Rembrandt: The Painter Who Watched Himself Grow Old

Rembrandt did not come from a family of artists. His father, Harmen, was a miller; his mother came from a family of bakers. He was the fourth of six surviving children.¹

After the Latin School in Leiden, and a registration at Leiden University in 1620, he trained as a painter: about three years with Jacob van Swanenburgh, a specialist in scenes of hell full of fire and reflected flames, then six months in Amsterdam with the history painter Pieter Lastman.¹ That early training in painting firelight may explain his lifelong interest in the effects of light.¹

His signature tells a story of its own. As a young man he signed with a monogram, RH, then RHL. From 1633 he signed with his first name only: Rembrandt.¹

It has been suggested that he saw himself as the equal of the great Italians who were known by their first names alone: Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael.¹ More than two centuries later, Vincent van Gogh would sign simply “Vincent,” for very different reasons.

In 1631 Rembrandt went into business with Hendrick Uylenburgh, an Amsterdam dealer whose workshop painted portraits, restored pictures and made copies. Leiden was in decline; Amsterdam was booming.¹

He conquered the city's portrait market quickly, painting livelier portraits than the specialists who had dominated it, along with group portraits such as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). In 1634 he joined the painters' guild and married Uylenburgh's niece, Saskia.¹

During his lifetime, Rembrandt's fame abroad came above all from his etchings, prints made from copper plates bitten with acid. Britannica calls them “unusual”: they brought him international renown while he was still alive.¹

Even his drawings, made as exercises or as studies for other works, were collected by art lovers of his day.¹ The laughing young man at the top of this page is one of those small etchings, made when he was 24.

From 1640 to 1642 Rembrandt worked on a huge group portrait of an Amsterdam civic militia company. A family album of its captain describes the scene: the captain “gives order to his lieutenant… to march out his company of citizens.”¹

Instead of lining the men up, Rembrandt set them in motion. Britannica sees in it an effort to achieve a much livelier scene than Leonardo had in his Last Supper.¹ The painting now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.²

In 1639 Rembrandt bought a large house in Amsterdam. He never paid off the debt. Instead he spent heavily on his collection of art and curiosities, and after 1642 he painted no more portraits on commission.¹

His collection was remarkable. It mixed natural wonders, such as shells and coral, with objects made by people: medals, plaster casts of Greek philosophers and Roman emperors, weapons, and musical instruments from many cultures. There were also prints and paintings by other artists and a number of Mughal miniatures.¹

We know it in detail because of the inventory drawn up in 1656, when the whole collection had to be auctioned with the house. A reconstruction of his “art room” can be visited today at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam.¹

In 1656 he went bankrupt. He was not alone: the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54) and its blockade of the Dutch coast had hit makers of luxury goods hard, and many artists failed at the same time.¹ He sold the house in 1658 and moved to a rented home on the Rozengracht. In 1660 his son Titus and his companion Hendrickje Stoffels set up a business that employed him, to protect him from his creditors.¹

Hendrickje died in 1663, and Titus a few years later. Rembrandt kept working: shortly before his death he was preparing copper plates for a series of etchings of the Passion, which he never finished.¹

He died in Amsterdam on 4 October 1669, aged 63, and was buried in the Westerkerk. The cause of his death is not known.¹