the painting, my sympathy and admiration, were enhanced by my undergraduate teacher Ann Millstein, a recent Harvard Ph.D. at the time, who provided me an intellectual and historical foundation for the uninformed meanderings and responses from the year before during my year in Holland and my subsequent years in Boston.  The painting is from Rembrandt's earlyish period.  He's still fascinated by minute representations of texture and narrative (all the more minute in this small size).  But his spiritual penetration and sensitivity is patent early on.