Rembrandt

Lore & Background

Rembrandt was born in Leiden, the eighth child of a miller and a baker's daughter.

Reader's Guide

Rembrandt's significance lies in his vast output—estimated at about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and several hundred drawings—and his influence on Dutch painting. Unlike most Dutch painters of his time, he depicted a wide range of styles and subjects, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological subjects, and animal studies. His approximately 100 self-portraits form an intimate autobiography. He never went abroad but was influenced by Italian Old Masters and Dutch and Flemish artists who had studied in Italy. For twenty years he taught many important Dutch painters. His portraits of contemporaries, self-portraits, and biblical illustrations are regarded as his greatest creative triumphs.

Did You Know?

• Rembrandt never went abroad but was considerably influenced by Italian Old Masters and Dutch and Flemish artists who had studied in Italy.
• He produced approximately 100 self-portraits, over 40 of which are paintings.

The Ascent from Leiden to Amsterdam

Rembrandt's professional trajectory moved swiftly from a provincial workshop to the capital's most in-demand portrait studio. After opening a shared studio with Jan Lievens in Leiden in 1625, he was already taking on pupils by 1627, including the future master Gerrit Dou. The breakthrough arrived in 1629 when the statesman Constantijn Huygens recognized his talent and secured commissions from the court at The Hague, a connection that kept Prince Frederik Hendrik purchasing his work. By the close of 1631, Rembrandt had relocated to Amsterdam, the booming trade capital, where he established himself as a professional portraitist of extraordinary demand. His early patronage network included the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, whose cousin Saskia he married in 1634, and the statesman Andries de Graeff. Over the following years he upgraded his living quarters repeatedly—first a riverside Amstel lodging, then Vlooienburg, and finally a 13,000-guilder house on the Breestraat in 1639. Throughout this period he trained numerous important painters, including Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck, and for two decades his teaching shaped the next generation of Dutch art.

Grief, Love, and Legal Conflict

The years after 1640 brought a cascade of personal loss. Three of Rembrandt's children with Saskia perished within weeks of birth; only their fourth, Titus (1641), survived. Saskia died in 1642, most likely of tuberculosis, and his drawings of her on her sick and deathbed rank among his most devastating pieces. In the aftermath, the widow Geertje Dircx was hired to care for young Titus but also became his lover. When she left in May 1649 and filed a breach-of-promise claim for alimony, Rembrandt pawned the diamond ring he had given her—one that had once belonged to Saskia—to pay her lawyer. A court settlement required him to pay a yearly allowance on the condition that Titus remained her sole heir and she sold none of his possessions. When Dircx broke those terms, Rembrandt had her committed to a women's house of correction in Gouda in August 1650, covering the costs himself. Around the same period, his relationship with the twenty-three-year-old Hendrickje Stoffels, originally his maid, drew the Reformed Church's attention. In 1654 she received three summonses on charges of sexual impropriety, admitted guilt, and was barred from communion, while Rembrandt was never called before the council. Their daughter Cornelia was born that October.

A Universe of Subjects and the Self-Portrait as Autobiography

Unlike most of his Dutch Golden Age peers, who tended to specialize, Rembrandt ranged across an astonishing breadth of subject matter. His surviving corpus—roughly three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and several hundred drawings—spans portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical compositions, biblical and mythological narratives, and even animal studies. Religion threads through much of this output, a reflection of the deeply confessional era in which he lived and of his own family's divided faith: his mother was Catholic while his father belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. In his Breestraat neighborhood, which was becoming the Jewish quarter, he frequently invited Jewish neighbors to model for his Hebrew Bible scenes. Perhaps no body of work is more intimate than his approximately one hundred self-portraits, over forty of them in paint. Spanning his entire career, they function as a visual autobiography, tracking his changing face, mood, and self-awareness from a confident young man to a weathered elder. His portraits of contemporaries, these self-portraits, and his biblical illustrations are widely regarded as his greatest creative triumphs, and his reputation as an artist remained high throughout his lifetime.

Formation: Leiden, Apprenticeships, and the Seeds of Genius

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn entered the world on 15 July 1606 in Leiden, the ninth child of Harmen Gerritszoon, a miller, and Neeltgen Willemsdochter, a baker's daughter. The family was quite well-to-do, and young Rembrandt first attended a Latin school before being enrolled at Leiden University in 1620. Yet his greater inclination was toward painting, and he was soon apprenticed to Jacob van Swanenburg, with whom he spent three years. A brief but important six-month period with the history painter Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam followed. In 1625 he spent a short time with Jacob Pynas, though the biographer Simon van Leeuwen claimed his training came under Joris van Schooten before Rembrandt started his own workshop. That same year he opened a studio in Leiden, shared with the fellow painter Jan Lievens, and by 1627 he was already accepting students. Notably, Rembrandt never traveled abroad; his artistic formation was shaped by the work of Italian Old Masters and by Dutch and Flemish artists who had themselves studied in Italy, a secondhand but powerful influence that helped define his visual language.

Gallery