Rembrandt

• 1. Introduction

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  Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn signed his first name alone, the way Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo were known. In 1633 he added a single letter, a "d", to the spelling of that first name. The change altered nothing about how the name sounded. Yet he kept it consistently ever after, proof that the small adjustment meant something to him, whatever that something was. He was born on the 15th of July 1606 in Leiden and died on Friday the 4th of October 1669 in Amsterdam. Between those dates he made roughly three hundred paintings, just under three hundred etchings, and several hundred drawings. He never once went abroad. Why does a miller's son from Leiden rank among the greatest visual artists in the history of Western art? What did he mean when he wrote that he sought "the greatest and most natural movement"? And how did a man so successful in his thirties end his life surrendering his house, his prints, and his collection of lion skins to creditors?

• 2. A Face Partially Eclipsed

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  Around forty surviving self-portraits, plus a few drawings and thirty-one etchings, form what amounts to an intimate autobiography in oil. At one time roughly ninety paintings were counted as Rembrandt self-portraits. Scholars later learned he had his students copy his own self-portraits as part of their training, which winnowed the autograph count to over forty. These images trace a man from an uncertain youth, through the dapper and successful portrait-painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but powerful figure of old age. Some show him in quasi-historical fancy dress. Some show him pulling faces at himself. In these portraits Rembrandt angles the sitter's face so the ridge of the nose almost always divides bright light from shadow. A Rembrandt face is a face partially eclipsed. The nose thrusts into a riddle of halftones, focusing the eye on the boundary between a flood of clarity and a brooding duskiness. He sometimes painted himself directly into biblical crowds, in works including The Raising of the Cross, Joseph Telling His Dreams, and The Stoning of Saint Stephen. The scholar Durham suggests the Bible was for Rembrandt "a kind of diary, an account of moments in his own life". Between 1652 and 1669 he painted fifteen of his most reflective self-portraits, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de' Medici, carried one home to Florence.

• 3. Smooth To Rough

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  Pieter Lastman, the history painter Rembrandt apprenticed with for six months in Amsterdam, shaped his Leiden years from 1625 to 1631. The paintings of that period were small but dense with detail, rich in costume and jewelry, favouring religious and allegorical subjects and tronies. In 1626 he produced his first etchings, whose wide circulation largely built his international fame. By 1629 he had completed Judas Repentant, Returning the Pieces of Silver and The Artist in His Studio, his first real leap forward in handling light and paint. During his early Amsterdam years, from 1632 to 1636, Rembrandt reached for the baroque scale of Rubens. He painted dramatic, high-contrast scenes in large format, among them The Blinding of Samson, Belshazzar's Feast, and Danaë. In the same stretch he produced the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632. From 1640 the tone grew sober, possibly reflecting personal tragedy, and his biblical subjects shifted from the Old Testament toward the New. By the 1650s the brushwork turned pronounced and the colours richer, while shine became almost nonexistent. Contemporary accounts sometimes complained about the coarseness of his brushwork. Rembrandt himself was said to have dissuaded visitors from looking too closely at his paintings. His move from a "smooth" manner to a "rough" one drew in part on the work of Titian, the Venetian master.

• 4. The Civic Militia

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  The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, painted between 1640 and 1642, became Rembrandt's most famous work. It is better known as The Night Watch, though the painting is not set at night. Its darkness comes from ageing. Nor is it a watch or a patrol. It is a ceremony. The piece was commissioned for the new hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, the musketeer branch of the civic militia. Convention demanded that such group portraits be stately and formal. Rembrandt instead layered his figures into a dramatic action, the firing of a musket, an event that touches some characters but not others. The street setting is invented, and its complex structure looks contrived or theatrical even as it seems to show a real event in a real place. The scholar Joseph Manca suggests the work was meant to function at multiple levels, so many competing interpretations may all be correct. Manca points to the two officers in the foreground, calmly carrying out their duty despite the disturbance behind them, as a sign of their "moral excellence".

• 5. Three Wives And A Court

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  Saskia van Uylenburgh married Rembrandt in 1634, in the local church of St. Annaparochie, without any of his relatives present. She came from a respected family. Her father Rombertus was a lawyer and had been burgomaster of Leeuwarden. Three of their children died within weeks of birth. Only the fourth, Titus, born in 1641, survived into adulthood, and Saskia died in 1642, probably from tuberculosis. Rembrandt's drawings of her on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works. Geertje Dircx, hired as Titus' caretaker and dry nurse, became Rembrandt's lover before leaving in May 1649 and charging him with breach of promise. To pay her lawyer she pawned a diamond ring he had given her, a ring that once belonged to Saskia. In August 1650 Rembrandt and members of Dircx's own family had her committed to a women's house of correction at Gouda. He paid the costs and took measures to keep her there as long as possible. Hendrickje Stoffels, twenty-three and once his maid, began a relationship with him in early 1649. In June 1654 the Reformed Church summoned her three times over the charge "that she had committed the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter". She admitted guilt and was banned from communion. Rembrandt was never summoned. That October the couple had a daughter, Cornelia, who would later move to Batavia in 1670.

• 6. Living Beyond His Means

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  Thirteen thousand guilders bought the house on the Breestraat that Rembrandt moved into in May 1639, and the mortgage to finance it sowed his later financial difficulties. His appetite for acquiring art, prints, and rare items pushed him to live beyond his means. By July 1656 he declared his insolvency through a high court arrangement known as cessio bonorum, surrendering his assets willingly rather than under force. Both the authorities and his creditors showed leniency. A sale list of 363 items reveals the breadth of what he had gathered. There were Old Master paintings and drawings, busts of Roman emperors, statues of Greek philosophers, two globes, bonnets, armour, porcelain from Asia, and natural history specimens including two lion skins, a bird-of-paradise, corals, and minerals. The prices realised were disappointing. He was permitted to keep his tools so he could keep earning. By February 1658 his house was sold at a foreclosure auction, and the family moved to more modest lodgings at the Rozengracht. To let him keep working, Hendrickje and Titus set up a dummy corporation as art dealers, with Rembrandt receiving board and lodging in return. He outlived them both and was buried four days after his death in a rented grave in the Westerkerk.

• 7. The Endless Reattribution

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  In 1968 the Rembrandt Research Project began under the Netherlands Organisation for the Advancement of Scientific Research, expected, highly optimistically, to last ten years. Art historians joined experts from other fields to reassess which works were genuinely his, using state-of-the-art technical diagnostics. The difficulty is rooted in Rembrandt's own studio practice. He encouraged students to copy his paintings, sometimes finishing them to sell as originals and sometimes as authorised copies, and his style was easy enough for his best pupils to emulate. The Polish Rider, now in the Frick Collection in New York, shows how the arguments swing. In the 1980s Dr Josua Bruyn tentatively gave it to a pupil, Willem Drost, but that remained a minority view, now generally rejected. Simon Schama and Ernst van de Wetering both later argued for the master himself. Schama also challenged the very title of Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, arguing, through Paul Crenshaw's scholarship, that the figure is the ancient Greek painter Apelles. In 2005 four paintings once given to students were reclassified as Rembrandt's own, among them Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet, painted in 1640. In 2014 van de Wetering called the demotion of the 1652 Old Man Sitting in a Chair "a vast mistake".