REMBRANDT (Rembrandt Harmenszogn van Rijn or van Rijn). - Painter and etcher, b. at Leiden on 15 July 1606, son of Harmen Gerritsz, owner of a mill on the Rhine, whence the name of the house van Rijn, with which R. always signs his paintings; d. at Amsterdam on 4 Oct. 1609. He is the greatest Dutch painter and one of the greatest in the world.
A pupil at Leiden of Jacob van Swanenbourg, a mediocre local master, who had nevertheless traveled in Italy (1617), and of Jan Lievens, his almost exact contemporary, R. in 1623 was for the first time in Amsterdam for a period of six months, under the guidance of Pieter Lastman, also a master of Lievens and an Italianizer after his Roman stay (1604-1607), and of Jan Pynas, likewise a good connoisseur of Italian painting, of which he had brought back above all Bolognese and Caravaggesque recollections. R.'s first known works were executed in collaboration with Lievens: the Head of a Boy in the Amsterdam Museum and the Head of an Old Man in the Schwerin Museum bear the double signature. Of uncertain attribution are certain paintings certainly of those years, in which it is difficult to distinguish between the hand of R., of Lievens and of a third local painter, Gerard Dou, somewhat younger, who worked in the same workshop. Both the Dou and Lievens were strongly influenced by R. also afterward, though in an outward sense. From 1626 date the first dated works: the Tobias in Moscow, The Prophet Balaam in the Cognac-Lay Museum in Paris, small panels executed with a minute, limpid and delicate technique; in St. Paul in Prison (1627) in the Stuttgart Museum, in the Usurer in Berlin, in the Old Man Asleep (1629) in Turin, in Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem (1630), in the Stroganoff Collection in Leningrad, in the Hermit Reading in the Louvre, in St. Anastasius in Stockholm, in the Presentation in the Temple (1631) in the Museum at The Hague there is already the typical manner of violent illumination that would later be transfigured into magical, phantasmagorical light; on the brown tonality of the background, vibrations of light are stirred by small strokes of the brush. In 1631 R. left Leiden and settled in Amsterdam. From the following year dates the painting that at once became famous: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (The Hague, Mauritshuis), a subject not new in Dutch painting (from 1619 is The Lesson of Dr. Sebastian Egbertsz around a Skeleton by T. Keyser, and from 1617 the Theatrum anatomicum of Mierveelt). In this work by R. the images of the seven physicians are so many forceful portraits that, while they show the influence of the Rubensian manner, are of such immediate sincerity as to place R. at once, still very young, in the forefront among the portraitists of his country, which nevertheless boasted in this genre artists of great fame such as Thomas de Keyser; the composition as a whole, in the arrangement of the figures, shows an undoubted knowledge of Caravaggio, justified by the proximity of Honthorst, Baburen and Terbruggen, the latter having returned from Rome in 1614.
(photograph of the Museum)
From the same period as the Anatomy Lesson are the Portrait of a Scholar in Leningrad and the Portrait of Coppenol in Kassel, as well as many other portraits that approach the more refined manner of Keyser, while the earlier ones, going back to the Leiden period, have a vigorous and dramatic chiaroscuro and subtle effects of vibrant light that are genuinely Rembrandtesque (Self-Portrait in Kassel, Totha, Lemberg, Byfleet, Boston, Budapest, Braunschweig, The Hague). There are many portraits of his father and mother and, from 1632 onward, those of his wife Saskia, whom the artist loved to portray in the richest garments, just as sometimes, in his self-portraits, he adorned himself in strange and pompous fashions (Self-Portrait in The Hague, Kassel, Vienna, Lichtenstein collection, etc.). Among the best-known portraits of his wife are those in the Jacquemart André Museum in Paris, the Museum in Dresden, Kassel, Pittsburg, and the double portrait The Artist and His Wife in Dresden and London. Often his figures become mythical, as Saskia does in Bathsheba (Madrid, 1634), in Flora and Danae (Leningrad 1634-36). There are portraits depicting figures who could be biblical or high dignitaries and whom R. represents in brocade garments, with oriental turbans and dark cloaks; they are commonly called Rabbis. Biblical subjects are the artist's favorite themes, which, while adhering faithfully to the texts, he transfigures into a poetic and pictorial vision of his own that transcends the narrative: Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Hague, 1634-35), Stories of the Cross (Munich and Leningrad), Sacrifice of Abraham (ibid., 1635), Samson and the Philistines (Frankfurt), Tobias and the Angel (Louvre, 1637). Noteworthy is the treatment of landscape, a subject in its own right in some fifteen paintings completed between 1638 and 1648; in the overall vision, which is fantastic, one encounters precise notations of details from life. Undoubted in them is the influence of Hercules Seghers, who left beautiful landscapes in numerous etchings of great power.
The year 1642, the year of the celebrated painting The Night Watch (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), a vast composition in which the group of militiamen is caught in movement amid strong contrasts of light, marks, with the death of his beloved Saskia, the beginning of a new period in R.'s life and art; years of sorrow and disgrace in which the artist was reduced to a solitary and modest life with the faithful housekeeper Hendrickje Stoppels, who later became his wife, and the only surviving child of Saskia, Titus, who reappear in many portraits of the following years (from an inventory of 1656 the immense collection of art objects that R. had gathered in his house during the happy years is known, followed by total financial ruin). But his activity continues; besides many other works, from 1660 are the Self-Portrait of the Uffizi and of the Louvre, from 1661 the masterpiece The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild (Amsterdam, Museum). Among the master's last works are the tragic Jewish Bride in Amsterdam, the Family in the Museum of Braunschweig, The Return of the Prodigal Son in Leningrad; the color is thick, plastic, with glimmers of unreal light. More than three hundred etchings and 1500 drawings moreover represent the certainly no less vivid part of R.'s activity. Famous are the etchings of the Mother, of the Father, The Death of the Virgin (1639), The Raising of Lazarus, Christ before Pilate, The Three Crosses, etc., the landscapes among which The Little Bridge of Six (1645) and the famous Three Trees, where the line is always powerful and highly personal; here too R. transforms familiar scenes into evocations of grandiose biblical events. Among his pupils Karel Fabricius excels; and, among the others, Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, Jan Victors, Barent Fabricius, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Nicolas Maes. - See pl. XXXIX.
Bibliography23 works
Luisa Mortari