Rembrandt

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch painter, etcher and draughtsman, the greatest artist of the Dutch Golden Age. Working in Amsterdam at the height of the young Dutch Republic's wealth, he painted portraits, biblical stories and group pictures such as The Night Watch, and made around three hundred prints. His searching self-portraits, his handling of light and shadow and his sympathy for ordinary human faces have made him one of the most admired painters in history.

Rembrandt was born on 15 July 1606 in Leiden, in the province of Holland, the ninth child of a prosperous miller, Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn, and a baker's daughter, Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuytbrouck. He grew up while the Dutch Republic was still fighting for independence from Spain, in a city famous for its university and its Protestant learning. He attended the Latin school and enrolled at Leiden University in 1620, but soon left to train as a painter.

After three years with a local artist, Jacob van Swanenburg, he spent about six months in Amsterdam with Pieter Lastman, a painter of biblical and classical scenes who had studied in Italy. Lastman's lively storytelling and gestures shaped Rembrandt's early work. Back in Leiden around 1625 he shared a studio with his friend Jan Lievens. In 1629 the statesman and poet Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the Prince of Orange, visited them and praised both young men, bringing Rembrandt his first commissions from the court at The Hague. Unlike most ambitious artists of his time, Rembrandt never travelled to Italy; he learned from Italian art through prints and paintings that passed through the Amsterdam market. At an auction in 1639 he sketched Raphael's portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, and the pose reappears in his own self-portrait of 1640.

Around 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, then the richest trading city in Europe, and worked in the business of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh. His breakthrough came in 1632 with The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, a group portrait of surgeons gathered round a dissected corpse. Instead of the usual rows of heads, he arranged the men as if caught in a moment of attention, and commissions for portraits poured in from the city's merchants.

In 1634 he married Saskia van Uylenburgh, the dealer's cousin, the orphaned daughter of a former mayor of Leeuwarden, whose dowry and connections helped his career. In 1639 the couple bought a grand house on the Jodenbreestraat for 13,000 guilders, paid largely on credit, where Rembrandt lived, taught pupils, dealt in art and assembled a huge collection of paintings, prints, weapons, shells and curiosities. Three of their children died in infancy; only their son Titus, born in 1641, survived. Saskia died in 1642, aged 29.

The same year he completed his largest painting, a group portrait of an Amsterdam civic militia company under Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, now known as The Night Watch. Militia portraits normally showed the members lined up in orderly rows. Rembrandt instead showed the company setting off in motion, with the captain giving an order, a drummer beating, guns being loaded and a girl in a glowing yellow dress among the men, all picked out by dramatic light against deep shadow. The darkened varnish later gave the picture its night-time name, though the scene is set in daylight. The story that the painting ruined his career is a myth; the militiamen paid for it and it hung in their hall. In 1648 the peace that ended the Thirty Years' War also brought Spain's formal recognition of Dutch independence, and Amsterdam began building a vast new town hall to celebrate it.

After Saskia's death, Titus's nurse Geertje Dircx became Rembrandt's partner. When the relationship broke down she sued him for breach of promise, and in 1650 Rembrandt and members of her own family had her confined in a house of correction in Gouda, the darkest episode in his life. By then he was living with a younger maid, Hendrickje Stoffels. Because Saskia's will cut him off from her money if he remarried, they never married, and in 1654 the Reformed church council summoned Hendrickje for living in sin. Their daughter Cornelia was born that year.

Rembrandt's finances were collapsing. He had never paid off the house, spent heavily on art, and the Dutch economy suffered in the first war with England. In 1656 he applied for cessio bonorum, a form of insolvency that let him surrender his goods to creditors, and his house and collection were auctioned in 1657 and 1658. The family moved to a modest rented house on the Rozengracht. To protect him from creditors, Hendrickje and Titus set up an art business that formally employed him.

Rembrandt's later paintings grew broader and rougher in technique, with paint laid on thickly in places and scraped or worked with the palette knife, which some contemporaries found unfinished. He continued to win major commissions. The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild of 1662 shows five officials of a cloth guild looking up from their table as if the viewer had just entered. The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, painted for the new Amsterdam town hall, was returned to him within months and survives only as a cut-down fragment in Stockholm. Late works such as The Jewish Bride and The Return of the Prodigal Son treat tenderness and forgiveness with a stillness unmatched in his earlier dramas.

His etchings, made throughout his career, were sold across Europe and did more than his paintings to spread his fame in his lifetime. Prints such as the Hundred Guilder Print, showing Christ healing the sick, and the Three Crosses, which he reworked through several states, pushed the medium further than any artist before him. He drew constantly, using his neighbours, many of them Jewish immigrants of the Jodenbreestraat district, and the streets of the city as models for biblical scenes.

Hendrickje died in 1663 and Titus in 1668, months after his marriage. Rembrandt died on 4 October 1669 in Amsterdam and was buried in a rented grave in the Westerkerk, whose exact site is unknown.

More than forty painted self-portraits, about thirty etchings and some drawings survive, made over four decades. They range from the young man pulling faces in the mirror to study expressions, through the prosperous artist dressed in finery, to the old man of the last years, unflinching about his ageing face. Together they form one of the most sustained records of a single human being in art.

Rembrandt trained many pupils, including Gerrit Dou, Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Carel Fabritius and Samuel van Hoogstraten. In the following century, classical taste found him coarse, but the Romantics and later painters revered him; Vincent van Gogh wrote that he would give years of his life to sit before The Jewish Bride. Modern scholarship, especially the Rembrandt Research Project from 1968, has reattributed many works once thought his to his studio and followers, reducing his accepted paintings to around three hundred. The Night Watch, now in the Rijksmuseum, is the most famous painting in the Netherlands, and his house in Amsterdam is a museum.