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Periods, themes and styles |
Throughout his career, Rembrandt took as his primary subjects the themes of portraiture, landscape and narrative painting. For the last, he was especially praised by his contemporaries, who extolled him as a masterly interpreter of biblical stories for his skill in representing emotions and attention to detail. Stylist... |
A parallel development may be seen in Rembrandt's skill as a printmaker. In the etchings of his maturity, particularly from the late 1640s onward, the freedom and breadth of his drawings and paintings found expression in the print medium as well. The works encompass a wide range of subject matter and technique, sometim... |
Lastman's influence on Rembrandt was most prominent during his period in Leiden from 1625 to 1631. Paintings were rather small but rich in details (for example, in costumes and jewelry). Religious and allegorical themes were favored, as were tronies. In 1626 Rembrandt produced his first etchings, the wide dissemination... |
During his early years in Amsterdam (1632–1636), Rembrandt began to paint dramatic biblical and mythological scenes in high contrast and of large format (The Blinding of Samson, 1636, Belshazzar's Feast, c. 1635 Danaë, 1636 but reworked later), seeking to emulate the baroque style of Rubens. With the occasional help of... |
By the late 1630s, Rembrandt had produced a few paintings and many etchings of landscapes. Often these landscapes highlighted natural drama, featuring uprooted trees and ominous skies (Cottages before a Stormy Sky, c. 1641; The Three Trees, 1643). From 1640 his work became less exuberant and more sober in tone, possibl... |
In the decade following the Night Watch, Rembrandt's paintings varied greatly in size, subject, and style. The previous tendency to create dramatic effects primarily by strong contrasts of light and shadow gave way to the use of frontal lighting and larger and more saturated areas of color. Simultaneously, figures came... |
In the 1650s, Rembrandt's style changed again. Colors became richer and brush strokes more pronounced. With these changes, Rembrandt distanced himself from earlier work and current fashion, which increasingly inclined toward fine, detailed works. His use of light becomes more jagged and harsh, and shine becomes almost ... |
In later years, biblical themes were often depicted but emphasis shifted from dramatic group scenes to intimate portrait-like figures (James the Apostle, 1661). In his last years, Rembrandt painted his most deeply reflective self-portraits (from 1652 to 1669 he painted fifteen), and several moving images of both men an... |
Graphic works |
Rembrandt produced etchings for most of his career, from 1626 to 1660, when he was forced to sell his printing-press and practically abandoned etching. Only the troubled year of 1649 produced no dated work. He took easily to etching and, though he learned to use a burin and partly engraved many plates, the freedom of e... |
In the mature works of the 1650s, Rembrandt was more ready to improvise on the plate and large prints typically survive in several states, up to eleven, often radically changed. He now used hatching to create his dark areas, which often take up much of the plate. He also experimented with the effects of printing on dif... |
His prints have similar subjects to his paintings, although the 27 self-portraits are relatively more common, and portraits of other people less so. The landscapes, mostly small, largely set the course for the graphic treatment of landscape until the end of the 19th century. Of the many hundreds of drawings Rembrandt m... |
Drawings by Rembrandt and his pupils/followers have been extensively studied by many artists and scholars through the centuries. His original draughtsmanship has been described as an individualistic art style that was very similar to East Asian old masters, most notably Chinese masters: |
Asian inspiration |
Rembrandt was interested in Mughal miniatures, especially around the 1650s. He drew versions of some 23 Mughal paintings and may have owned an album of them. These miniatures include paintings of Shah Jahan, Akbar, Jahangir and Dara Shikoh and may have influenced the costumes and other aspects of his works. |
The Night Watch |
Rembrandt painted The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq between 1640 and 1642, and it became his most famous work. This picture was called De Nachtwacht by the Dutch and The Night Watch by Sir Joshua Reynolds because by 1781 the picture was so dimmed and defaced that it was almost indistinguishable, and it ... |
The piece was commissioned for the new hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, the musketeer branch of the civic militia. Rembrandt departed from convention, which ordered that such genre pieces should be stately and formal, rather a line-up than an action scene. Instead, he showed the militia readying themselves to embark on a ... |
Contrary to what is often said, the work was hailed as a success from the beginning. Parts of the canvas were cut off (approximately 20% from the left-hand side was removed) to make the painting fit its new position when it was moved to the town hall in 1715. In 1817 this large painting was moved to the Trippenhuis. Si... |
Expert assessments |
In 1968, the Rembrandt Research Project began under the sponsorship of the Netherlands Organization 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 Rem... |
One example of activity is The Polish Rider, now housed in the Frick Collection in New York City. 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 Engli... |
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 ... |
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. Scholars have since dated the painting to the 1660s and assigned it to an anonymous pupil, possibly Aert... |
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 Detroi... |
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 authorized copies. Additionally, his style proved easy ... |
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, ... |
Name and signature |
"Rembrandt" is a modification of the spelling of the artist's first name that he introduced in 1633. "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 s... |
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 f... |
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 largest collections of Rembrandt's work are in the United States in 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... |
The largest collections of drawings are in the older large museums such as the Rijksmuseum, Louvre and British Museum. All major print rooms have large collections of Rembrandt prints, although as some exist in only a single impression, no collection is complete. The degree to which these collections are displayed to t... |
The Rembrandt House Museum has fittings and furniture that are mostly not original but period pieces comparable to those Rembrandt might have had, and those in the many drawings and etchings set in the house, and contemporary paintings reflecting Rembrandt's use of the house for art dealing. His printmaking studio has ... |
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 (singer) song Duchess features the lyrics “It’s your Bicycle bells / and your Rembrandt swells” |
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 |
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 |
Selected works |
The Entombment of Christ (c. 1624) – Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow |
The Stoning of Saint Stephen (1625) – Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon |
Andromeda Chained to the Rocks (1630) – Mauritshuis, The Hague |
Old Man with a Gold Chain (c. 1631) – Art Institute of Chicago |
Jacob de Gheyn III (1632) – Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
Philosopher in Meditation (1632) – The Louvre, Paris |
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) – Mauritshuis, The Hague |
Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes (1634) – Museo del Prado, Madrid |
Descent from the Cross (1634) – Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Looted from the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel in 1806. |
Belshazzar's Feast (c. 1635-1638) – National Gallery, London |
The Prodigal Son in the Tavern (c. 1635) – Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
Danaë (c. 1635, reworked before 1643) – Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg |
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