Baroque Age
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669)
Dutch Golden Age painter.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, born in Leiden in 1606, is the towering figure of the Dutch Golden Age and among the greatest painters and etchers in European history. The son of a miller, he trained briefly in Leiden and with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam, then built an early career as a fashionable portraitist in the booming, market-driven art world of the young Dutch Republic. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) established him in Amsterdam; the great militia group portrait now called The Night Watch (1642) is the summit of his public ambition.
Rembrandt made light and its withdrawal into a language of feeling. His mature works model faces and hands out of warm shadow with an almost tactile impasto, and his etchings — above all the so-called Hundred Guilder Print — pushed the intaglio medium to unmatched tonal richness. Across a lifetime he painted, drew, and etched himself perhaps a hundred times, charting his own aging with unsparing honesty in works like the late Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
His life was marked by loss and reversal: the death of his wife Saskia, the deaths of children, and a bankruptcy in 1656 that forced the sale of his house and collection. Yet his late religious paintings, among them The Return of the Prodigal Son, reach a compassion and inwardness rarely equalled. He left only a handful of writings — seven letters to the statesman-poet Constantijn Huygens survive — and died in Amsterdam in 1669.
The words the record keeps using: introspective, compassionate, warm, profound, unsparing, meditative, humane, shadowed.
At a glance
- Lived 1606–1669
- Origin Dutch
- Worked in Amsterdam
- Era Baroque Age
- Movements Dutch Golden Age
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Engraving and etching
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Etching with drypoint, Impasto
Works in the archive
- The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632 (Mauritshuis, The Hague)
Painted soon after Rembrandt settled in Amsterdam, this group portrait shows the anatomist Dr Nicolaes Tulp demonstrating the muscles of a corpse's forearm to members of the surgeons' guild. It transformed the group… - The Night Watch (Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq), 1642 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
Rembrandt's most famous painting is a group portrait of an Amsterdam civic militia company, but he broke every convention of the genre by turning the static line-up into a surging moment of action as the company musters… - Christ Healing the Sick (The Hundred Guilder Print), 1643 (Various impressions (Rijksmuseum; British Museum; and others))
Rembrandt's most celebrated print gathers several episodes from Matthew 19 into one scene — Christ preaching, healing the sick, welcoming children, and confronting the doubting rich — under a single arch of composition.… - The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1661 (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg)
A late masterpiece of religious feeling: the ragged, kneeling son buries his shaved head against his father, whose worn hands rest on the boy's shoulders in wordless forgiveness, while onlookers stand in shadow.… - Self-Portrait with Two Circles, 1665 (Kenwood House (English Heritage), London)
One of the greatest of Rembrandt's roughly forty painted self-portraits, made near the end of his life. He shows himself as a working painter, palette and brushes in hand, before two enigmatic circles on the wall behind…
What was said
Writing to Constantijn Huygens about two Passion paintings for the Stadtholder, Rembrandt explained that he had striven in them for the greatest and most natural movement — an aim usually understood as both bodily action and inner emotion.
The early biographer Houbraken reported that Rembrandt held a picture to be finished when the master had achieved his intention, and would not let sitters pester him to smooth what he considered complete.
Houbraken also recorded that in his late manner Rembrandt laid paint on so thickly that it stood proud of the canvas, and that a portrait was said to be built up so heavily one could lift it by the nose.
Lineage
Learned from Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Titian
What would Rembrandt make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Rembrandt van Rijn", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Rembrandt · Keep a life moment the way Rembrandt would · Pictures made after Rembrandt