Rembrandt: A Guide to the Life and Artworks of Rembrandt

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, commonly known as Rembrandt, was a seventeenth-century Dutch artist renowned for his portraiture work. Rembrandt’s career spanned various subjects and styles, but he is best known for his honest and empathetic portraits (especially his self-portraits) and depictions of Biblical scenes. While his oil on canvas works are the most prominent in his catalog, the Dutch artist was also a master etcher—in which the artist etches into a metal surface—and printmaker. Rembrandt’s most famous works include The Night Watch, The Return of the Prodigal Son, and many self-portraits.

Here’s a brief biographical sketch of Rembrandt:

• Early life: Rembrandt was born into a wealthy family in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic (now part of the Netherlands), in 1606. His parents both belonged to various churches—his father to the Dutch Reformed Church and his mother to the Roman Catholic Church—which may have informed his interest in the religious allusion that would feature prominently in his future works. He attended Latin school and the University of Leiden and was apprenticed to several Dutch painters, including Jacob van Swanenburgh, Pieter Lastman, and Jacob Pynas. While Rembrandt never traveled abroad, he studied many international works, including those by Italian painters Titian and Caravaggio and Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens.
• Early success: In 1624, Rembrandt opened his first studio. Within a few years, he became well-known for his elegant brush strokes and detailed historical paintings and began painting commissions for the court (including for the sovereign prince). He then moved his studio to Amsterdam, where he worked as a portraitist. During this time, he became extremely well-known, earning a significant income from his painting. He also took on several pupils, including Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, and Gerrit Dou.
• Marriage: In 1634, Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh. Their early marriage was marked with the deaths of several of their children—an infant son and two infant daughters—before they had their fourth child, a boy named Titus, who would survive to adulthood.
• Later relationships: After Titus’s birth, Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, became ill with tuberculosis and passed away in 1642 at 29. The painter soon began having an affair with his son’s caretaker, Geertje Dircx, who eventually sued him for breaking his promise to marry. The conditions of the trust his wife set up for their son before she died prevented the painter from remarrying after her death, or he would lose access to the funds. The court eventually decided to award Dircx, the model for Danaë, with alimony. Years later, Rembrandt began a relationship with his former maid, Hendrickje Stoffels, but would never legally marry again.
• Financial troubles: Rembrandt’s excessive spending habits and poor investments forced him to sell his house and most of his art collection. In response to the painter’s increasing financial troubles, the painter’s guild in Amsterdam made a new rule barring artists with major financial difficulties from working as painters. Titus and Stoffels set up an art-dealing dummy corporation with Rembrandt as the sole employee to circumvent this rule.
• Later work: As Rembrandt aged, he continued his prolific pace and created many more paintings and etchings, commissions, and personal work. His later paintings are characterized by more expressive or coarse brushwork and quieter, emotionally intense scenes. He continued working right up until his death, finishing one of his most well-known paintings, The Return of the Prodigal Son, just before his passing. He was buried in the Westerkerk church.
• Legacy: While Rembrandt’s financial situation and romantic drama were public knowledge, he was still considered a master artist during his day, and his legacy has only continued to grow. His work can be seen in museums worldwide, including the National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum, and The Hague.

Rembrandt was an incredibly prolific artist who experimented throughout his long career. However, there are a few principles that remained relatively constant throughout his body of work:

• Light and shadows: One ubiquitous characteristic throughout much of Rembrandt’s oeuvre is his dramatic experimentation with light in his paintings. Whether a portrait, a narrative piece, or a landscape, certain parts of Rembrandt’s paintings seem to glow with an inner light, while other areas are obscured by heavy shadow. Nearly all of his portraits are angled so that the subject’s nose is the demarcation line between the extreme light and extreme dark of the painting, meaning that half the subject’s face is illuminated while the other half is in shadow. Rembrandt drew much of his lighting inspiration from chiaroscuro, a Baroque technique for dramatic lighting popularized by the painter Caravaggio.
• Movement: In contrast to the classical form of art (in which figures are usually shown resting, reclining, or emotionless), Rembrandt’s work closely resembles the Baroque style characterized by movement. In his early work, this movement came in the form of physical action—for example, a ship being tossed by waves in The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. In his later work, the physical action became much more subdued, and Rembrandt instead opted for movement to come through in the subject’s subtle emotions.
• Allusion: Rembrandt took a significant amount of inspiration from other sources when he painted or etched. Many of his works tell the Bible’s stories or Greek mythology—for example, in his works The Blinding of Samson and Andromeda Chained to the Rocks.
  
• Portraiture: Rembrandt worked as a portrait painter for most of his life, resulting in many portraits on display worldwide. His most well-known paintings are his self-portraits, which offer viewers a glimpse into his inner psyche. In addition to his self-portraits, Rembrandt also painted himself into many of his narrative paintings. For instance, in The Stoning of Saint Stephen, a careful viewer can spot Rembrandt’s face in the crowd, immediately underneath the left elbow of the man in the center holding the stone.

Some of Rembrandt’s most well-known works include:

1. 1. The Stoning of Saint Stephen (1625): This painting depicts Saint Stephen’s martyrdom from the New Testament, an earlier known painting by Rembrandt, finished when he was 19 years old. It is also the first self-portrait of Rembrandt since he painted himself into the painting as one of the crowd’s onlookers.
2. 2. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632): This painting, commissioned by Amsterdam’s Guild of Surgeons, features a surgeon displaying the muscles of a human corpse’s arm to a group of doctors. This work diverges dramatically from other commissioned works because it is a mise-en-scène painting, an art world term to describe the staging of all of the elements in the painting, from lighting to composition to subject placement.
3. 3. The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633): This painting is the only known seascape that Rembrandt painted and tells the story of Jesus Christ’s calming of the waters in the New Testament. It is perhaps most famous for being at the center of an art heist in 1990, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
4. 4. Danaë (1636): This painting depicts the Greek mythological figure Danaë, most likely welcoming Zeus into her bedroom. Geertje Dircx, Rembrandt’s lover at the time, was the model for this painting which is considered one of his best narrative pieces due to the detail, light and dark, and size (the original was eight by ten feet).
5. 5. The Night Watch (1642): Arguably Rembrandt’s most famous painting was a commissioned piece that depicts a troop of musketeers heading out on a mission. The painting’s official name is Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. It is commonly known as The Night Watch because the painting’s severe age and dimming made it look like the scene was occurring at night. However, when it was first painted, the scene was of the troop stepping out of a shadowy courtyard into bright sunlight. Rembrandt completed this painting in 1642, the year his wife passed away from tuberculosis.
6. 6. The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662): Also called The Sampling Officials, this painting was one of Rembrandt’s last commissioned group portraits, featuring a group of men whose job was to assess the quality of cloth for sale in their guild.
7. 7. Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c. 1665): Of all of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, the late Self-Portrait with Two Circles is the most well-known. The painting shows Rembrandt at work in his studio and features a curious background with two large circles. Art critics debate the significance of these circles, but no one has produced a definitive answer.
8. 8. The Return of the Prodigal Son (1669): One of Rembrandt’s final paintings, The Return of the Prodigal Son is often considered one of his most moving. Although it depicts a quiet moment in which a wayward son returns home (told in the New Testament), Rembrandt incorporates a powerful emotional veneer that taps into how the subjects are feeling in the moment.

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