Rembrandt

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on July 15, 1606, in Leiden, a prosperous university town in the province of Holland ^[1]. He was among the youngest children of Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn, a miller whose family name derived from the Rhine river near their mill, and Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuytbrouck, the daughter of a baker. The household was comfortable by the standards of the Dutch Republic, and the parents invested in their son's education in a way that set him apart from most artisans' children ^[2].

As a boy he attended the Latin school in Leiden, where instruction covered classical languages, rhetoric, and religion. Around the age of fourteen he was enrolled at Leiden University, though he appears to have spent little or no time in actual study there ^[1]. His inclination lay elsewhere. His parents apprenticed him to the Leiden painter Jacob van Swanenburgh, with whom he spent roughly three years learning the fundamentals of drawing and painting.

The decisive step in his training came around 1624, when he studied for about six months in Amsterdam under Pieter Lastman, a history painter who had worked in Italy and absorbed the dramatic lighting of Caravaggio's followers ^[2]. Lastman's crowded biblical and mythological narratives, with their strong gestures and theatrical illumination, left a lasting imprint. Rembrandt returned to Leiden and, still in his teens, set up as an independent master.

For anyone asking who was Rembrandt in the late 1620s, the answer was a fiercely ambitious young Leiden painter sharing ideas, and possibly a workshop, with his contemporary Jan Lievens ^[3]. The two produced small, densely worked history paintings and studies of expressive old men. Rembrandt's early pictures already showed the concentration on light and psychological intensity that would define his career. Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the Prince of Orange and a discerning connoisseur, visited the young painters around 1628 and praised Rembrandt's gift for conveying emotion, a judgment recorded in Huygens's own autobiographical manuscript ^[3].

Through Huygens's mediation, Rembrandt received commissions from the stadholder Frederik Hendrik, including a series of paintings on the Passion of Christ ^[2]. By 1631 he had begun working with the Amsterdam art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh, and he soon moved permanently to the city, then the commercial hub of northern Europe. Amsterdam's wealthy merchants, clergy, and civic officials wanted portraits, and Rembrandt supplied them with a fluency that quickly made him the most fashionable portraitist in town.

The painting that announced his arrival was The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp of 1632, a group portrait of the Amsterdam surgeons' guild now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague ^[4]. Instead of arranging the sitters in a static row, Rembrandt gathered them around a dissected corpse in a moment of shared attention. The picture turned a routine guild commission into a drama, and commissions multiplied. In these same years he took on pupils, beginning a teaching practice that continued for most of his life and trained painters such as Gerrit Dou, Govert Flinck, and Ferdinand Bol ^[2].

Any account of Rembrandt achievements has to begin with the militia group portrait completed in 1642 and known since the eighteenth century as The Night Watch ^[5]. Commissioned by the civic guard company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, the enormous canvas broke with convention by showing the guardsmen in motion, spilling forward out of shadow into light. The painting has hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam since the museum's building opened in 1885 and remains its most famous possession ^[5]. Contrary to a persistent legend, the picture was admired in its own time; the sitters paid for it and it hung prominently in the guardsmen's hall.

Rembrandt's achievement was never confined to a single genre. He painted biblical narratives throughout his life, from early works such as the Passion series for Frederik Hendrik to late masterpieces including The Return of the Prodigal Son, now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg ^[2]. He was also one of the greatest printmakers in the history of art. His roughly 300 etchings, among them The Hundred Guilder Print and the Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves known as The Three Crosses, circulated across Europe during his lifetime and spread his fame far beyond the Dutch Republic ^[6]. He treated the etching plate experimentally, reworking states, varying inking, and printing on Japanese paper to alter mood.

A third pillar of his reputation is the long sequence of self portraits. Across paintings, etchings, and drawings, he recorded his own face from cocky youth to weathered old age, a sustained self examination without precedent in European art ^[7]. Scholars have counted around 80 such works in all media, and the late painted examples, including those in the National Gallery in London and the Frick Collection in New York, are often described as summits of portraiture ^[7]. Taken together, the paintings, prints, and drawings (several hundred paintings and roughly two thousand drawings are generally accepted as his) constitute one of the most studied bodies of work of any artist, and the Rembrandt Research Project spent decades from 1968 onward sorting authentic works from those of pupils and imitators ^[2].

In 1634 Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh, a cousin of his dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh and the daughter of a former burgomaster of Leeuwarden in Friesland ^[1]. Saskia brought social standing and a substantial dowry, and she appears repeatedly in his paintings and drawings, sometimes in costume as Flora or as a figure in biblical scenes. The couple's first three children died in infancy. Their fourth, a son named Titus, was born in 1641 and survived to adulthood ^[2].

Saskia died in June 1642, only months after the completion of The Night Watch, probably of tuberculosis ^[1]. Her will left her estate to Titus but allowed Rembrandt the income so long as he did not remarry, a condition that shaped his later relationships. Geertje Dircx, hired as Titus's nurse, became Rembrandt's companion; the relationship ended badly, with a breach of promise suit and Geertje's eventual confinement in a house of correction at Gouda, an episode that biographers still debate ^[2].

By the late 1640s Hendrickje Stoffels, a young woman from Bredevoort who had entered the household as a servant, became his partner. In 1654 she was summoned before the Amsterdam church council and censured for living with the painter unmarried, shortly before giving birth to their daughter Cornelia ^[1]. Hendrickje modeled for several of his most affecting late works, and she and Titus later formed a business partnership that employed Rembrandt and shielded his output from creditors.

Rembrandt's finances collapsed in the 1650s. In 1639 he had bought a grand house on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat in Amsterdam for 13,000 guilders, paid mostly on credit, and he spent freely on art, prints, weapons, costumes, and curiosities for his collection ^[8]. War with England damaged the Amsterdam economy, his debts mounted, and in 1656 he applied for a form of court-supervised insolvency known as cessio bonorum, which spared him imprisonment ^[2]. His collections were sold at auction over the following years for disappointing sums, and the house itself was sold; the building survives today as the Museum Het Rembrandthuis ^[8].

He moved to a rented house on the Rozengracht in the Jordaan, a poorer quarter, but he did not stop working or receiving important commissions. In the early 1660s he painted The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, a group portrait of cloth sampling officials that ranks with his finest work, and The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis for the new Amsterdam Town Hall, a monumental canvas that was returned to him and survives only as a fragment now in Stockholm ^[2]. His late manner grew broader and rougher, with paint applied thickly and forms suggested rather than described, an approach some contemporaries found unfinished but later generations recognized as profoundly expressive ^[7].

Loss shadowed the final decade. Hendrickje died in 1663, and Titus, who had married in early 1668, died that September at about 26 ^[1]. Rembrandt himself died in Amsterdam on October 4, 1669, at the age of 63, and was buried in an unmarked rented grave in the Westerkerk ^[1]. His daughter Cornelia and Titus's infant daughter Titia survived him.

Rembrandt's reputation dipped in the decades after his death, when classicizing taste dismissed his rough handling, but collectors never stopped wanting his work, and by the nineteenth century he had been elevated into the small company of artists treated as universal geniuses ^[2]. Painters as different as Francisco Goya, Eugène Delacroix, and Vincent van Gogh studied him closely, and his etchings shaped printmaking for centuries. The very word Rembrandtesque came to describe a certain kind of warm, directional lighting, and cinematographers still use the term Rembrandt lighting for a standard portrait setup ^[6].

His works anchor major museums on several continents. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds The Night Watch and The Jewish Bride; the Mauritshuis has the Anatomy Lesson; the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Hermitage all hold important groups of paintings ^[4][5]. Museum Het Rembrandthuis preserves his former home and a nearly complete collection of his etchings ^[8]. Attribution questions keep his catalogue in motion: the Rembrandt Research Project's five volume Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, published between 1982 and 2015, removed and restored works, and new technical study continues to refine the list ^[2].

Basic Rembrandt facts, his dates, his bankruptcy, his roughly 80 self portraits, only begin to explain his hold on viewers. Any serious Rembrandt biography returns in the end to the pictures themselves, where ordinary faces are given weight and inner life through light and shadow. In 2019, 350 years after his death, the Netherlands marked a national Year of Rembrandt with exhibitions including the Rijksmuseum's All the Rembrandts, and the museum's live streamed restoration of The Night Watch, Operation Night Watch, drew a worldwide audience ^[5]. Few artists of any era remain so continuously present.