63 Facts About Rembrandt

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman.

Unlike most Dutch masters of the 17th century, Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of styles and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes and animal studies.

Rembrandt never went abroad but was considerably influenced by the work of the Italian masters and Dutch artists who had studied in Italy, like Pieter Lastman, the Utrecht Caravaggists, and Peter Paul Rubens.

Rembrandt was the ninth child born to Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn and Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuijtbrouck.

Rembrandt's family was quite well-to-do; his father was a miller and his mother was a baker's daughter.

Rembrandt's mother was Catholic, and his father belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church.

Unlike many of his contemporaries who traveled to Italy as part of their artistic training, Rembrandt never left the Dutch Republic during his lifetime.

In 1627, Rembrandt began to accept students, which included Gerrit Dou in 1628 and Isaac de Jouderville.

In 1629, Rembrandt was discovered by the statesman Constantijn Huygens who procured for Rembrandt important commissions from the court of The Hague.

Rembrandt began to practice as a professional portraitist for the first time, with great success.

Rembrandt initially stayed with an art dealer, Hendrick van Uylenburgh, and in 1634, married Hendrick's cousin, Saskia van Uylenburgh.

Rembrandt acquired a number of students, among them Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck.

The later burgomaster Joan Huydecoper van Maarsseveen is mentioned as the first buyer of a Rembrandt painting in Amsterdam.

Rembrandt tried to settle the matter amicably but she pawned the ring he had given her that once belonged to Saskia to maintain her livelihood.

The court particularly stated that Rembrandt had to pay a maintenance allowance, provided that Titus remained her only heir and she sold none of Rembrandt's possessions.

In 1650 Rembrandt paid for the travel costs to have her committed to an asylum or almshouse at Gouda.

In early 1649 Rembrandt began a relationship with the much younger Hendrickje Stoffels, who initially been his maid.

Rembrandt was not summoned to appear for the Church council; while his work reveals deep Christian faith, there is no evidence that Rembrandt formally belonged to any church.

Rembrandt lived beyond his means, buying art, prints and rarities.

The creditors began to insist on installments but Rembrandt refused and asked for a postponement.

Rembrandt was allowed to keep all his tools as a mean of income.

Two weeks later Hendrickje and Titus set up a dummy corporation as art dealers, so Rembrandt, who had board and lodging, could continue to produce.

Around this time Rembrandt took on his last apprentice, Aert de Gelder.

Rembrandt lost more than once and had to pay the money he had already received to Titus in 1665 who was by then declared of age.

Rembrandt was working on the Jewish Bride and his three final self-portraits but fell into rent arrears.

Whether this refers to objectives, material, or something else, is not known but critics have drawn particular attention to the way Rembrandt seamlessly melded the earthly and spiritual.

Rembrandt must have realized that if he kept the paint deliberately loose and "paint-like" on some parts of the canvas, the perception of space became much greater.

Lastman's influence on Rembrandt was most prominent during his period in Leiden from 1625 to 1631.

In 1626 Rembrandt produced his first etchings, the wide dissemination of which would largely account for his international fame.

Rembrandt produced etchings for most of his career, from 1626 to 1660, when he was forced to sell his printing-press and practically abandoned etching.

Rembrandt took easily to etching and, though he learned to use a burin and partly engraved many plates, the freedom of etching technique was fundamental to his work.

Rembrandt was very closely involved in the whole process of printmaking, and must have printed at least early examples of his etchings himself.

Rembrandt worked on the so-called Hundred Guilder Print in stages throughout the 1640s, and it was the "critical work in the middle of his career", from which his final etching style began to emerge.

Rembrandt now used hatching to create his dark areas, which often take up much of the plate.

Rembrandt experimented with the effects of printing on different kinds of paper, including Japanese paper, which he used frequently, and on vellum.

Rembrandt began to use "surface tone," leaving a thin film of ink on parts of the plate instead of wiping it completely clean to print each impression.

Rembrandt made more use of drypoint, exploiting, especially in landscapes, the rich fuzzy burr that this technique gives to the first few impressions.

Rembrandt's prints have similar subjects to his paintings, although the 27 self-portraits are relatively more common, and portraits of other people less so.

Rembrandt owned, until forced to sell it, a magnificent collection of prints by other artists, and many borrowings and influences in his work can be traced to artists as diverse as Mantegna, Raphael, Hercules Seghers, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.

Rembrandt was interested in Mughal miniatures, especially around the 1650s.

Rembrandt painted The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq between 1640 and 1642, which became his most famous work.

Rembrandt departed from convention, which ordered that such genre pieces should be stately and formal, rather a line-up than an action scene.

Art historians teamed up with experts from other fields to reassess the authenticity of works attributed to Rembrandt, using all methods available, including state-of-the-art technical diagnostics, and to compile a complete new catalogue raisonne of his paintings.

Rembrandt's authorship had been questioned by at least one scholar, Alfred von Wurzbach, at the beginning of the twentieth century but for many decades later most scholars, including the foremost authority writing in English, Julius S Held, agreed that it was indeed by the master.

Those few scholars who still question Rembrandt's authorship feel that the execution is uneven, and favour different attributions for different parts of the work.

The composition bears superficial resemblance to mature works by Rembrandt but lacks the master's command of illumination and modeling.

In 2005 four oil paintings previously attributed to Rembrandt's students were reclassified as the work of Rembrandt himself: Study of an Old Man in Profile and Study of an Old Man with a Beard from a US private collection, Study of a Weeping Woman, owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet, painted in 1640.

Rembrandt's own studio practice is a major factor in the difficulty of attribution, since, like many masters before him, he encouraged his students to copy his paintings, sometimes finishing or retouching them to be sold as originals, and sometimes selling them as authorized copies.

The pigment analyses of some thirty paintings have shown that Rembrandt's palette consisted of the following pigments: lead white, various ochres, Vandyke brown, bone black, charcoal black, lamp black, vermilion, madder lake, azurite, ultramarine, yellow lake and lead-tin-yellow.

The entire array of pigments employed by Rembrandt can be found at ColourLex.

Rembrandt is one of the most famous and the best expertly researched visual artists in history.

Rembrandt has been the subject of a vast amount of literature in genres of both fiction and nonfiction.

Research and scholarship related to Rembrandt is an academic field in its own right with many notable connoisseurs and scholars and has been very dynamic since the Dutch Golden Age.

Rembrandt regarded the Bible as the greatest Book in the world and held it in reverent affection all his life, in affluence and poverty, in success and failure.

Rembrandt never wearied in his devotion to biblical themes as subjects for his paintings and other graphic presentations, and in these portrayals he was the first to have the courage to use the Jews of his environment as models for the heroes of the sacred narratives.

Rembrandt has been one of the most controversial artists in history.

When Fromentin realized his inability to like some of the works by Rembrandt he formulated the following comments: 'I even do not dare to write down such a blasphemy; I would get ridiculed if this is disclosed'.

Only about twenty-five years earlier another French Romantic master Eugene Delacroix, when expressing his admiration for Rembrandt, has written in his Journal a very different statement: '.

In 1875 the blasphemy was not to admire everything Rembrandt had ever produced.

Between these two dates, the appreciation of Rembrandt reached its turning point and since that time he was never deprived of the high rank in the art world.

He's just everywhere, and people who don't know anything, who wouldn't recognize a Rembrandt painting if they tripped over it, you say the name Rembrandt and they already know that this is a great artist.

The Stoning of Saint Stephen, Rembrandt's first painting completed at the age of 19.

The Blinding of Samson, which Rembrandt gave to Huyghens.