Rembrandt had little use for Italian art. He ignored Raphael, turned up his nose at Leonardo, and shook off the influence of Michelangelo. He even refused to make the traditional artist’s pilgrimage to Rome.
Yet he did adopt one practice from the Italian greats: He signed his name, simply, Rembrandt. Like Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo before him (or Cher, Prince, and Madonna after him), he was known by one name alone. That’s one heck of an ego.
Fortunately, Rembrandt had the artistic chops to back it up. His dramatic histories and forceful portraits challenged and captivated seventeenth-century audiences, at least until his aesthetic and Dutch taste parted ways. Spoiler alert: Rembrandt’s story does not have a happy ending. But even if he died alone and in penury, he sure had one heck of a ride.
Rembrandt was the eighth of nine children born to the van Rijns of Leiden, a family of millers. He must have been a bright child because, at about age fourteen, his family enrolled him at Leiden University. But the young boy had different plans, and in the early 1620s he pursued an artist’s apprenticeship. Soon after completing his training, he moved to Amsterdam, a port city throbbing with the business of fur traders, spice importers, and slave brokers. At the height of the Dutch golden age, burghers enjoyed the fruits of their labors by commissioning portraits of themselves, their families, and their civic organizations. Artists flourished, and Rembrandt faced significant competition. Luckily, his style found favor by capturing not only the personal appearance of his patrons but a sense of their personality as well.
In his best portraits, Rembrandt added drama to the scene. In The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, a group portrait of a well-known local physician and several surgeons, Rembrandt shows the good doctor demonstrating how arm tendons function. As he lectures, the surgeons peer intently at the flayed human appendage, their faces full of concentration and fascination.
The Dutch also enjoyed history paintings of biblical, historical, or mythological events, which usually contained some sort of moral. Such works often combined Caravaggio-esque drama with splendor—the women were busty and beautiful, the men chiseled and courageous, and the settings luxurious and exotic. Rembrandt demolished many of these conventions by simplifying his compositions, eliminating extraneous elements and making the characters look like ordinary people. In Samson and Delilah of 1628, the blue-robed temptress looks like an ordinary tavern girl, complete with a double chin. The rare touch of luxe, her satin brocade gown, is countered by her dirty toenails.
Rembrandt’s star was on the rise throughout the 1630s. Commissions rolled in, and students lined up for classes. Things only got better in 1634 when he married the young and relatively wealthy Saskia Uylenburgh. Rembrandt immediately began sketching and painting his wife—as herself, as the Roman goddess Flora, and once, oddly, as a prostitute sitting on the knee of the biblical prodigal son, whom he painted as a self-portrait. With Saskia’s dowry, combined with his booming artistic reputation, Rembrandt took out a mortgage on a large house.
To top it all off, Rembrandt received a major commission to paint a group portrait of an Amsterdam militia unit. Because the Netherlands defended its cities with these volunteer guards, militias symbolized Dutch independence and pride. In 1641, Amsterdam’s six militia companies commissioned portraits for their new headquarters, and Rembrandt was asked to portray the company of Capt. Frans Banning Cocq.
Imagine comparing a group photo of corporate stockholders with a dramatic still from an action movie. That’s how different Rembrandt’s portrait was from the other five. Now known as The Night Watch, the work is alive with action and energy. The captain is shown gesturing his men forward, thrusting the company into motion. A drummer strikes up a beat, the standard-bearer raises his flag, and the troops lift their muskets and pikes. The patrons expected a static scene, and instead Rembrandt gave them this pulse-pounding mini-drama. He had gambled that he could transform his subject but still satisfy the commission, and his bet paid off. Dutch audiences were wowed.
His moment of triumph was sorely diminished, however, when Saskia was found to be suffering from tuberculosis. She died in June 1642, soon after The Night Watch was completed, leaving Rembrandt with a baby boy, Titus, less than one year old.
Rembrandt may have tried to remain faithful to his wife’s memory, but the presence of Geertge Dircx, his housekeeper, proved too tempting, and within a few years the two were lovers. Then his eye fell on his new maid, the lovely Hendrickje Stoffels. He gave Geertge the boot while a pregnant Hendrickje was dragged before the church council for living in sin.
The decade was disastrous, and by the early 1650s popular taste had shifted. Unable to keep up with the mortgage, Rembrandt took out personal loans with patrons and Amsterdam businessmen. He transferred some of his possessions into Titus’s name and even held a weeklong sale of his possessions, but it wasn’t enough. Facing bankruptcy, Rembrandt watched as auditors inventoried all his possessions and sold them to repay creditors. The house was auctioned, and Rembrandt, fifteen-year-old Titus, Hendrickje, and new baby Cornelia moved to a rented house in a less-than-attractive neighborhood.
REMBRANDT HAD A THING FOR SELF-PORTRAITS: THROUGHOUT HIS LIFETIME, HE DREW, PAINTED, AND ETCHED HIS OWN LIKENESS MORE THAN EIGHTY TIMES.
If nothing else, Rembrandt had faith in himself. He believed he could get everything back with one massive gamble. The opportunity arose in 1661, when he received the civic commission to create a painting for the new town hall. The subject—The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis—was especially dear to the city. According to legend, in AD 69 the Batavians, a Germanic tribe believed to be the ancestors of the Dutch, rebelled against Roman oppression. In the seventeenth century, the episode was evoked as a parallel to the Netherlands’ recent struggle against Spain. Popular prints depicted the feast at which the Batavians swore an oath of loyalty and declared their rebellion against Rome; most painters showed the Batavians standing around a table and shaking hands to seal the deal.
Rembrandt’s approach couldn’t have been more different. His Batavians aren’t sophisticated proto-Dutchmen, but rather barbarians dressed in rough and wild regalia. Civilis’s stern expression and battle-worn face are made grimmer by the scar of his missing left eye, a detail Rembrandt found in ancient histories. Most shocking? Instead of politely shaking hands, the conspirators cross their raised swords with Civilis’s.
“Oh, er, my,” said the Dutch. They expected an inspiring depiction of their forerunners but were met with an alcohol-fueled call to insurrection. Rembrandt believed he could wow his audience by transforming the subject, just as he had done with The Night Watch, but this time he was wrong. Officials requested that the work be removed.
The 1660s were terrible years of plague and death. The disease claimed the life of his beloved Hendrickje in 1662. Then Titus, who was working as an art dealer and his father’s promoter, died in 1668, only eight months after his marriage. Despite personal misery, during his last years Rembrandt created many of his most enduring masterworks. He died October 4, 1669, alone except for his daughter, Cornelia. He was buried in a rented grave.
The next centuries would be equally grim for his reputation, with critics condemning his “vulgar” style. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Romantic artists rediscovered Rembrandt and began to celebrate him as a prototypical artistic genius. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists applauded his work and imitated his “rough” use of paint; Vincent van Gogh said of one of Rembrandt’s late paintings, “I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting in front of this picture for ten days with only a dry crust of bread.” Today, Rembrandt is considered to be the ultimate Old Master.
The Night Watch is a terrible title for Rembrandt’s most famous painting. Amsterdam’s militias didn’t guard the city at night. In his lifetime, the painting was known by the clunkier—albeit more correct—title The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq. Why the name change? By the nineteenth century, the already heavy shadows of the painting had darkened under layers of yellowing varnish and centuries of dirt. Audiences interpreted the scene as having taken place at night and gave the work its current title. A thorough cleaning after World War II removed much of the grime, and the resulting, much brighter painting more correctly shows Rembrandt’s intended impression.
If you thought Albrecht Dürer had a thing for self-portraits, Rembrandt put him to shame, drawing, painting, and etching his own likeness more than eighty times. Through these detailed and often startling works, we watch the artist age, his hair growing longer, shorter, and longer again; his eyes changing from sharp to tired to rheumy; his nose bulging wider and wider until the skin is pitted and the veins are broken. Sometimes he experiments with different facial expressions, from surprise to anger to shock. Other times he presents himself as a character—a beggar or a withered St. Paul. But most often he is unmistakably himself, an artist, holding a palette or standing before a canvas. In 1669, with both Hendrickje and Titus dead, Rembrandt depicted himself as Democritus, the ancient Greek philosopher who laughed at the spectacle of human life. The poignancy of the aging artist producing a bitter chuckle at the vanity of ambition makes for a haunting work.
SWEET REVENGE
Geertge Dircx had a right to be mad at Rembrandt: He’d thrown her out like last week’s milk. So in 1649 she sued him for breach of promise. Eager to prevent a scandal, Rembrandt offered her money, but still she demanded a trial. The judges weren’t going to force the artist to marry Geertge, but they demanded he increase his yearly payments to her. Rembrandt was steamed, and so he conspired with her brother, to whom Geertge had given power of attorney, to have her declared of unsound mind. She was thrown into a house of correction, a sorry workhouse where prostitutes and vagabonds were held alongside epileptics and the genuinely insane. Inmates were subjected to a rigorous schedule of demanding work, relentless sermons, and endless Scripture readings.
Geertge was finally released in 1656 after five years of incarceration, managing to regain control of her affairs from her treacherous brother. By then, Rembrandt’s finances were in a disastrous state, and he was in no position to pay her. Before she could join the list of Rembrandt’s creditors, she died. Pity she didn’t live to see the artist humiliated and bankrupt—she might have enjoyed it most.
