Rembrandt

Career

In 1625, Rembrandt opened a studio in Leiden, which he shared with friend and colleague Jan Lievens. In 1627, Rembrandt began to accept students, among them Gerrit Dou and Isaac de Jouderville. Joan Huydecoper is mentioned as the first buyer of a Rembrandt painting in 1628. In 1629, Rembrandt was discovered by the statesman Constantijn Huygens who procured for Rembrandt important commissions from the court of The Hague. As a result of this connection, Prince Frederik Hendrik continued to purchase paintings from Rembrandt.

At the end of 1631, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, a city rapidly expanding as the business and trade capital. He began to practice as a professional portraitist for the first time, with great success. He initially stayed with an art dealer, Hendrick van Uylenburgh, and in 1634, married Hendrick's cousin, Saskia van Uylenburgh. Saskia came from a respected family: her father Rombertus was a lawyer and had been burgomaster (mayor) of Leeuwarden. The couple married in the local church of St. Annaparochie without the presence of Rembrandt's relatives. 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.

In 1635, Rembrandt and Saskia rented a fashionable lodging with a view of the river Amstel. In 1637, Rembrandt moved upriver to Vlooienburg, in a building on the previous site of the current Stopera. In May 1639 they moved to a recently modernised house in the upscale 'Breestraat' with artists and art dealers; Nicolaes Pickenoy, a portrait painter, was his neighbour. The mortgage to finance the 13,000 guilder purchase would be a cause for later financial difficulties. The neighborhood sheltered many immigrants and was becoming the Jewish quarter. It was there that Rembrandt frequently sought his Jewish neighbours to model for his Hebrew Bible scenes. One of the great patrons at the early stages of his career was Amsterdam statesman Andries de Graeff.

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. 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's 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 14 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.

Insolvency

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 finalised but Rembrandt still had to cover half of the remaining mortgage. Creditors began pressing for instalments but Rembrandt, facing financial strain, sought a postponement. The house required repairs, prompting Rembrandt to borrow money from friends, among them 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 his 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 his 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 (including a bible), two globes, bonnets, armour, and various objects from Asia (porcelain), as well as a collections of natural history specimens (two lion skins, a bird-of-paradise, corals and minerals). However, the sale prices were disappointing.

By February 1658, Rembrandt' house had been 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. In early December 1660, the sale of the house was finalised 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 (in Stockholm) 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, 4 October 1669, and was buried four days later in a rented grave in the Westerkerk. His illegitimate child, Cornelia (1654–1684), 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 (1669-1715) 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.

Expert assessments

In 1968, the Rembrandt Research Project began under the sponsorship of the Netherlands Organisation 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 favour of the Frick; In his 1999 book Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama and the Rembrandt Project scholar Ernst van de Wetering (Melbourne Symposium, 1997) 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. "Most scholars since the 1940s have 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 modelling.

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 authorised 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. As well, there were later imitations of his work, and restorations which so seriously damaged the original works that they are no longer recognisable.

Painting materials

Technical investigation of Rembrandt's paintings in the possession of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Kassel) 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, van Dyke 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 colours, 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.

Name and signature

"Rembrandt" is a modification of the spelling of the artist's first name that he introduced in 1633. The patronymic "Harmenszoon" indicates that his father's name is Harmen. "van Rijn" indicates that his family lived near the Rhine.

Rembrandt's earliest signatures (c. 1625) consisted of an initial "R", or the monogram "RH" (for Rembrant Harmenszoon), and starting in 1629, "RHL" (the "L" stood, presumably, for Leiden). In 1632, he used this monogram early in the year, then added his family name to it, "RHL-van Rijn" but replaced this form in that same year and began using his first name alone with its original spelling, "Rembrant". In 1633 he added a "d", and maintained this form consistently from then on, proving that this minor change had a meaning for him (whatever it might have been). This change is purely visual; it does not change the way his name is pronounced. Despite the large number of paintings and etchings signed with this modified first name, most of the documents that mentioned him during his lifetime retained the original "Rembrant" spelling. (Note: the rough chronology of signature forms above applies to the paintings, and to a lesser degree to the etchings; from 1632, presumably, there is only one etching signed "RHL-v. Rijn", the large-format "Raising of Lazarus", B 73).

His practice of signing his work with his first name, later followed by Vincent van Gogh, was probably inspired by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo who, then as now, were referred to by their first names alone.

Workshop

Rembrandt ran a large workshop and had many pupils. The list of Rembrandt pupils from his period in Leiden as well as his time in Amsterdam is quite long, mostly because his influence on painters around him was so great that it is difficult to tell whether someone worked for him in his studio or just copied his style for patrons eager to acquire a Rembrandt. A partial list should include Ferdinand Bol, Adriaen Brouwer, Gerrit Dou, Willem Drost, Heiman Dullaart, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Carel Fabritius, Govert Flinck, Hendrick Fromantiou, Aert de Gelder, Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, Abraham Janssens, Godfrey Kneller, Philip de Koninck, Jacob Levecq, Nicolaes Maes, Jürgen Ovens, Christopher Paudiß, Willem de Poorter, Jan Victors, and Willem van der Vliet.

Museum collections

The United States has the largest number of Rembrandt's paintings, spread over several museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (mostly portraits) and the Frick Collection in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, in total 86 paintings. Other large groups are in Germany, with 69 paintings, at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, and Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel, and elsewhere. The UK has a total of 51, especially in the National Gallery and Royal Collection. There are 49 in the Netherlands, many in the Rijksmuseum, which has The Night Watch and The Jewish Bride, and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Others can be found in The Louvre, the Hermitage Museum, and Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. The Royal Castle in Warsaw has two paintings by Rembrandt.

Large collections of Rembrandt's drawings are held in the Rijksmuseum, Louvre, and British Museum. The Rembrandt House Museum holds many of his drawings and "almost all" the etchings, a selection of which are on rotating display in the house.

Apart from a few very rare prints, mostly less important early studies, or "the informal printed scribbles from the artist's early years", most of his prints are not very rare by museum standards, and major print rooms have good collections. Both the Rijksmuseum and the British Museum, who claim to have the best collections, have over 1,000 impressions of the 300-odd prints; most of these can be viewed in great detail online. The degree to which these collections are displayed to the public or can easily be viewed by them in the print room, varies greatly. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York claims to have the best collection in the United States, with "impressions of most of the three hundred or so known etchings by Rembrandt, as well as multiple, often exceedingly rare impressions of various states"; it has "almost 500" images online.

Impressions often continued to be printed by others until at least the 19th-century, with many of the plates reworked as they became worn. In 1986, 79 of Rembrandt's original copper plates still existed.

Exhibitions

• Sept–Oct 1898: Rembrandt Tentoonstelling (Rembrandt Exhibition), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
• Jan–Feb 1899: Rembrandt Tentoonstelling (Rembrandt Exhibition), Royal Academy, London.
• 30 January – 1 May 2005: Rembrandt's Religious Etchings, National Gallery of Art
• 30 January – 1 May 2005: Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits, National Gallery of Art, traveled to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 7 June - 28 August 2005 catalogue by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
• 21 April 2011 – 18 July 2011: Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, Musée du Louvre.
• 22 February 2012 – 17 June 2012: Where Darkness Meets Light: Rembrandt and His Contemporaries – The Golden Age of Dutch Art, Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul.
• 23 February – 20 May 2012: Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• 16 September 2013 – 14 November 2013: Rembrandt: The Consummate Etcher, Syracuse University Art Galleries.
• 19 May 2014 – 27 June 2014: From Rembrandt to Rosenquist: Works on Paper from the NAC's Permanent Collection, National Arts Club.
• 19 October 2014 – 4 January 2015: Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough and the Golden Age of Painting in Europe, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art.
• 15 October 2014 – 18 January 2015: Rembrandt: The Late Works, The National Gallery, London.
• 12 February 2015 – 17 May 2015: Late Rembrandt, The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
• 16 September 2018 – 6 January 2019: Rembrandt – Painter as Printmaker, Denver Art Museum, Denver.
• 24 August 2019 – 1 December 2019: Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario.
• 4 October 2019 – 2 February 2020: Rembrandt's Light, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.
• 18 February 2020 – 30 August 2020: Rembrandt and Amsterdam portraiture, 1590–1670 , Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
• 10 August 2020 – 1 November 2020: Young Rembrandt, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
• 18 November 2023 – 19 February 2024 Rembrandt: Etchings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Paintings

Self-portraits

Other major paintings

Drawings and etchings

Works about Rembrandt

Literary works (e.g. poetry and fiction)

• To the Picture of Rembrandt, a Russian-language poem by Mikhail Lermontov, 1830
• Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, a series of French-language poems by Aloysius Bertrand, 1842
• Picture This, a novel by Joseph Heller, 1988
• Moi, la Putain de Rembrandt, a French-language novel by Sylvie Matton, 1998
• Van Rijn, a novel by Sarah Emily Miano, 2006
• I Am Rembrandt's Daughter, a novel by Lynn Cullen, 2007
• The Rembrandt Affair, a novel by Daniel Silva, 2011
• The Anatomy Lesson, a novel by Nina Siegal, 2014
• Rembrandt's Mirror, a novel by Kim Devereux, 2015

Music

• The Donna Summer song "Dinner with Gershwin" contain the lyrics "I want to watch Rembrandt sketch."
• The Scott Walker song "Duchess" features the lyrics "It's your bicycle bells / and your Rembrandt swells"
• The song on the Dreamville album Revenge of the Dreamers III "Rembrand... Run it Back"

Films

• The Stolen Rembrandt, a 1914 film directed by Leo D. Maloney and J. P. McGowan
• The Tragedy of a Great / Die Tragödie eines Großen, a 1920 film directed by Arthur Günsburg
• The Missing Rembrandt, a 1932 film directed by Leslie S. Hiscott
• Rembrandt, a 1936 film directed by Alexander Korda and starring Charles Laughton
• Rembrandt, a 1940 film
• Rembrandt in de schuilkelder / Rembrandt in the Bunker, a 1941 film directed by Gerard Rutten
• Rembrandt, a 1942 film directed by Hans Steinhoff
• Rembrandt: A Self-Portrait, a 1954 documentary film by Morrie Roizman
• Rembrandt, schilder van de mens / Rembrandt, Painter of Man, a 1957 film directed by Bert Haanstra
• Rembrandt fecit 1669, a 1977 film directed by Jos Stelling
• Rembrandt: The Public Eye and the Private Gaze, a 1992 documentary film by Simon Schama
• Rembrandt, a 1999 film directed by Charles Matton
• Rembrandt: Fathers & Sons, a 1999 film directed by David Devine
• Stealing Rembrandt, a 2003 film directed by Jannik Johansen and Anders Thomas Jensen
• Simon Schama's Power of Art: Rembrandt, a 2006 BBC documentary film series by Simon Schama
• Nightwatching, a 2007 film directed by Peter Greenaway
• Rembrandt's J'Accuse, a 2008 documentary film by Peter Greenaway
• Rembrandt en ik, a 2011 film directed by Marleen Gorris
• Schama on Rembrandt: Masterpieces of the Late Years, a 2014 documentary film by Simon Schama