Rembrandt van Rijn

The son of a Leiden miller, Rembrandt abandoned university in order to paint. His ambition was great, but his early pictures show that he had a long row to hoe.

Early on in his career, influencer Constantijn Huygens, the secretary of Prince Frederik Hendrik, praised Rembrandt’s ability to depict the passions of the soul - basically the emotions. This was the greatest accomplishment a painter could achieve, and Rembrandt could do it even better than the best artists of Ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance.

With his eighty -some odd specimens executed in three media (drawing, etching and painting), Rembrandt held the title of artist with the most self-portraits until the 20th century. In this early one from around 1628 he scratched some of the curls into the wet paint with the butt end of his brush and daringly has the light come from behind.

Rembrandt was keen to depict the most moving stories and the most moving moments of a story, even if no artist before him had dared do so. An example is the sublime Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem of 1630, which shows us the inner workings of a vision.

Not long after his death, Rembrandt was criticized for the 'ugliness' of his nude models. But for him saggy breasts, distended stomachs and excessive amounts of cellulite formed an ideal playground for light and shadow.

In the early 1630s, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where – almost overnight – he became the city’s leading portraitist. Among his spectacular works in this genre are the wedding portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, his only pair of life-size, standing full-lengths.

Rembrandt could not help but tell a story. The Night Watch is a group portrait, but Rembrandt treated it like one of his biblical scenes, filled with lights, sound and action.

Rembrandt loved to use members of his family as models, but art historians have sometimes gone too far in identifying them in his pictures. The model for Old Woman Reading probably was his mother, Neeltgen Willemsdr van Zuytbrouck, and the young man in contemplative extasy his son Titus.

Rembrandt declared bankruptcy in 1656 and had to cede almost all of his possessions to his creditors. His mistress Hendrickje Stoffels and son Titus set up a company with Rembrandt as their sole employee so that he did not have to give the money he received for new commissions to his creditors.

Rembrandt’s experiments with technique included scratching into the wet paint, modelling it as if it were clay and applying it to the canvas with a palette knife. Critics later mocked him for smearing the paint on with a bricklayer’s trowel.