Rembrandt van Rijn's Simeon with the Christ Child in the Temple, left unfinished at his death in 1669 and now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, is among the most moving religious paintings in Western art precisely because of its incompleteness. The aged Simeon holds the infant Jesus, his face illuminated from below by the child's radiance, his expression combining awe, relief, and something like the approach of sleep - the recognition that the thing he has waited his entire life to see has now been seen, and he is ready to go. Behind him, the background and surrounding figures fade into unresolved paint: the half-formed world of a painting that death interrupted.
The biblical source is Luke 2:25-32. Simeon is described as 'righteous and devout' and 'waiting for the consolation of Israel,' with the Holy Spirit upon him and a divine promise that he would not die before seeing the Lord's Messiah. When Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the Temple for the rite of purification (Leviticus 12:2-4), Simeon takes the child in his arms and speaks what Christians have called the Nunc Dimittis: 'Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.'
The Nunc Dimittis is one of the oldest and most continuously used liturgical texts in the Christian tradition, sung at Compline - the final prayer of the monastic day - since the sixth century at least. Its use at the close of the day, at the threshold of sleep (which monastic tradition read as a figure of death), gives it exactly the resonance of Rembrandt's painting: the acknowledgment that the day's work is done, that what needed to be seen has been seen, that the night can now come. Rembrandt painted the scene multiple times across his career - a completed version exists in the Kunsthalle Hamburg - but the Stockholm painting, unfinished as it is, has been identified by most critics as the more powerful work.
The unfinished quality of the Stockholm Simeon is not an accident to be compensated for but a fact to be read. Rembrandt died on October 4, 1669, with this painting on his easel. The areas he completed - the face of Simeon, the child's body, the hands - are painted with the extreme simplicity and luminosity of his final period. The hands holding the child are among the most carefully executed parts of the canvas: gnarled, aged, gentle, they embody a lifetime of waiting resolved into a single act of holding. The unfinished figure behind Simeon (probably Anna, the prophetess of Luke 2:36-38) recedes into brown-gray paint that has never been resolved into form - a figure on the threshold of emergence, like Simeon himself on the threshold of death.
The light in the painting is mysterious: it appears to radiate from the child rather than from any external source, giving visual form to Simeon's words 'a light for revelation to the Gentiles' and to John's description of Christ as 'the true light that gives light to everyone' (John 1:9). This self-luminous child in the arms of the dying old man is Rembrandt's final statement on the themes of mortality and grace that had preoccupied him since the earliest years of his career.
Rembrandt's last decade was marked by personal loss - his son Titus died in 1668, a year before his own death - and financial ruin that had required the liquidation of his house and art collection in the late 1650s. The Simeon is often read as autobiographical: the old man who has waited, who holds something precious and now prepares to release it, who prays to be dismissed in peace. Whether or not this biographical reading is accurate, the painting's emotional content is inseparable from its awareness of finitude.
The Stockholm Nationalmuseum acquired the painting in the nineteenth century. It is displayed in the context of Dutch and Flemish Golden Age painting, where the contrast between the completed technical refinement of contemporaries and the deliberately incomplete late Rembrandt is instructive. Alongside it in Rembrandt's production are the great self-portraits of the 1660s - the Kenwood House Self-Portrait, the Uffizi Self-Portrait - which share the same quality of stripped, undeceived late vision.
For further reading: Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (1985); Simon Schama, Rembrandt's Eyes (1999); Boudewijn Bakker, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (2004); Christian Tümpel, Rembrandt (1993); Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt's Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (2009).