Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt (Harmenszoon) van Rijn

Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, oil on canvas by Rembrandt van Rijn, …

(credit: © National Gallery Collection; by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery, London/Corbis)

(born July 15, 1606, Leiden, Neth.—died Oct. 4, 1669, Amsterdam) Dutch painter and etcher. As a young man, he was apprenticed to masters in Leiden and in Amsterdam. His early paintings show his interest in the “spotlight effects” of light and shadow that were to dominate his later paintings. Early in his career he began the studies of his own face and the more-formal self-portraits that make up almost a tenth of his painted and etched work. After moving to Amsterdam about 1631, he quickly became the city's most fashionable portrait painter and a popular teacher. In 1632 he produced the celebrated Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Yearning for recognition as a biblical and mythological painter, in 1635 he produced The Sacrifice of Isaac and in 1636 Danaë. In 1634 he married Saskia van Uylenburgh (d. 1642), a woman of property. That same year he completed his largest painting, the extraordinary but controversial The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq (known as The Night Watch), which was a watershed in his life and art. For unknown reasons, his portrait commissions thereafter declined, and he began to focus his attention on etching, a medium in which he was self-taught. In 1656, after transferring most of his property to his son, he applied for bankruptcy. In his last decade he treated biblical subjects like portraits and also continued to paint self-portraits. These late works exhibit a lively brushwork and a new treatment of light. In addition to being an innovator, he was an acute observer of life and a sensitive renderer of those observations in his drawings, etchings, and paintings. The human figure, Rembrandt's central subject, contributes to the sense of a shared dialogue between viewer and artist, the foundation of Rembrandt's greatness and of his popularity today.