Art in Social Studies: Exploring the World and
Ourselves with Rembrandt
by Iftikhar Ahmad
Introduction
Rembrandt's art lends itself as a fertile resource for teaching and learning
social studies. His art not only captures the social studies themes relevant
to the Dutch Golden Age, but it also offers a description of human relations
transcending temporal and spatial frontiers. Rembrandt is an imaginative
storyteller with a keen insight for minute details. His narrative of the
culture, society, economy, geography, and contemporary events of seventeenthcentury
Dutch life is as vivid and perceptive as a historian's eloquent text.
How people lived in community, how the city of Amsterdam functioned, how
important religion was to people, how diverse and cosmopolitan the culture
was, how interdependent the world was in the seventeenth century, and
what the social and civic ideals of the Dutch people were during the Golden
Age—Rembrandt's paintings, etchings, and drawings neatly organize
these and other social studies themes into visual messages. More importantly,
our appreciation and interpretation of Rembrandt's work helps us learn
about not just Dutch society and culture of four hundred years ago but
also about ourselves. The passion, emotions, conflicts, and inspirations
of his subjects are essentially human and eternal, arousing empathy in
every generation and cross-section of society. In this article I look
at Rembrandt's art for the purpose of teaching and learning social studies
in our contemporary interdependent world—a world that is chronologically
and geographically distant from the Dutch Golden Age but in many respects
shares its enduring values, norms, ideals, pursuits, challenges, and possibilities.
To do so, I employ a conceptual lens—the curriculum thematic strands
of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)—to examine
Rembrandt's art in order to explore life and make meaning of the story
that is being told about the human condition, and to seek out its relevance
to ourselves and our world in the early twenty-first century. Although
Rembrandt's oeuvre is extensive, including the diverse genres of self-portraits,
group portraits, drawings, etchings, landscapes, and religious themes,
for our limited purpose I have selected only those works that, in my judgment,
correspond with the following seven of the ten thematic curriculum strands
of the NCSS:
Culture
Time, Continuity, and Change
People, Places, and Environment
Individual Development and Identity
Production, Distribution, and Consumption
Global Connections Civic Ideals and Practices
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