Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on the 15th of July 1606 in Leiden, a city in the Dutch Republic, as the ninth child of a miller and a baker's daughter. His family was well-to-do, yet his life would be defined not by the quiet stability of his upbringing but by a relentless, almost obsessive drive to capture the human condition through paint and ink. He attended a Latin school before enrolling at the University of Leiden in 1620, though his heart was never in the academic halls. Instead, he spent three years apprenticed to Jacob van Swanenburg, a local painter who taught him the basics of his craft. This early training was brief but foundational, setting the stage for a career that would see him move from the quiet streets of Leiden to the bustling heart of Amsterdam. His mother was Catholic, and his father belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, a religious tension that would later seep into his work, making faith a central, often fraught, theme in his art. He was a boy who saw the world differently, one who would grow to see the divine in the mundane and the sacred in the ordinary.
The Master Of Light And Shadow
In 1625, Rembrandt opened a studio in Leiden, which he shared with his friend and colleague Jan Lievens, a partnership that would prove crucial to his early development. By 1627, he began to accept students, including Gerrit Dou and Isaac de Jouderville, and in 1629, he was discovered by the statesman Constantijn Huygens, who procured important commissions for him from the court of The Hague. This connection led to Prince Frederik Hendrik purchasing paintings from Rembrandt, establishing a pattern of patronage that would support him for years. At the end of 1631, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, a city rapidly expanding as the business and trade capital of the Dutch Republic. He began to practice as a professional portraitist for the first time, with great success, and in 1634, he married Hendrick van Uylenburgh's cousin, Saskia van Uylenburgh. Saskia came from a respected family; her father Rombertus was a lawyer and had been burgomaster of Leeuwarden. The couple married in the local church of St. Annaparochie without the presence of Rembrandt's relatives, a decision that may have reflected his growing independence. In the same year, Rembrandt became a citizen of Amsterdam and a member of the local guild of painters. He also acquired a number of students, among them Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck. His early works were characterized by a smooth, detailed style, rich in illusionistic form and religious or allegorical subjects. He was especially praised by his contemporaries for his biblical subjects, for his skill in representing emotions, and attention to detail. Stylistically, his paintings progressed from the early smooth manner to the late rough treatment of richly variegated paint surfaces, which allowed for an illusionism of form suggested by the tactile quality of the paint itself. His use of chiaroscuro, the theatrical employment of light and shadow derived from Caravaggio, became a hallmark of his work, creating a dramatic and lively presentation of subjects, devoid of the rigid formality that his contemporaries often displayed.
Despite his early success, Rembrandt's life was marked by profound personal tragedy. Although they were by now affluent, the couple suffered several personal setbacks; three children died within weeks of their births. Only their fourth child, Titus, who was born in 1641, survived into adulthood. Saskia died in 1642, probably from tuberculosis, and Rembrandt's drawings of her on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works. After Saskia's illness, the widow Geertje Dircx was hired as Titus' caretaker and dry nurse; at some time, she also became Rembrandt's lover. In May 1649 she left and charged Rembrandt with breach of promise and asked to be awarded alimony. Rembrandt tried to settle the matter amicably, but to pay her lawyer she pawned the diamond ring he had given her that once belonged to Saskia. On the 14th of October they came to an agreement; the court particularly stated that Rembrandt had to pay a yearly maintenance allowance, provided that Titus remained her only heir and she sold none of Rembrandt's possessions. As Dircx broke her promise, Rembrandt and members of Dircx's own family had her committed to a women's house of correction at Gouda in August 1650. Rembrandt also took measures to ensure she stayed in the house of correction for as long as possible. Rembrandt paid for the costs. In early 1649, Rembrandt began a relationship with the 23-year-old Hendrickje Stoffels, who had initially been his maid. She may have been the cause of Geertje's leaving. In that year he made no dated paintings or etchings at all. In 1654 Rembrandt painted a nude Bathsheba at Her Bath. In June Hendrickje received three summonses from the Reformed Church to answer the charge that she had committed the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter. In July she admitted her guilt and was banned from receiving communion. Rembrandt was not summoned to appear for the Church council. In October they had a daughter, Cornelia. Had he remarried he would have lost access to a trust set up for Titus in Saskia's will. These personal tragedies cast a long shadow over his life, yet they also fueled his artistic output, transforming his work into a deeply personal and emotional exploration of human suffering and resilience.
The Fall And The Rise
Rembrandt, despite his artistic success, found himself in financial turmoil. His penchant for acquiring art, prints, and rare items led him to live beyond his means. In January 1653 the sale of the property formally was finalized but Rembrandt still had to cover half of the remaining mortgage. Creditors began pressing for installments but Rembrandt, facing financial strain, sought a postponement. The house required repairs prompting Rembrandt to borrow money from friends, including Jan Six. In November 1655, amid a year overshadowed by plague and the drafting of wills, Rembrandt's 14-year-old son Titus took a significant step by drafting a will that designated his father as the sole heir, effectively sidelining his mother's family. In December Rembrandt orchestrated a sale of his paintings, yet the earnings failed to meet expectations. This tumultuous period deeply impacted the art industry, prompting Rembrandt to seek a high court arrangement known as cessio bonorum. Despite the financial difficulties, Rembrandt's bankruptcy was not forced. In July 1656, he declared his insolvency, taking stock and willingly surrendered his assets. Notably, he had already transferred the house to his son. Both the authorities and his creditors showed leniency, granting him ample time to settle the debts. Jacob J. Hinlopen allegedly played a role. In November 1657 another auction was held to sell his paintings, as well as a substantial number of etching plates and drawings, some of the latter by famous artists including Raphael, Mantegna and Giorgione. Remarkably, Rembrandt was permitted to retain his tools as a means of generating income. Rembrandt lost the guardianship of his son and thus control over his actions. A new guardian, Louis Crayers, claimed the house in settlement of Titus's debt. The sale list comprising 363 items offers insight into Rembrandt's diverse collections, which encompassed Old Master paintings, drawings, busts of Roman emperors, statues of Greek philosophers, books, two globes, bonnets, armor, and various objects from Asia, as well as a collection of natural history specimens. Unfortunately, the prices realized in the sale were disappointing. By February 1658, Rembrandt's house was sold at a foreclosure auction, and the family moved to more modest lodgings at Rozengracht. In 1660, he finished Ahasuerus and Haman at the feast of Esther which he sold to Jan J. Hinlopen. Early December 1660, the sale of the house was finalized but the proceeds went directly to Titus's guardian. Two weeks later, Hendrickje and Titus established a dummy corporation as art dealers, allowing Rembrandt, who had board and lodging, to continue his artistic pursuits. In 1661, they secured a contract for a major project at the newly completed town hall. The resulting work, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, was rejected by the mayors and returned to the painter within a few weeks; the surviving fragment is only a quarter of the original. Despite these setbacks, Rembrandt continued to receive significant portrait commissions and completed notable works, such as the Sampling Officials in 1662. It remains a challenge to gauge Rembrandt's wealth accurately as he may have overestimated the value of his art collection. Nonetheless, half of his assets were earmarked for Titus's inheritance. In March 1663, with Hendrickje's illness, Titus assumed a more prominent role. Isaac van Hertsbeeck, Rembrandt's primary creditor, went to the High Court and contested Titus's priority for payment, leading to legal battles that Titus ultimately won in 1665 when he came of age. During this time, Rembrandt worked on notable pieces like The Jewish Bride and his final self-portraits but struggled with rent arrears. Notably, Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, visited Rembrandt twice, and returned to Florence with one of the self-portraits. Rembrandt outlived both Hendrickje and Titus; he died on Friday the 4th of October 1669 and was buried four days later in a rented grave in the Westerkerk. His illegitimate child, Cornelia, eventually moved to Batavia in 1670 accompanied by an obscure painter and her mother's inheritance. Titus's considerable inheritance passed to his only child, Titia, who married her cousin and lived at Blauwburgwal. Rembrandt's life was marked by more than just artistic achievements; he navigated numerous legal and financial challenges, leaving a complex legacy.
The Painter Of The Human Soul
In a letter to Huygens, Rembrandt offered the only surviving explanation of what he sought to achieve through his art, writing that the greatest and most natural movement, translated from de meeste en de natuurlijkste beweegelijkheid, was his goal. The word beweegelijkheid translates to emotion or motive. Whether this refers to objectives, material, or something else, is not known but critics have drawn particular attention to the way Rembrandt seamlessly melded the earthly and spiritual. Earlier 20th century connoisseurs claimed Rembrandt had produced well over 600 paintings, nearly 400 etchings and 2,000 drawings. More recent scholarship, from the 1960s to the present day, often controversially, has winnowed his oeuvre to nearer 300 paintings. His prints, traditionally all called etchings, although many are produced in whole or part by engraving and sometimes drypoint, have a much more stable total of slightly under 300. It is likely Rembrandt made many more drawings in his lifetime than 2,000 but those extant are rarer than presumed. Two experts claim that the number of drawings whose autograph status can be regarded as effectively certain is no higher than about 75, although this is disputed. The list was to be unveiled at a scholarly meeting in February 2010. At one time, approximately 90 paintings were counted as Rembrandt self-portraits but it is now known that he had his students copy his own self-portraits as part of their training. Modern scholarship has reduced the autograph count to over forty paintings, as well as a few drawings and thirty-one etchings, which include many of the most remarkable images of the group. Some show him posing in quasi-historical fancy dress, or pulling faces at himself. His oil paintings trace the progress from an uncertain young man, through the dapper and very successful portrait-painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but massively powerful portraits of his old age. Together they give a remarkably clear picture of the man, his appearance and his psychological make-up, as revealed by his richly weathered face. In his portraits and self-portraits, he angles the sitter's face in such a way that the ridge of the nose nearly always forms the line of demarcation between brightly illuminated and shadowy areas. A Rembrandt face is a face partially eclipsed; and the nose, bright and obvious, thrusting into the riddle of halftones, serves to focus the viewer's attention upon, and to dramatize, the division between a flood of light, an overwhelming clarity, and a brooding duskiness. In some of his biblical works, including The Raising of the Cross, Joseph Telling His Dreams, and The Stoning of Saint Stephen, Rembrandt painted himself as a character in the crowd. Durham suggests that this was because the Bible was for Rembrandt a kind of diary, an account of moments in his own life. Among the more prominent characteristics of Rembrandt's work are his use of chiaroscuro, the theatrical employment of light and shadow derived from Caravaggio, or, more likely, from the Dutch Caravaggisti but adapted for very personal means. Also notable are his dramatic and lively presentation of subjects, devoid of the rigid formality that his contemporaries often displayed, and a deeply felt compassion for mankind, irrespective of wealth and age. His immediate family, his wife Saskia, his son Titus and his common-law wife Hendrickje, often figured prominently in his paintings, many of which had mythical, biblical or historical subjects. Throughout his career, Rembrandt took as his most common subjects portraits, narrative or history paintings, mostly biblical, and landscapes. He was especially praised by his contemporaries for his biblical subjects, for his skill in representing emotions, and attention to detail. Stylistically, his paintings progressed from the early smooth manner, characterized by fine technique in the portrayal of illusionistic form, to the late rough treatment of richly variegated paint surfaces, which allowed for an illusionism of form suggested by the tactile quality of the paint itself. Rembrandt must have realized that if he kept the paint deliberately loose and paint-like on some parts of the canvas, the perception of space became much greater. A parallel development may be seen in Rembrandt's skill as a printmaker. In the etchings of his maturity, particularly from the late 1640s onward, the freedom and breadth of his drawings and paintings found expression in the print medium as well. The works encompass a wide range of subject matter and technique, sometimes leaving large areas of white paper to suggest space, at other times employing complex webs of line to produce rich dark tones. In the 1650s, Rembrandt's style changed again. Colors became richer and brush strokes more pronounced. With these changes, Rembrandt distanced himself from earlier work and current fashion, which increasingly inclined toward fine, detailed works. His use of light becomes more jagged and harsh, and shine becomes almost nonexistent. His singular approach to paint application may have been suggested in part by familiarity with the work of Titian, and could be seen in the context of the then current discussion of finish and surface quality of paintings. Contemporary accounts sometimes remark disapprovingly of the coarseness of Rembrandt's brushwork, and the artist himself was said to have dissuaded visitors from looking too closely at his paintings. The tactile manipulation of paint may hearken to medieval procedures, when mimetic effects of rendering informed a painting's surface. The result is a richly varied handling of paint, deeply layered and often apparently haphazard, which suggests form and space in both an illusory and highly individual manner. In later years, biblical subjects were often depicted but emphasis shifted from dramatic group scenes to intimate portrait-like figures. In his last years, Rembrandt painted his most deeply reflective self-portraits, from 1652 to 1669 he painted fifteen, and several moving images of both men and women, The Jewish Bride, in love, in life, and before God. In Rembrandt's late great portraits we feel face to face with real people, we sense their warmth, their need for sympathy and also their loneliness and suffering. Those keen and steady eyes that we know so well from Rembrandt's self-portraits must have been able to look straight into the human heart.
The Shadow Of The Master
In 1968, the Rembrandt Research Project began under the sponsorship of the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Scientific Research; it was initially expected to last a highly optimistic ten years. Art historians teamed up with experts from other fields to reassess the authenticity of works attributed to Rembrandt, using all methods available, including state-of-the-art technical diagnostics, and to compile a complete new catalogue raisonné of his paintings. As a result of their findings, many paintings that were previously attributed to Rembrandt have been removed from their list, although others have been added back. One example of activity is The Polish Rider, now in the Frick Collection in New York. Rembrandt's authorship had been questioned by at least one scholar, Alfred von Wurzbach, at the beginning of the twentieth century but for many decades later most scholars, including the foremost authority writing in English, Julius S. Held, agreed that it was indeed by the master. In the 1980s, however, Dr. Josua Bruyn of the Foundation Rembrandt Research Project cautiously and tentatively attributed the painting to one of Rembrandt's closest and most talented pupils, Willem Drost, about whom little is known. But Bruyn's remained a minority opinion, the suggestion of Drost's authorship is now generally rejected, and the Frick itself never changed its own attribution, the label still reading Rembrandt and not attributed to or school of. More recent opinion has shifted even more decisively in favor of the Frick; In his 1999 book Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama and the Rembrandt Project scholar Ernst van de Wetering both argued for attribution to the master. Those few scholars who still question Rembrandt's authorship feel that the execution is uneven and favour different attributions for different parts of the work. A similar issue was raised by Schama concerning the verification of titles associated with the subject matter depicted in Rembrandt's works. For example, the exact subject being portrayed in Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, recently retitled by curators at the Metropolitan Museum, has been directly challenged by Schama applying the scholarship of Paul Crenshaw. Schama presents a substantial argument that it was the famous ancient Greek painter Apelles who is depicted in contemplation by Rembrandt and not Aristotle. Another painting, Pilate Washing His Hands, is also of questionable attribution. Critical opinion of this picture has varied since 1905, when Wilhelm von Bode described it as a somewhat abnormal work by Rembrandt. Scholars have since dated the painting to the 1660s and assigned it to an anonymous pupil, possibly Aert de Gelder. The composition bears superficial resemblance to mature works by Rembrandt but lacks the master's command of illumination and modeling. The attribution and re-attribution work is ongoing. In 2005 four oil paintings previously attributed to Rembrandt's students were reclassified as the work of Rembrandt himself: Study of an Old Man in Profile and Study of an Old Man with a Beard from a US private collection, Study of a Weeping Woman, owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet, painted in 1640. The Old Man Sitting in a Chair is a further example: in 2014, Professor Ernst van de Wetering offered his view to The Guardian that the demotion of the 1652 painting Old Man Sitting in a Chair was a vast mistake...it is a most important painting. The painting needs to be seen in terms of Rembrandt's experimentation. This was highlighted much earlier by Nigel Konstam who studied Rembrandt throughout his career. Rembrandt's own studio practice is a major factor in the difficulty of attribution, since, like many masters before him, he encouraged his students to copy his paintings, sometimes finishing or retouching them to be sold as originals, and sometimes selling them as authorized copies. Additionally, his style proved easy enough for his most talented students to emulate. Further complicating matters is the uneven quality of some of Rembrandt's own work, and his frequent stylistic evolutions and experiments. Rembrandt was not always the perfectly consistent, logical Dutchman he was originally anticipated to be. As well, there were later imitations of his work, and restorations which so seriously damaged the original works that they are no longer recognizable. Technical investigation of Rembrandt's paintings in the possession of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister was conducted by Hermann Kühn in 1977. The pigment analyses of some thirty paintings have shown that Rembrandt's palette consisted of the following pigments: lead white, various ochres, Vandyke brown, bone black, charcoal black, lamp black, vermilion, madder lake, azurite, ultramarine, yellow lake and lead-tin-yellow. Synthetic orpiment was shown in the shadows of the sleeve of the jewish groom. This toxic arsenic yellow was rarely used in oil painting. One painting, Saskia van Uylenburgh as Flora, reportedly contains gamboge. Rembrandt very rarely used pure blue or green colors, the most pronounced exception being Belshazzar's Feast in the National Gallery in London. The book by Bomford describes more recent technical investigations and pigment analyses of Rembrandt's paintings predominantly in the National Gallery in London. The entire array of pigments employed by Rembrandt can be found at ColourLex. The best source for technical information on Rembrandt's paintings on the web is the Rembrandt Database containing all works of Rembrandt with detailed investigative reports, infrared and radiography images and other scientific details.