ASPIRATION: Rembrandt

Published 3 Feb 2020

The son of a miller from Leiden, Rembrandt was the greatest of all Dutch painters and a prolific draftsman and etcher. He lived in a golden age for Dutch art, but whereas most of his contemporaries were specialists, Rembrandt produced virtually every type of subject. But it was as a portraitist that he made his name. By his late 20s he was the most popular painter in Amsterdam, and happily married to a wealthy bride.

Later, his career was clouded with misfortune - his wife, mistress and five of his six children died, and a financial crisis led to his insolvency when he was 50. Throughout his personal troubles he continued to work triumphantly, although many of his contemporaries preferred the slicker painting of his pupils. It was only in the 19th century that Rembrandt became generally recognised as one of the greatest artists of all time.

Holland’s Supreme Genius

Rembrandt’s early success was followed by tragedy and bankruptcy in later life. Yet his work was not diminished by his misfortune, and he produced some of the most powerful pictures ever painted.

Rembrandt Harmenzoon van Rijn was born in Leiden on 15 July 1606. His father Harmen (Rembrandts middle name means ‘sun of Harmen’) was a miller and his mother Cornelia was the daughter of a baker. The family took their name from the nearby ‘Rijnmill’, a mill on the Rijn (a tributary of the Rhine).

At this time Leiden was second only to Amsterdam in size and importance among the towns of the Netherlands, and Rembrandt’s family were comfortably off members of the lower middle class. Rembrandt was the eighth of his mother’s nine children.

Although almost nothing is known of Rembrandt’s boyhood, it is safe to assume that he was intellectually the brightest of the children, for while his brothers were sent to learn trades, he became a pupil at the Latin School in Leiden when he was about seven. There he must have gained a thorough knowledge of Latin and absorbed the background of classical history and mythology that would later be put to use in his paintings.

By the age of 14, Rembrandt was studying at Leiden University, which was one of the most distinguished in Europe. His stay was short-lived, however, for within a few months he had convinced his parents that his talents were artistic, so they abandoned their plan for him to become a member of a learned profession and allowed him to become apprenticed to a painter. The decision was no doubt a very reluctant one, for having a lawyer or a civic administrator as a son would have taken them a rung or two up the social ladder.

The earliest source of information we have on Rembrandt is contained in the second edition (1641) of a book called Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden (Description of the City of Leiden), by Jan Orlers, who was mayor of the city. He tells us that Rembrandt’s parents ‘took him to the well painting Mr Jacob Isaaxszoon van Swanenburch in order that he might be taught and educated by him, with whom he remained about three years’.

Swanenburgh is an obscure figure and Rembrandt probably learnt little more than the rudiments of his trade from him, for although in the course of his career he painted most subjects, he never tried his hand at either of Swanenburgh’s specialties: architectural scenes and views of hell.

None of Rembrandt’s work from this age in his life survives but he is said to have shown so much promise that his father decided to further his career by sending him to study with a much more significant artist than Swanenburgh, Pieter Lastman, at this time one of the leading painters in the country.

Lastman had travelled in Italy as a young man and had come back eager to show off all he had learned there. His paintings were clever, lively and polished, full of vivid gestures and expressions, and he liked to paint historical and mythological subjects in which he could demonstrate his skill in depicting elaborate customs and exotic details. Rembrandt stayed only six months with him, but Lastman's work had a powerful effect. He inherited Lastman's love of colourful stories and his earliest surviving paintings are heavily indebted to him in both subject and treatment.

After he left Lastman, Rembrandt may also have spent some time working in the studios of Jan Pynas and Joris van Schooten, but this can only have been briefly, for in 1625 he had set up as an independent artist in Lieden. There he worked in close association with Jan Leivens who was a year younger than himself. Like Rembrandt, Leivens was a native of Leiden and had studied in Amsterdam with Lastman. They probably shared a studio for a time and their work was sometimes so similar as to cause confusion of some of their works.

The two young artists soon established reputations as major talents in the making. In 1628 Rembrandt took on his first pupil and in that year the lawyer, Aernout van Butchellm wrote in his notebook: ‘The Leiden miller’s son is greatly praised’. In the following year another visitor to Leiden wrote a much fuller account of Rembrandt in his formative years. This was Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the head of state, and one of the most remarkable men of his time. A diplomat and polylingual scholar, (he translated John Donne’s poems into Dutch), he was also passionately interested in the arts and would have become a painter himself but for parental disapproval. Huygens called on Rembrandt and Levens (the later had painted his portrait two years earlier) and praised both of them highly.

He suggested they should visit Italy, 'for if they became familiar with Raphael and Michelangelo, they would reach the height of painting.' But the two artists said they had no time to travel and that they could in any case see plenty of good Italian painting in Holland.

Although he painted (and etched) several portraits of himself and members of his family during his time in Leiden, Rembrandt concentrated on picture painting, notably ones of old men depicted as biblical characters or philosophers, and it was not until 1631 that he is known to have produced his first formal commissioned portrait. This was of the rich Amsterdam merchant Nicoleos Ruts. Rembrandt must have realised that in such works he had a recipe for success, for in late 1631 or early 1632 he moved to Amsterdam and during the next few years devoted himself almost exclusively to portraiture.

He moved into the home of the picture dealer van Uylenburgh, with whom he had had business dealings while he was still living in Leiden, and very rapidly became the city’s leading portraitist. There were other talented portrait painters working there, notably Thomas de Keser, but Rembrandt could match them in delicacy of painting costumes and glossiness of finish, and far outstripped them in capturing on canvas a sense of life and personality.

Rembrandt worked with enormous energy in his early days in Amsterdam to consolidate his success. About 50 of his surviving paintings are dated 1632 or 1633 (almost all of them portraits) and even without allowing for the ones that must have disappeared over the centuries, that is a prodigious output. His most famous painting from this time is undoubtedly The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, which more than any other work showed how far he was ahead of his rivals.

Such group portraits were very popular in the Netherlands, and it was a hard task for the painter to bring together a group of identically dressed men without making the picture look rather like a school photograph. Rembrandt’s brilliantly arranged group showed the originality of his mind and his superb painterly skills. In 1634 Rembrandt, then 28, married Saskia van Uylenburgh; the 21-year-old cousin of his picture-dealer associate.

Saskia was not only from a higher social class than Rembrandt but also fairly well off as she was an orphan and had been left money by her parents. The couple lived with her cousin Henrick van Uylenburgh for a while and then rented a house on the fashionable Hiewe Doelenstraat. There are no first-hand accounts of Rembrandt’s relationship with Saskia, but they are hardly necessary, for it was obvious from his paintings and drawings that he worshipped her.

Unfortunately, there happiness was marred by a succession of infant deaths. Between 1635 and 1640 Saskia gave berth to a boy (Rumbartas) and two girls (both named Cornelia after Rembrandt’s mother), but none lived longer than two months. Saskia had never been robust and the repeated ordeal weakened her considerably.

Although he had these domestic worries to contend with, Rembrandt’s material fortunes were never greater than in the second half of the 1630s. He had all the pupils and commissions he could handle.

Writing 50 years after his death, the Dutch painter and historian Arnold Houbracken said that clients had to beg him for pictures and the large sums he was earning enabled him to indulge his passion for collecting. He bought not only paintings, drawings and engravings, but also arms and armour, medals, old costumes, indeed anything that took his fancy or that he thought might come in useful as a prop.

The direction of Rembrandt’s career changed in the 1640s. He virtually gave up the type of formal portrait with which he had made his reputation (although he still painted people he knew) and religious paintings began to occupy a correspondingly greater part in his work, which became less flamboyant and more introspective.

Various reasons have been suggested to explain this change. The deaths of his mother in 1640 and Saskia in 1642 must have upset him deeply and he may well have found solace in religion. At the same time the pupils he had taught so well were beginning to take some of his market in fashionable portraiture. There may be something in both these ideas, but it is more likely that Rembrandt had simply had enough of routine portraiture and wanted to get back to his first love, which was painting stories from the bible.

The year before Saskia died she had given birth to a sun, Titus, the only one of her four children to survive to adulthood.

Titus became an artist himself and also acted as his father’s dealer. A woman called Geertge Dircx, the widow of a trumpeter, was hired as the baby’s nurse, and after Saskia's death she became Rembrandt’s mistress. When she was replaced in his affections by Hendrickje Stoffels, a servant who had entered his household in about 1645, Geertge left and sued Rembrandt for breach of promise.

After some unsavoury legal action, Rembrandt managed to get her shut up in an asylum in Gouda, where she remained for five years. It was in the 1640s that Rembrandt began to take a great interest in landscape, and it has been suggested that the walks in the country gave him a welcome rest from his domestic troubles.

Hendrickje, who was about 20 years younger than Rembrandt, remained with him until she died in 1663, and Rembrandt’s portrayals of her are as tender and loving as those of Saskia. But, because of a clause in Saskia’s will according to which Rembrandt would forfeit his share of her estate if he remarried, he was unable to legalise his relationship with Hendrickje.

This got her into trouble with the church authorities, who forbade her to take communion because she was living in sin. In 1652 she had a baby who soon died, but in 1654 she gave berth to a girl, called Cornelia as Saskia's daughters had been, who was to be the only one of Rembrandt’s children to outlive him.

Now that he was no longer earning a small fortune with his portraits, Rembrandt had difficulty in keeping up the payment on his expensive house, and in the early 1650s his financial troubles became acute, as he took out one loan to pay off another. He began selling parts of his collections at auction, but more drastic action was called for, and in 1656 he transferred ownership of the house to Titus and was declared insolvent.

To avoid the degradation of bankruptcy he applied for and was granted a cessio bonorum, a legal procedure which involved the sale of debtors' goods but which allowed him to retain considerable freedom provided he could convince the court of his honesty and good faith. Rembrandt’s collections were finally dispersed in two auctions in 1657 and 1658, and in the latter year his house was sold, although he was not forced to move out until the end of 1660. To protect him from his creditors, Hendrickje and Titus formed a business partnership, with Rembrandt technically their employee. That way he was able to keep the earnings from his work.

According to the romantic image of Rembrandt beloved of novelists and film makers, the artist became a pauper and a recluse in his final years. Although it is true that he was never again free from financial worries, this picture is a grave distortion of the truth. Certainly he lived more modestly in lodgings on the Rozengracht, which was in a poorer district on the other side of the city from his previous house,

and it has been recorded that ‘in the autumn of his life he kept company mainly with common people and such as practised art’, but he was anything but forgotten. The move may in fact have given him renewed energy, with the feeling that he was making a fresh start, for his output surged and in 1661 he produced more dated paintings than in any year since the early 1630s.

But despite his renewed success, and foreign acclaim, there was much personal sadness in Rembrandt’s final years. Hendrickje died in 1663 and his beloved son, Titus, followed her in 1668. Titus had married in that year and his wife gave berth to Rembrandt’s granddaughter, Titia, in March 1669. Rembrandt lived out his final days with his daughter Cornelia and an old servant woman. He lived simply and it was said he was ‘often content with some bread and cheese or pickled herring as his whole meal. We have only the evidence of the paintings to go on, particularly the self-portraits,

but from them it appears that Rembrandt faced his hardships with dignity and no trace of bitterness. His work continued to grow in freedom of technique and depth of expression to the very end of his life, and his late masterpieces take their place among the greatest works of art ever created. He died on 4th of October 1669, aged 63, and was buried beside Hendrickje and Titus in the Westerkerk four days later. Cornelia married a painter, Cornelius Suytbhor, in the following year, and had too children whom she named Rembrandt and Hendrickje.

A brilliant and versatile artist, Rembrandt painted a wide variety of themes during his career, but it is his compassionate handling of his subjects which give his works their universal appeal. Rembrandt stands apart from all other 17th century Dutch artists not only because of the quality of his work but also on account of its range. The number of paintings produced in Holland in Rembrandt’s period was huge, for the country was prosperous and democratic, and pictures were not the preserve of the rich and privileged as they were in aristocratic cultures.

Most paintings were produced by specialists, who often worked in restricted fields. Some confined themselves not just to landscapes, but to winter landscapes or dune landscapes, not just to still-life in general, but to paintings of fish or flowers.

Although Rembrandt excelled at portraits and religious scenes, he pained most subjects in the course of his career, including some, such as The Polish Rider, that defy classification.

He not only painted them, but etched and drew them also, for he was a superlative etcher (few would deny that he was the greatest ever master of the technique) and a prolific and brilliant draftsman.

As a painter, Rembrandt began working in the detailed manner that was part of his heritage and stemmed ultimately from the innovations in oil painting of Jan van Eyck.

His commissioned portraits of the 1630s, such as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, are the best examples of the clarity and polish of his early work, but even in his most formal pictures his brushwork is never laboured or finicky. In his more personal work of the same period, particularly self-portraits and portraits of his family, he allowed himself more freedom, often applying the paint quite thickly, and even using the handle of the brush to scrape through it.

When in the 1640s, he began to paint more to please himself than to satisfy his customers, his style became much broader, his brushwork suggesting form and texture rather than minutely delineating it, and in the 1650s and 1660s his impasto (thickly applied paint) was one of the most remarkable features of his work. Rembrandt’s biographer, Hoobraken, wrote that ‘in the last years of his life, he worked so fast that his pictures, when examined from close by, looked as if they had been daubed with a bricklayer’s trowel’.

But a better notion of the wonderful richness and total expressive mastery of Rembrandt’s technique is perhaps conveyed in the celebrated remark of the German Impressionist painter, Max Liebermann: ‘Whenever I see Frans Halls (Rembrandt’s greatest predecessor in Dutch portraiture), I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt, I feel like giving up!’

Rembrandt’s etchings and drawings show equal mastery. At times he used the etching needle as fluently as if it were a pen, but at others he reworked the copper plate again and again to produce an effect of sonorous richness. His drawings, especially those of his mature years, were done mainly with a thick reed pen and were usually self-sufficient works. With a few quick strokes he could bring an animal to life, convey the drama of a biblical story or suggest the airy breadth of the Dutch countryside.

But Rembrandt’s greatness lies not only in his unsurpassed technical skills, but also in the emotional range and depth of his work. Although very little is recorded of his personal life, his marvellous series of self-portraits gives us the feeling that we know him more intimately than any other great artist.

This remarkable sense of human sympathy extends to his other work, whether he was painting imaginary scenes or portraying the people he saw about him, from rich businessmen to hapless beggars. Although he avidly collected the art of the past and learned avidly from its example, contemporaries were struck by how directly he observed what he saw. One, for example, wrote in 1681: ‘If he painted, as sometimes would happen, a nude woman, he chose no Greek Venus as his model, but rather a washerwoman…

Flabby breasts, ill-shaped hands, the traces of the lacings of the corselets on the stomach, of the garters on the legs, must be visible, if Nature is to get her due. This was not praise, for it was felt that Rembrandt had wasted his talent on lowly subjects. This attitude towards Rembrandt prevailed throughout the 18th century. Although he had many admirers and most critics admitted he was unsurpassed in his mastery of light and shade, he was generally considered to be vulgar.

The real change in his critical fortunes came in the Romantic period, with the idea that an artist could express his innermost feelings and flout conventions. In 1851 Delacroix expressed the opinion that Rembrandt would one day be considered a greater painter than Raphael - ‘a piece of blasphemy that will make every good academician's hair stand on end.’

But his prediction came true within 50 years, and now when we look for an artist with whom Rembrandt can be compared in breadth and depth of feeling, we turn not to another painter but to Shakespeare.

Picture Exhibition

This exuberant work was probably painted soon after Rembrandt’s marriage to Saskia when his career was at its most buoyant and his personal life at its happiest. It is generally thought that the picture is not a straightforward portrait, but is meant to have some moralising intention. Several scholars consider that Rembrandt has here represented himself as the Prodigal Son, who ‘took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living’ (Luke 15:13) and who is often shown in a tavern or brothel setting.

Rembrandt painted several pictures of Saskia of a similar type – he obviously loved dressing her up in beautiful costumes. The subject matter of the picture has been much discussed, some thinking that it may represent Proserpina, daughter of the corn goddess Ceres, but the emphasis on flowers is so strong that there seems little doubt that Saskia represents the floral goddess.

This is one of three paintings of famous figures of antiquity that Rembrandt painted for the Sicilian nobleman Don Antonio Ruffo. The greatest philosopher of the ancient world is shown with his hand on a bust of the foremost poet of antiquity, evoking a feeling of meditative solemnity.

The model for this painting was probably Hendrickje Stoffels. In the Old Testament, Bathsheba was the wife of a soldier in King David’s army. Smitten by her beauty, David had her brought to him and callously seduced her. Rembrandt shows her summonsed by letter, a detail not in the Bible.

This small panel is a wonderful example of Rembrandt’s individuality of approach, for it does not fit easily into any of the established categories of painting and the sensuous brushwork is so bold it was very likely painted for his own satisfaction alone. The model was probably Hendrickje Stoffels.

Rembrandt’s self-portraits cover an enormous psychological range. Often he shows himself at work, but here he has the air of a grand dignitary holding a cane (a symbol of authority) rather than brushes or a palette. In fact, his pose and expression recall images of enthroned kings, and the rich colouring enhances the regal effect.

This work is ranked by most critics among Rembrandt’s greatest masterpieces. X-rays show that he experimented with the positioning of the figures before finalising them.

Whether this painting is simply a double portrait or, as some critics claim, a biblical subject (Isaac and Rebecca?), it is one of Rembrandt’s most glorious achievements as a colourist.

Captain Frans Banning Cocg (in black with red sash) orders his Lieutenant, William van Ruytenburch (in yellow with ceremonial lance) to march the company out. Unlike other portraits of militia companies, which traditionally portrayed members lined up in neat rows or sitting at a banquet, Rembrandt's painting shows the company fully equipped, ready for action, and about to march.

This is Rembrandt’s largest surviving painting and without doubt his most famous and most discussed work, having had several books and countless articles devoted to it. It has been subjected to much learned (and sometimes fanciful) interpretation, and it has been proposed, for example, that it represents an allegory of the triumph of Amsterdam, inspired by a drama of the great Dutch righter Joost van den Vondel, a contemporary of Rembrandt.

The grandeur of the portrayal might seem to invite such high-flown interpretations, but they run contrary to Rembrandt’s whole approach to art, and it is more sensible to see the painting as part of the Dutch tradition of civic grand portraits.