REMBRANDT GREW UP IN THE BUSTLING NEIGHBOURHOOD BEHIND Wittepoort, where all travellers from the direction of The Hague entered the city. Checks were performed at the gate, not only on individuals but also on goods to prevent excise fraud. It was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a person to enter Leiden unnoticed.
Just outside the gate, a bridge spanned the ring-shaped external canal. It had been built at a bend in the canal, to prevent an enemy firing a cannon from it straight into the city. The siege of 1574 had struck terror into the people of Leiden and prompted them to strengthen their defensive structures. The gates were key to these efforts.
Inside the city gate, along Noordeinde, carts and carriages rattled to and fro all day long. The wide street was peppered with taverns and inns bearing names such as De Eenhoorn, De Gulden Wagen and De Drie Haringen, where merchants and travellers stopped off to eat, drink and sometimes to spend the night. Merchandise was laid out invitingly under awnings, and fire baskets brightened the scene, with people roasting chestnuts and making pancakes.
The list of local property owners commissioned in 1606 by the town clerk Jan van Hout consisted almost entirely of craftsmen: coppersmiths, glaziers, carpenters, glue-makers, cobblers, turners, chamois-makers, bricklayers, tailors. The largest number of entries are those for farriers, waggoners and wheel-and saddle-makers. Horses were shoed at the corner of Weddesteeg, and the regular beat of hammer on anvil in Pieter Woutersz’s forge filled the air. The street heaved with horses and carts, and to relieve congestion a small canal at right angles to Noordeinde had been filled in—named ’t Sand, after the material used to make it—to serve as a parking area. Once a week a pig market was held there.
Amid the jostling and shoving in ’t Sand, tempers sometimes flared. Rembrandt’s father was once called to testify as a witness after a row between two waggoners in ’t Sand had escalated into a violent brawl. The report of 2nd October 1594 drawn up by the Leiden notary Willem Claesz van Oudevliet states that the waggoner Harmen Willemsz van Dincloo took offence at the words of his fellow waggoner Jan Symonsz from Delft. The former had offered to transport “human cargo” for four stivers, and the other man, incensed, accused his rival of undercutting. The report does not indicate how the case was resolved. When Harmen Willemsz van Dincloo heard himself being branded a scoundrel and a “dishonourable thief”, he flew into a rage. The dispute spiralled out of control and was recounted in front of the notary, in the presence of the city’s bailiff—and of Rembrandt’s father, “a miller of around twenty-nine years of age”, as a witness. His signature appears at the bottom of the document.
Beggar with a Wooden Leg, 1628–32.
The Blind Fiddler, 1631.
The area around the Wittepoort and the inns abounded with beggars and tramps, as well as miscellaneous foreign travellers. Where these strangers came from, the locals had no idea: for convenience’s sake they were all known as “Orientals”. In around 1630 Rembrandt turned out a quantity of sketches, drawings and etchings with finely observed portraits of people he had seen in the street: a beggar leaning on a stick, lepers and maimed soldiers, a beggar couple with an emaciated dog, a man with a hurdy-gurdy, a blind fiddler—oddly holding his bow in his left hand—and an old beggarwoman in rags with a bottle gourd hanging from a leather cord at her hip.
The city council endeavoured to provide shelter for the poor and sick and to feed the hungry, but constantly fell short. In 1577, Jan van Hout had drawn up a Poor Report, in which he proposed that the city take responsibility for organizing poor relief and remove this task from the churches. Begging was prohibited in the statute book (Keurboek) of 1583. In practice, however, the influx of destitute people was too great and the poor relief too meagre. The begging simply continued.
Rembrandt was familiar with the colourful figures who haunted the streets. They had been part of his everyday surroundings from his earliest years. In the late 1620s they started to fascinate him, and he would make sketches of them with a few bold lines in his sketchbook or on an erasable tablet, on Noordeinde and just outside Wittepoort, sitting at the side of the road.
To learn the art of portraying people he saw in the street, Rembrandt studied the work of the French printmaker Jacques Callot, who achieved great success with his gueux. Some of Rembrandt’s own etchings of beggars in his neighbourhood are based directly on those of the popular French artist. He differed from Callot, however, in that he did not work with neatly drawn lines: he scratched and carved, allowing his etching needle to follow its own capricious path.
These images must have served Rembrandt as studies: exercises for the hand and eye for figures to be included in biblical scenes. The blind beggar would be used for the blind Tobit, who stumbles to the door in the hope that his son, despatched to fetch money deposited with someone for safe keeping, has finally returned home. In Rembrandt’s etching, Tobit almost trips over his little dog.
Rembrandt’s sketch of two weary travellers applying to De Gulden Wagen for a place to sleep as darkness fell would serve him well later on, in a nocturnal scene with the Flight into Egypt. Joseph was modelled on a beggar.
The grumpiest-looking beggar in his etchings has the face of the artist himself. Rembrandt could take on any role, from Oriental to Apostle and from prince to pauper. There he sits, leaning back against a little hill in a ragged tabard. His toes stick out of the holes in his tattered shoes. He accosts passers-by, demanding alms with an aggrieved expression. The signature reads “RHL 1630”.
Was Rembrandt drawing attention to the distressing situation of the poor? Did he identify with the wretched of the earth? It is possible. In any case, Rembrandt did not have to give this beggar alms to ask him to sit still for a minute.
Beggar, Seated on a Mound, 1630.
Some of the etchings from Rembrandt’s Amsterdam period provide a retrospective picture of what he had seen in and around Leiden. A game of kolf, for instance—a sport halfway between today’s hockey and golf. Or beugelen, pell-mell, a game similar to cricket. There was a long pell-mell pitch just outside Wittepoort.
In the winter, when the Rhine and Rapenburg were frozen over, games were played on the ice. Rembrandt made an etching of a skater gliding along gracefully with a long-hooked stick over his shoulder. In Leiden a long stick of this kind was given the same name (verrejager) as the spiked pole used in bullfighting. The skater has one eye squeezed shut against the cutting wind.
Seventeenth-century winters in the Netherlands were “biting-cold”, as Rembrandt wrote in a caption to an etching of a man with chattering teeth. The sky seemed made of ice, in brittle blues, greens and greys with streaks of flake-white. Take the winter landscape he painted in 1646, for instance, in which a woman shuffles over the ice followed by her dog, while her husband sits on the bank, attaching his skates.
When the snow came whirling from the sky like “chopped feathers”, as the great diplomat and poet Constantijn Huygens would have it, the Rhine merged with Leiden’s canal system to produce a large expanse of picturesque winter. The chronicles report that when William of Orange visited Leiden on 6th November 1572, he watched people skating on the Vestgracht, the former moat. In one of the oldest pictures of the university on Rapenburg, a gouache in a Leiden law student’s liber amicorum, we see students donning their skates and a woman who has slipped and fallen on the ice. The gouache has a wonderfully pretentious caption: “Dear viewer, this drawing displays the University of Holland and shows you how the student flocks gird their loins when the wintry north-wester makes it impossible to cleave the Dutch waters with the ship of the Dionysian goddess.”
When special guests entered the city through the Wittepoort, Rembrandt would have been right at the front of the gaping crowd. In one of the testimony books in Leiden’s archives, we find statements made by his brother Adriaen and others in 1642 (over ten years after his move to Amsterdam) about a scuffle that had erupted in the mill yard between civic militiamen and Adriaen’s son Jan, Rembrandt’s nephew, who was then still a minor.
It happened on 7th June 1642, when Henrietta Maria, the Queen Consort of England, paid a visit to Leiden. Her young daughter Mary had been betrothed to the fourteen-year-old Prince of Orange, the later stadtholder Willem II, the year before. The Queen Consort entered the city with her retinue, passing between two lines of civic guardsmen. The inhabitants of Weddesteeg and the Van Rijn family sat at the foot of their mill on corn sacks to watch the procession from close by.
Suddenly events turned nasty. Were the militiamen manhandling spectators in their over-zealous determination to keep them at a distance? In any case, one of them took a pike to a woman, Claertge Dircxdr van Driel, wounding her. Another, Adolf Paulsz van Westervelt, struck the little son of the miller’s assistant Jacob Corsz van Rijn a hard blow in the face as he sat on his father’s lap, causing the child to bleed. As the father tried to push the pike away, he pulled a pennant off it.
The exchange that followed was recorded in the testimony book: the militiaman Adolf thought that Jan Adriaensz van Rijn was trying to steal his pennant and said: “Do you think you’re dealing with a load of stopgens?”
The term stopgen referred to men hired to guard the city gates and keep order at night time, and had a bad reputation. The militiaman evidently felt greatly superior to these impoverished guards. Nor did he display any respect for the residents of Weddesteeg.
Jan said to the militiaman: “Are you lot better than stopgens?”
“Say that again, if you have the nerve!”
“I would say that you’re just like a stopgen.”
At this, without further warning, the militiaman struck Jan so hard that his pike broke in two. The militiamen stormed the mill yard and beat the people back.
The records do not indicate how the fight ended or whether the militiaman was reprimanded. However, this anecdote certainly shows that it was not without danger for youths to be out and about in Leiden, certainly not for those endowed with such a quick temper as Rembrandt’s nephew.
As darkness fell and Wittepoort was bolted for the night, the streets remained crowded. Visitors found a place to sleep at one of the inns and men might go in search of entertainment. They would not have far to go. In the alleys between Noordeinde and the parallel Groenhazengracht, the authorities turned a blind eye to the “stews”, the brothels.
On the other side of the water were the grounds of the Doelen complex, where the militiamen—musketeers—had their target practice. They would sometimes haul a plank to the water and improvise a bridge to get across to the “women of easy virtue” in Sliksteeg as quickly as possible. The canal they crossed was named after Groen Haesge, a young prostitute from days long past.
The neighbourhood to which Weddesteeg belonged at the end of the sixteenth century had a particularly colourful name. Billenburg (“Buttocks Burg”), between present-day Galgewater, Kort Rapenburg, Rapenburg, Groenhazengracht and the outer canal, was named after a shapely fifteenth-century girl known as “Fye with the bottom”.
In 1602, the district of Billenburg was divided up and the area containing Weddesteeg was named Pelikaanshoek. That same year, Rembrandt’s father was appointed neighbourhood master or buurtheer—a post that conferred social standing but no power. Harmen’s neighbours would have called on him in emergencies, since the master was responsible for poor relief and took an active role in baptisms, weddings and funerals.
So it happened that on 14th February 1605, at the request of “Harmen Gerritsz Moelenaer as master of his neighbourhood”, two young orphans of Walloon immigrants, the brothers David and Pieter Daeffuidt, aged fourteen and eight, were admitted to the Orphanage of the Holy Spirit on Hooglandse Kerkgracht. The care for the poor, sick and orphans was tightly organized at this time: partly from Christian and humanitarian motives, and partly from self-interest. In fact, the local authorities would sometimes fetch orphans from other cities and bring them to Leiden to fill vacancies in the flourishing cloth-manufacturing industry.
In the event of a death in the neighbourhood, it was the master who had to make sure that the person was given a decent funeral. This was no sinecure. In 1603, a year after the district’s partition, the residents of the houses in the section of Noordeinde between Zand and Vest submitted a grievance to the city council. They complained that they did not have the strength to carry their dead all the way to the cemetery and petitioned to be reassigned to Pelikaanshoek. However, their petition was denied.
Burials were governed by strict social rules. Supervision was not easy at the best of times, and during smallpox or Plague epidemics it was a hellish task. In the family chronicles of the Leiden families Van Heemskerck and Van Swanenburg, we find the following entries in 1624: “Number of deaths during the Plague: 4,765.” A few hundred people succumbed every week in the months of September, October and November. The numbers gradually fell after that, “thanks to the special grace of God”.
Everyone was afraid of being infected by a sick person or a body. When the Black Death was abroad, bodies were piled up in the graveyard while others lay unburied in houses. From early morning until late at night, the streets were awash with people hauling biers and pushing wheelbarrows with coffins. Doctors scarcely had time to attend to their patients and were helpless in the face of the scourge: they always arrived too late.
The neighbourhood master applied the rules strictly. He insisted on family members removing dead bodies from the house and burying them with all due speed. When the supply of coffins ran out, bodies would sometimes have to be bundled together on planks or old sofas and tipped unceremoniously into the pit. During the Plague epidemic of 1635, the Pieterskerk cemetery was so crowded and its ground raised to such a height that the city council decreed that the dead must henceforth be buried on the ramparts or outside the city. Funeral bells tolled dismally almost without interruption.
Harmen served as neighbourhood master for twenty-two years. In 1624 he was discharged from his duties on account of physical frailty, according to the city’s records. The task had become too arduous for him. That may have been related to an accident that had taken place many years before. At a meeting of the civic militia on 22nd February 1611, he asked to be relieved of his obligation to serve because a musket had exploded in his hands. Although he made a partial recovery, his hand sustained permanent damage that made it hard for him to shoot—a disability that must also have affected his work as a miller.
Harmen was exempted from serving in the night watch—at a price. He was obliged to pay six guilders a year for the exemption, which permitted him to retain his rifle. Every member of the civic militia purchased his own tailor-made weaponry and armour, consisting of a morion (helmet), breastplate, a sword or halberd, a lance, a dagger and a knife—often a double-edged hunting knife known by the grisly Dutch name of hartsvanger—“heart-catcher”. And a musket with a cartridge of lead pellets. The militiaman kept his weaponry at home so as to be able to leap into action in the event of a riot, a sudden enemy incursion or some other emergency. There was no time to go to the Doelen complex, even it if was only five minutes’ walk from his house.
Rembrandt may well have worn his father’s own gorget for the 1629 self-portrait. The painting shows a self-assured, pugnacious figure with his hair styled in fashionable curls complete with an aristocratic “love lock”, a tapering corkscrew curl. A little neckscarf completed the outfit. Rembrandt was proud of the fighting spirit of Leiden’s civic militia. Although he probably never fired a shot himself, the bright illumination of the portrait depicting him as a military dandy conveys his allegiance to the men of arms.
Harmen’s obligation to pay an annual fee for his exemption was speedily revoked, we learn from the minutes of a meeting of 22nd February 1611, provided one of his sons served instead. Affluent families were required by law to help protect the city from danger, and most families were proud of their contribution. We see this pride reflected in the numerous portraits that civic militias commissioned of their members in the seventeenth century. They wanted themselves and their loyalty immortalized for all to see. The civic militia was the symbol par excellence of liberty and of the townspeople’s determination to resist any attempt at rule by outsiders.
In 1626, the Leiden artist Joris van Schooten, almost twenty years Rembrandt’s senior, was given the city’s most prestigious painting commission. He managed to produce seven large paintings of militia companies for the large hall of the Doelen complex, including an extraordinary fifty-eight portraits of fully costumed officers. The paintings, each one several metres wide, were paid for by those depicted: twelve guilders each.
The gifted portrait painter David Bailly, a contemporary of Joris van Schooten’s and an officer of the company of Captain Harman van Brosterhuyzen, with its orange, white and green standard, was incensed that he had not been chosen for the commission—so incensed, in fact, that he painted his own portrait in the group rather than allow his colleague to do so. Bare-headed, soberly dressed in black with a white collar, Bailly glares out at us from amid the profusion of bright-orange plumes on the officers’ hats. With his defiant action, he saved himself twelve guilders into the bargain.
In 1642, Rembrandt was at the peak of his fame. By a cruel stroke of fate, he was struck just then by the saddest of personal calamities. His wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh, died on 14th June of that year at just twenty-nine years of age and was buried five days later in the Oude Kerk. In the midst of this turbulence, he put the finishing touches to his largest and most important painting of a militia company. The group portrait of the militia company of the city’s District II for the large banquet hall in the Kloveniersdoelen, the musketeers’ shooting-range complex, was a highly prestigious and lucrative commission. Each of the sixteen militiamen paid him 100 guilders.
This meant that when Rembrandt set about painting “The company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh ready to march out”, as Captain Banninck Cocq called it in his family album, he was working in a genre with which he was very familiar and which he boldly interpreted in his own way. Instead of a column of men in battle array he showed a bustling crowd of individuals, amid the turmoil that precedes their marching off.
One of the militiamen is preparing to fire his weapon, while another is blowing on the cock of his musket to clean it. Scans of The Night Watch reveal that Rembrandt was so fascinated by the scene that he erased part of Ruytenburgh’s shoulder in order to paint the mechanics of the musket with precision.
The militiaman Jan van der Heede in The Night Watch (detail), 1642.
One musketeer in a red suit is loading his musket. We know the musketeers’ names: this man was Jan van der Heede. He is steadying one of the twelve small powder kegs from his shoulder belt, known affectionately as “the twelve apostles”, at the muzzle of his weapon, ready to slip the powder into the barrel.
Firearms experts tell us that Van der Heede is holding his musket awkwardly for loading. Instead of placing the butt on the ground and standing the gun up vertically, he has it at an angle. Moreover, on closer inspection you see that Van der Heede’s palm is scarcely bent as he grasps the heavy weapon—he is not even clasping it with his thumb. A dangerous way to handle a gun. Could his father’s accident have been playing through Rembrandt’s mind when he depicted this man’s ineptitude?
In his Leiden days he had already made drawings in red chalk of soldiers, along with those of beggars and other characters he saw in the streets. For the soldiers’ poses, Rembrandt studied the figures drawn by Jacques de Gheyn II in his Wapenhandelinghe (“Handling of Arms”). This drill manual was published in 1607 and served an important military purpose. It was commissioned by Maurits of Nassau, who used it to convert a ragged band of mercenaries into the well-drilled army of the Dutch States.
When it fell to one of Harmen’s sons to replace him in the militia, his eldest son Gerrit could not oblige, since he too had had some “accident with his hands”. Nor did he succeed his father as miller. Gerrit must have suffered from some frailty or disability. On 16th March 1621, Harmen and Neeltje summoned the notary, Craen, because Neeltje lay deathly ill in bed. They had a last will and testament drawn up, which stipulated that Gerrit was to receive a pension of 125 guilders a year upon the death of both his parents. This precautionary measure turned out to have been unnecessary. Neeltje recovered. She did not die until 1640, at the age of seventy-three, having survived her husband by ten years and Gerrit by nine years.
The second son did sign up with the militia. On 10th October 1617, Adriaen enlisted with the second company of the sixth district, serving under the standard of Adriaen Claesz van Leeuwen. He took his oath, adding the note “m” for musket, thus redeeming his father’s debt.
It seems likely that Adriaen was mobilized in 1622, a year after the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce. Leiden sent its entire militia to occupy the Brabant city of Grave on the River Waal, making it possible for Prince Maurits, the son of William of Orange, stadtholder and general, to march his troops to Bergen op Zoom. It has been suggested that sixteen-year-old Rembrandt was also called to arms, but there is no evidence whatsoever for this.
Adriaen, nine years older than Rembrandt, took over from his father as miller. That had not been the original intention; he had been sent away as a boy to be apprenticed to a cobbler. In 1619, Adriaen married Lijsbeth van Leeuwen, who came from a prominent, affluent Leiden family that had produced a number of millers. For several years he and his wife ran a cobblers’ workshop at what is now Aalmarkt 13.
Jacques de Gheyn II, Soldier Blowing Sparks off the Pan of his Musket (no. 16), c.1600.
Soldier blowing sparks away in The Night Watch (detail), 1642.
It was around 1624, when Harmen was relieved of his duties as neighbourhood master, that Adriaen ended up in his father’s business. Through his parents-in-law he inherited several properties and half of another windmill, De Vechter—a bastardization of the name “Victor”, St Victor being the patron saint of millers. After his mother’s death, Adriaen inherited the other half of the family mill and moved into his parental home on Weddesteeg.
Initially, his business prospered. However, after just a few years he was compelled to sell the houses he had inherited and his share in De Vechter. In 1644 the city council demanded that he move the mill De Rijn, which he kept running day and night, to the ramparts to the south of the Wittepoort. He was given a grant to arrange the move, but it was a severe setback nonetheless.
Adriaen’s business slumped with the declining demand for malt. It was a bad time for breweries. People were cutting down on their beer consumption because of rising prices. Brewers could no longer draw their water from the Rhine, moats, and canals, which had all become badly polluted by the cloth industry, but had to transport it by barge from the dunes. In the absence of demand for malt, Rembrandt’s brother sought to convert his malt-mill into a flour-mill. In 1651, he obtained the necessary consent.
In spite of his financial setbacks, Adriaen maintained his position as the proud head of the Van Rijn family in Leiden. He was evidently well respected in the community. On 22nd October 1643 he was appointed master of the Pelikaanshoek district, like his father before him. He died nine years later. On 19th October 1652 he was buried in the Pieterskerk, just a few stone slabs removed from his parents: in grave number 101 in the central section of the nave.