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The Return of the Prodigal Son
(painting, c. 1669)
Created near the end of his life, during a time of mourning, personal and artistic disappointment, and ongoing financial struggles, Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son is a testament to his security in the love and mercy of God in the face of all these trials. Throughout his artistic career, Rembrandt had revisited scenes from this story several times in drawings, etchings, and paintings. He was clearly moved by Jesus’s parable of God’s unconditional love, and in this late canvas he made his culminating statement. It is a painting of great tenderness, capturing the moment when the wayward son returns to his father to beg for forgiveness. The hands of the father rest gently on his kneeling son’s shoulders as he leans forward with an expression of absolute acceptance and love. No matter what paths the son has trod, no matter what mistakes and betrayals he has committed, no matter how much he has hurt and disgraced his family, his father has been awaiting his return and welcomes him home.
The emotion in Rembrandt’s famous painting is palpable, and made even more emotionally resonant by its quiet dignity. It is obvious to the viewer that something important and life changing is taking place among this cluster of family members. But there is clearly more going on here than a simple family reunion. In the face of this loving and merciful father, we glimpse the very face of God.
In his book The Return of the Prodigal Son, acclaimed spiritual writer Henri Nouwen wrote movingly of his own personal encounter with this emotionally engaging painting. He first glimpsed it as a poster pinned to the office door of a colleague at a time in his own life when he was struggling with physical exhaustion, emotional restlessness, and spiritual emptiness. He had just completed a lecture tour on which he had been speaking with great passion about justice and the spiritual life, but his own heart was filled with deep loneliness and a longing for something more. What he discovered as he meditated on Rembrandt’s painting was home. “The tender embrace of father and son expressed everything I desired at that moment. I was, indeed, the son exhausted from long travels; I wanted to be embraced; I was looking for a home where I could feel safe.”1 The image spoke to his personal yearnings, offering a deeper understanding of the love of God, his heavenly Father.
Months later, Nouwen had the opportunity to sit for several hours in front of the actual painting at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The impact of the time spent in the presence of this masterpiece was life-changing, and gave Nouwen a renewed and deepened understanding of God’s care for him; he felt almost as though the painting had been created specifically for him.
I came to see it as, somehow, my personal painting, the painting that contained not only the heart of the story that God wants to tell me, but also the heart of the story that I want to tell to God and God’s people. All of the Gospel is there. All of my life is there. All of the lives of my friends is there. The painting has become a mysterious window through which I can step into the Kingdom of God.2
One imagines that Rembrandt would have been pleased with such a response.
Rembrandt van Rijn was born in the Netherlands in 1606 to a Dutch Reformed father and a Catholic mother. Both took their faith seriously and taught their children to do the same. Rembrandt’s education surely included an immersion in the Bible, upon which he would draw for his art throughout his life. The young man showed artistic promise and was apprenticed first to Jacob Swanenburgh and then to Pieter Lastman, whose own work was influenced by Caravaggio. It is likely under Lastman’s influence that Rembrandt began to experiment with the dramatic effects of light, which would be a characteristic of his paintings throughout his career.
In 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, the artistic capital of the Dutch Republic. This was the golden age of Dutch art, and the number of painters in the city was said to outnumber the number of bakers! Many of them were painters of the first order, but none was greater than Rembrandt. Three years after settling in Amsterdam he married Saskia van Uylenburgh, whom he had met through a cousin and with whom he had fallen deeply in love. Her family’s wealth brought a financial stability and an elevated social status that allowed Rembrandt to focus on his painting. It also allowed him to engage in collecting paintings by other admired artists, as well as various and sundry costumes, hats, weaponry, and miscellaneous exotic items that he used as props for his own works. He soon became known as one of Amsterdam’s leading portrait painters and was sought out by discerning collectors throughout Europe. This income allowed him to purchase an expensive home in which he built a studio, where he both painted and trained aspiring artists.
The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg [Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD-Mark]
Rembrandt’s many portraits of Saskia give evidence of the depth of their relationship, and so it was a great personal tragedy when she died after only eight years of marriage. This marked the beginning of his many personal and financial problems. Saskia’s will had a provision that would not allow him to retain any of her family’s money if he remarried, so he never did. But in the late 1640s he began a relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels, a maid in his household. This relationship made him a target of criticism for some religious leaders, and also resulted in a suit by another woman who claimed that Rembrandt had earlier promised to marry her and had broken his promise.
Never good with money, Rembrandt would rarely pass up an opportunity to purchase a painting he loved or an exotic prop that might one day make its way into one of his paintings. The result was that in 1658 he lost his beloved home due to unpaid debts, and most of his collections, as well as artifacts, paintings, and household goods, were sold off to pay the debts. By this time his work had begun to fall out of favor with collectors in Amsterdam, he had lost all of his children to premature deaths, and he had little money or property to his name. However, in the very year he was stripped of virtually all he owned (which was put up for auction), he painted one of his most confident and serene self-portraits. Even if nothing else was left, he could still paint. And that was what mattered most. He lived a turbulent life: financial insolvency and debt, relationship struggles, the deaths of all those most dear to him, and a fading reputation. But in all this he remained true to his calling as an artist. He knew what he was created to do.
We know few details of Rembrandt’s personal faith. Little writing by him of any kind survives. But his paintings, etchings, and drawings tell the story of what he held to be most important. He invested more energy on biblical themes than any other genre. There are at least 591 drawings, 72 etchings, and 89 paintings that bring scriptural stories to life. His very first major painting was of the story of the stoning of Stephen from the book of Acts, and over the years he added paintings of numerous stories from both the Old and New Testaments. He always sought for biblical realism, building his works from the text of Scripture (which he obviously knew very well) rather than using the traditional symbols and clichés that were the norm in most religious painting of his time. He studied the work of Jewish historian Josephus and consulted with Jewish rabbis, and he often used Jewish models in his attempt to be authentic. At a time when anti-Semitism was common, Rembrandt was not afraid to call his Jewish acquaintances his friends and use them in his paintings.
In his biblical pictures, Rembrandt wasn’t really interested in traditional iconography. He was absorbed in the people in the stories, and he made them come alive for his viewers. He painted them as though they were unaware that they were part of a Bible story; they were just living, breathing human beings. When he read the Bible he also saw himself in its stories, and he sometimes even added a self-portrait to these paintings: himself as a spectator, or as a participant in the biblical events. You can see his face as one of those involved in the Raising of the Cross (1633). Was he implicating himself as a sinner who was one of those responsible for Jesus’s death?
Rembrandt was a great painter of portraits, intrigued by the faces he could bring to life as no one before or since. In these portraits the personalities of his sitters shine through. He didn’t just paint the public persona but found the essential human being beneath. His portraits are unflattering but dignified. Rembrandt painted humanity in all its imperfection and glory. And one of the faces that seemed to interest him most was his own. He created a collection of self-portraits that give us a glimpse of him at virtually every stage of his life. In many of his more than seventy-five self-portraits there is an unflattering truthfulness, as he unflinchingly looks straight out at the viewer.
During his career, Rembrandt also painted a number of portraits of Christ, much like the ones he did of himself and other residents of Amsterdam. Departing from traditional ways of portraying Jesus, these images were based on the Jewish models who posed for him and portray a Christ who is serene and introspective, kind and wise. They are not so much demonstrations of his divine power but rather reminders that he was human as well as divine.
In whatever genre he undertook, Rembrandt brought a unique perspective and an amazing painterly touch, applying the paint generously and thickly enough that the brushwork is usually visible. This means that it is essential, if at all possible, to see his artwork in person and not just through reproductions in order to appreciate their tactile effect. And when one stands before one of the great Rembrandt masterpieces, one cannot help but feel something of the magic of what he accomplished. As Vincent van Gogh, another great Dutch painter, was to write of him, “Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.”3