Rembrandt Hermensz van Rijn
(July 15, 1606 - October 4, 1669) |
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portraiture, landscape, mythological, secular, & historical narratives Art Work
| Name: |
Rembrandt Hermensz van Rijn |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Leiden, Netherlands |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
July 15, 1606 |
| Death: |
October 4, 1669 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
portraiture, landscape, mythological, secular, & historical narratives |
| Medium: |
oil painting, etching, engraving |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
Dutch Golden Age |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
Printmaking
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Biography
Ranked among the greatest artists the West has ever produced, Rembrandt specialized in a fairly narrow range of subjects (mostly portraits and histories) and worked in a limited number of techniques: painting, drawing, and printmaking. Yet within these restrictions, he operated so freely that he opened up whole new dimensions to his subjects and his materials. His originality enabled him to ignore conventions and to see his chosen themes anew. Rembrandt endowed the most arcane subjects with a new humanity and accessibility; conversely, he took the most humble themes and ennobled them. His instinctive approach to ink and paper or oil and canvas is remarkably modern; he always alluded to process and left the raw material very much a part of the final product. His accomplishments thus place him at the very pinnacle of artistic achievement.
Such a stature places before the student of Rembrandt a daunting body of literature. Almost nothing about the artist is now deemed too insignificant to study, yet much about him remains the subject of debate. His development, schooling, subject matter, works, motivations, and his relative success or failure have all been variously interpreted. Around a nucleus of a few accepted facts, romantic myths were spun by the nineteenth and early twentieth century; our own era is actively stripping them away, perhaps losing something of the truth as well. For an artist to whom the human condition was so important that the barriers between art and life were lifted as never before, it is not surprising that the events of Rembrandt's life cast a large shadow over his professional career. It will remain for each age to find in Rembrandt's work and life the artist that best reflects its own preoccupations.
We know that Rembrandt was born the youngest of nine children to a miller in Leiden in 1606, but even such mundane facts as his schooling are debated. Much information about him is gleaned from the biography written by Jan Janz Orlers in 1641, who states that Rembrandt's parents sent him to school with the idea of teaching him Latin and then bringing him to the Leiden Academy. But since he hadn't the least urge in that direction, his parents had no choice but to apprentice him to a painter who would teach him the basics of his art. Thus it is unclear whether Rembrandt did or did not complete his studies before matriculating from the Leiden Academy. Opinion is divided, but no one doubts his literacy, which was of great benefit to him when he tackled narrative subjects derived from the Bible or classical publications, sources which he read with care and understanding. We also know that between 1619 and 1622 Rembrandt apprenticed to Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburgh, a Leiden painter of "noble subjects," and then, from around 1622 until around 1624, to Pieter Lastman,* a history painter in Amsterdam.
Returning to Leiden between 1623 and 1625, Rembrandt produced his first independent paintings there. By 1629 he came to the notice of the stadtholder's secretary, Constantijn Huygens, and he began to receive important commissions. In 1630 Rembrandt's father died. The following year Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, setting up a studio with Hendrick van Uylenburgh, an art dealer. He was betrothed in 1633 to Saskia, Uylenburgh's cousin, and married her in 1634. A year later (December 1635) the first of their children, Rombertus, was born. Rombertus died in February 1636. Between 1636 and 1640, Saskia gave birth two more times to children who died soon after birth. Surviving pictorial evidence from the early years of their marriage reveals that Rembrandt was deeply attached to Saskia and that they were prosperous. In 1638 Rembrandt sued Saskia's relatives for libel for claiming that he was squandering Saskia's inheritance.
In 1639 Rembrandt purchased a house for 13,000 guilders thus incurring the debt that would eventually bring him to bankruptcy. In 1640 Rembrandt's mother died. The following year brought the first biographical mention of Rembrandt in J. Orlers's Beschtyvinge der Stadt Leyden (Description of the City of Leiden), as well as the birth of Titus, their only child to survive infancy. Chronically ill, perhaps from tuberculosis and likely from complications of pregnancy, Saskia died in 1642, leaving Rembrandt half her estate on the condition that he not remarry.
Rembrandt then entered into his unfortunate relationship with Geertge Dircx, the widow of a ship's bugler, who had been engaged as Titus's nurse. Perhaps pressured by Saskia's relatives, Rembrandt (who had apparently given some of Saskia's jewels to Geertge) asked her in 1648 to make a will, leaving her jewelry to Titus. The following year Geertge sued Rembrandt for breach of promise and won alimony. But in 1650 she was (through Rembrandt's efforts) committed to an asylum, where she spent five years.
The rift between Geertge and Rembrandt was apparently sparked by Hendrickje Stoffels, who would remain Rembrandt's lifelong companion without benefit of marriage. In 1654 their daughter, Cornelia, was born.
Two years later Rembrandt declared bankruptcy and an inventory was made of his belongings. This exhaustive account of Rembrandt's possessions, including his extensive collection of other artists' works, is considered one of the most valuable surviving documents concerning him. In 1657 Rembrandt's belongings were sold; in 1658 the house was sold, whereupon Rembrandt was forced to seek new lodgings in the Jordaan district of Amsterdam, where the poorer artisans and shopkeepers lived. In 1660 Titus and Hendrickje formed an art trading company to sell Rembrandt's work after the guild had declared that a painter who held a general sale could no longer operate independently in the art market. Rembrandt became an employee of this company and thereby continued to paint.
In 1662 Rembrandt experienced further tragedy. Hendrickje died. His son Titus married in 1668, but died of the plague seven months later. Rembrandt's granddaughter, Titia, was born in 1669, and seven months after her birth Rembrandt himself was dead at age sixty-three.
This bare outline of his biography encompasses a prodigious artistic output that, coupled with the personal tragedy he endured, has made Rembrandt the quintessential artist-hero for many and therefore, for others, the perfect candidate for revisionist clarification. His surviving paintings enable us to trace his development practically from the moment he left Lastman's studio until he drew his last breath. Yet his collaborative studio practices, his impact on his pupils and followers, together with the rigorous reappraisal being conducted of his oeuvre by modern historians, leave many questions about his work and development unanswered. It is safe to assume that Rembrandt will survive these diverse approaches to his life and work and offer future generations as many new opportunities for both enrichment and re-understanding as he has in the past.
Rembrandt's career is generally divided into several phases. The first phase began when he returned to Leiden around 1625 and remained there until around 1631. During those six years, Rembrandt found himself as an artist. He began by tackling multifigured narrative subjects, a real indication of his youthful ambition. However, these initial experiments were modestly sized, a sign of his early acceptance of practical limitations. His first efforts, not surprisingly, depended heavily on Lastman, but within two years Rembrandt was rapidly becoming his own man. Rembrandt's earliest known work, The Stoning of St. Stephen (signed and dated 1625, Lyon, Musee des Beaux-Arts), followed by pictures such as Consul Cerialis and the Germanic Legions (signed and dated 1626, Leiden, Municipal Museum), are Lastman's kind of pictures; brightly colored extravaganzas featuring a large cast of characters whose faces bear exaggerated, often bug-eyed expressions lest the meaning of the narrative be lost on the viewer.
Rembrandt's Balaam (dated 1626, Paris, Musee Conacq-Jay) is particularly inspired. Full of violent action and passionate drama, it is clearly a quotation from and improvement on Lastman's 1622 (Palmer Collection) version of the story. From the same year comes Rembrandt's Tobit, Anna and the Kid (Lugano, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, on loan to Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) in which the color is toned down, the facial expressions less exaggerated, and the narrative and composition more fully integrated. This painting seems to have been a kind of watershed, introducing devices, including a closed-off room with a window, penumbral shadows, and fewer figures with more thoughtful, introspective, or mysterious expressions, that Rembrandt favored for the next few years. Continuing to concentrate almost exclusively on biblical narratives, he already reveals those interests that would be his lifelong preoccupations: human beings (particularly those in crisis); and human redemption, either through divine or human intervention.
From 1627 comes his Paul in Prison (Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie) in which Paul is shown deep in thought, momentarily interrupted in his epistles; the light from the window in his cell provides both spiritual and physical illumination. Rembrandt's growing interest in the human face as a mirror of the soul is evident in the many self-portraits begun around this time and in his drawings and paintings of his mother and father, all of which matured into memorable examples from 1629 to 1630. Many of these portraits, together with his other paintings, emphasize the reflective, meditative, or redemptive side of human nature. Rembrandt's proclivity for familiar faces also indicates his inclination to make his work in some ways a reflection of his own experience. This enabled him to endow the most abstruse narrative with a new human and personal dimension and to bring his own life into the world of his pictures. Rembrandt's visual autobiography is unmatched in the history of art, and his surroundings and family are more thoroughly part of his artistic oeuvre than is the case in any other artist's known career. Often contrasting opulence with stark simplicity, piety with pragmatism, Rembrandt's narrative abilities had clearly matured in pictures such as Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (signed and dated 1629, Yorkshire, Normanby Collection, Mulgrave Castle). From roughly the same year comes his profoundly moving portrait of his mother (London, Windsor Castle, Royal Collection). The pictures from this period also reflect Rembrandt's interest in the minute details of armor, costume, as well as faces, all of which are rendered with selective precision.
When Rembrandt returned to Leiden, he struck up a friendship with Jan Lievens, another former Lastman pupil, and the two shared models as well as a studio. They clearly influenced one another and likely collaborated on pictures, though that remains a difficult area for Rembrandt scholars. One possible result of their collaboration is The Homecoming of Tobias (signed by Rembrandt alone, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen), whose size and a certain literalness in arrangement of props argues for a joint effort. Both Lievens and Rembrandt soon came to the attention of Constantijn Huygens, the stadtholder's secretary, who admired both young men: Lievens for his precocity, and Rembrandt for his "liveliness of feeling." Huygens particularly admired the Yorkshire Judas for its brilliant summing up of varied emotions. Rembrandt's interest in the theme of remorse would be taken up many times again during his lifetime, as would another theme he began to tackle between 1629 and 1631, the confrontation of the natural and the supernatural.
Among the finest of his early essays are his Christ at Emmaus (Paris, Mus6e Jacqumart-Andre") and Raising of Lazarus (Howard Ahmanson Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art). In both pictures, his use of light and shadow heightens the supernatural aspect of the experience, making the eyewitnesses' reactions of surprise, fear, and shock both believable and very human. A similar feeling is found in his portrayal of The Presentation in the Temple (dated 1631, The Hague, Mauritshuis). That same year, Rembrandt received several commissions that would transplant him to Amsterdam. One was for a portrait of the Amsterdam merchant Nicolaes Ruts (dated 1631, New York, Frick Collection), the other was for The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (dated 1632, The Hague, Mauritshuis).
By the time he left Leiden, Rembrandt was maturing as an artist and already recognized as exceptional. His influence in Leiden would continue with Gerrit Dou and a number of pupils and the so-called Fineschilders, a Leiden school of painters. With the Nicolaes Ruts portrait and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, Rembrandt quickly established himself as a preferred painter of individual and group portraits among the wealthy burghers of Amsterdam. His sense of lighting and his mastery of form, expression, gesture, and detail all contributed to original interpretations of the problems such commissions presented, and they yielded vivacious, direct, exquisitely rendered faces. His sense of composition and narrative gave his group portraits a totality and spontaneity the genre had previously lacked. Gerson attributes nearly one hundred portraits to Rembrandt from 1631 through 1639, with forty-six of them dated 1632 or 1633. Such figures indicate the demand for Rembrandt's services in these years and the prosperity he began to enjoy. Undoubtedly the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh helped spread Rembrandt's name and was equally important for introducing Rembrandt to his young cousin Saskia, whom Rembrandt married in 1634.
His portraits mirror his public as well as his private successes. Among his finest commissions are such pictures as The Shipbuilder and His Wife (signed and dated 1633, London, Buckingham Palace, Royal Collection) and Maria Trip (signed and dated 1639, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), in which his sitters are presented alternately with drama and with calm majesty. "Fancy dress" or costume portraits of remarkable quality were also produced, including the so-called Noble Slav (dated 1632, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Not surprisingly, Saskia became the subject of many portraits, the finest of which includes Rembrandt's lovely silverpoint engagement portrait of 1633 (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen) and the exquisite profile portrait now in Kassel. She was also the subject of several fancy dress pictures, notably the Saskia as Flora (dated 1634, St. Petersburg, Hermitage). Besides Saskia, his mother continued to inspire him: his 1639 portrait (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) gives her aging features a particularly saintly appearance. Rembrandt's love of combining narrative, comedy, and tragedy with portraiture is evident in his remarkable portrayal of himself and Saskia, Rembrandt and Saskia as the Prodigal Son (Dresden, Gemflldegalerie Alte Meister), which may have been painted after the death of their first son, Rombertus. Three or four years later, Rembrandt painted himself as the dignified, self-possessed (though not untroubled) gentleman a la Titian's Man with the Blue Sleeve (both London, National Gallery). For the rest of his life Rembrandt would slip into various guises, though showing himself most nobly as the painter.
His narratives still generally concentrated on biblical themes, but eschewed their former meditative quietude for a renewed interest in drama and violent action, perhaps in keeping with local tastes. His pictures became larger. Among the first of his new essays in drama was Christ in a Storm on the Sea of Galilee (dated 1633, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Art; stolen), which shows Christ's disciples reacting very humanly (one is even seasick) as their tiny boat is tossed about by massive waves. Returning, in a sense, to the aspirations of his Last man years for large, ambitious, theatrical scenes, Rembrandt seems to have indulged himself in his ability now to outdo his master. He was perhaps too successful for his own good. The picture is thrilling, funny, and admirable by turns, but it lacks the great depth of feeling Rembrandt had achieved in his earlier, smaller, more reflective narratives, a feeling he would later revive.
Evidently reveling in his growing ability to convey affecting emotion, potent gesture, and stirring action on a large scale, Rembrandt pulled out all stops in a series of operatic narratives: a furious Samson is shown waving a fist at his father-in-law (from 1635(7), Berlin, Dahlem Museum, Gemaldegalerie), while a frightened baby Ganymede pees from anxiety as a huge eagle carries him off (dated 1635, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemaldegalerie). In two versions of another painting (dated 1635 and 1636), an angel knocks the knife from Abraham's hand just before Isaac's throat is cut (St. Petersburg, Hermitage; Munich, Alte Pinakothek). From 1636 comes the most gory example of all, as Rembrandt shows the blood spurting from Samson's eye at the moment a dagger pierces it (Frankfurt am Main, StSdelsches Kunstinstitut un Stadtische Galerie). By contrast, an enigmatic bride (posed by Saskia) is surrounded by a fury of debating revelers in Samson's Wedding Feast (dated 1638, Dresden, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister). Full of high spirits, energy, and a raw if brutal humor, these earthy, spectacular renditions are unlike anything Rembrandt or anyone else was painting at that time, and they are worlds away from the often mysterious, meditative quality he created in much of his portraiture of the same period.
A quieter tone is taken in the Passion series Rembrandt undertook for the stadtholder Frederick Henry around 1632. Although not completed until 1639, the Elevation of the Cross, the Deposition, and the Ascension of Christ (all Munich, Alte Pinakothek) were all in progress by 1636, and while they are theatrical, they are painted in a calmer mode than the melodramas previously mentioned. The Entombment and the Resurrection (both dated 1639, Munich, Alte Pinakothek) show a deepening of feeling, a more evocative use of light, and a greater sense of pathos; here again the convergence of the natural with the supernatural gave Rembrandt the inspiration to both humanize and elevate his treatment of the narrative. Angels (his favorite supernatural characters) play a prominent role in the Resurrection and would crop up in etchings as well as other paintings, notably his Angel Departing from the Family of Tobias (dated 1637, Paris, Louvre) and Christ and Mary Magdalen in the Tomb (dated 1638, London, Buckingham Palace, Royal Collection). In these smaller, more monochromatic pictures Rembrandt set a different tone, less dramatic and more humble.
Rembrandt's diversity in these years is also evidenced by the other subject matter he explored. A series of small, nearly monochromatic landscapes were made up in the studio. Their brooding skies and vast panoramas give them an epic quality despite their small scale (see Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Art; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum). And from 1636 comes Rembrandt's first large essay on the nude, his so-called Danae (St. Petersburg, Hermitage). Whether or not Danae is the true title, the actual subject-that of nudity, sensuality, and intimacy--is conveyed brilliantly.
The year 1639 is generally marked as a watershed in Rembrandt's life for several reasons. It is the year generally accepted as the high point of Rembrandt's fame, and the year in which he made his fateful decision to purchase his house. Saskia's health went into decline. The shift in evolution of Rembrandt's painting is less dramatic. One the one hand, he produced what amounts to his most ambitious group portrait, combining it with elements of history and narrative painting. On the other hand, much of what he painted in these years is more modest, introspective, and personal--quite a contrast to the grandiose, overblown narratives of the previous years.
Did these changes turn on the combined circumstances of Saskia's death and a poor reception of the so-called Night Watch (dated 1642, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), about whose contemporary success scholars disagree? Schwartz, for example, calls the picture a "bad fall from which his career never recovered." Haak notes that a myth has grown up around the painting and that in feet Rembrandt's contemporaries acknowledged that this picture was the liveliest one in the new hall of the arquebusiers; it was installed there and remained until about 1715, when it was moved to a smaller chamber of the Amsterdam Town Hall, and cut down in order to make it fit. No one argues that Rembrandt's output after The Night Watch changed, but the reasons for the shift are speculative. It would be hard to imagine an artist with Rembrandt's sensibilities to be immune from the effect of his wife's death. But a direct correlation between her loss and his output is equally difficult to draw. Yet the Holy Families, the landscape drawings and etchings, the portraits and narratives from these years all share a kind of solitariness, a quiet intimacy, and an empathy with the individual character of his subjects that is richer than before. Surely the constant presence of Titus with his nurse inspired at least in part the homey, endearing domesticity of pictures such as the Holy Family with Angels (signed and dated 1645, St. Petersburg, Hermitage).
His portraits, such as the etched likenesses of Jan Six (ca. 1647), show us an artist observing his subject and letting the natural posture, gestures, and expressions of that subject come through, while infusing the whole image with a new sense of privacy that echoes the silence of his meditative pictures of the early 1630s. His paintings of women, such as Woman in the Bed (signed and partially dated 164?, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland) or Susannah and the Elders (signed and dated 1647, Berlin, Dahlem Museum, Gema'ldegalerie) place the viewer in the position of voyeur. Perhaps in his renewed isolation Rembrandt consciously or unconsciously brought a sense of intimacy and isolation into his pictures. In the passive tranquility that pervades even the Susannah picture, can we detect a soul coming to terms with life with equal measures of determination, resignation, and acceptance? At any rate, we also see Rembrandt renewing his experiments with light and continuing to reunderstand his paint, which was applied in these pictures with broader strokes, less delineation of form, and more emphasis on the solidity of his figures and the space, air, and light around them.
During the decade of the 1650s Rembrandt emerges as the master of his medium. His thickly painted canvases radiating light, texture, and color are balanced perfectly between the thing portrayed and the medium used to portray it. A new power and heroic spirit is found in his pictures, and a new complexity of meaning as well as emotion is evoked in his works. One after another, acknowledged masterpieces emerged from his studio. A commanding presence is coupled with a formidable moralizing tone in works such as Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (dated 1653, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). A compelling commentary on history, knowledge, art, the senses, and the processes of thought and feeling, this extraordinary work is perhaps the best known of the half-length figural works that occupied Rembrandt's energies during the decade.
Self-portraits, such as the signed and dated example of 1652 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), follow essentially the same format and take on a new dignity and monumentality. He also used the format for portraits, such as An Old Man in an Armchair (signed and dated 1652, London, National Gallery) or Portrait of Jan Six (dated 1654, Amsterdam, Six Collection). Others of this format were biblical in theme, such as The Apostle Paul (dated 1659?, London, National Gallery), while still others were reprises of the fancy dress-ups that had featured friends and family, such as Saskia, and that now used Hendrickje Stoffels, his mistress {Hendrickje as Flora, ca. 1654, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Hendrickje was also the model for the largest history picture Rembrandt had painted in over fifteen years when she posed for his Bathsheba (dated 1654, Paris, Louvre). Here, as in his earlier nude, Bathsheba is sensuously portrayed but she is also depicted as a person in crisis, meditating over her predicament even as she prepares to meet the man whom she has unwittingly seduced. That sense of tragedy, both past and future, emanates from other monumental images of the decade, notably the Slaughtered Ox (dated 1655, Paris, Louvre). Each of these exceptional paintings centers around a single figure, brilliantly interplaying psychological and aesthetic concerns in a summary yet monumental fashion.
Less often, Rembrandt treated multiple figures, but these too were reductive and elemental in their representation, for example, The Blessing of Jacob (Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen). The now fragmentary Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deyman (signed and dated 1656, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), one of the few group portrait commissions he received in that decade, is, despite its ruined state, a stark commentary on the nature of human life, the process of learning, and human sacrifice. This decade also saw Rembrandt's forced bankruptcy in 1656 (and the resulting inventory of his belongings) and the sale of his house in 1658 (as well as the censure of Hendrickje Stoffels in 1654), all of which reflect a new financial low point.
Artistically, however, the 1650s flowed into the final decade of his life, in which his most original, profound, and moving paintings were produced. Perhaps the picture that best represents Rembrandt's own self-perception at this time is his Self-Portrait (dated 1658, New York, Frick Collection). Shown frontally, holding a staff like a scepter, Rembrandt is the painter-king, ennobled by his abilities and experiences even as life takes its toll. Portrait commissions continued to come Rembrandt's way in his last years. Perhaps the greatest of his late essays in portraiture are those of the aging Jacob Trip and Margaretha de Geer (dated ca. 1661, London, National Gallery).
Around that time Rembrandt received a commission to complete Govert FlinckV cycle portraying the Batavian Revolt, begun for the Town Hall in Amsterdam in 1659. Rembrandt's contribution (painted in 1661) was the immense nineteen-by-nineteen-foot portrayal of the Conspiracy of the Batavians, which now survives as a cut-down fragment in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Though we know that the picture hung in the Town Hall for some time, it was taken down in Rembrandt's lifetime and it is presumed that Rembrandt himself cut out the fragment that now survives. Rembrandt's painting undoubtedly was rejected by the town fathers, who could not accept his startlingly original departure from the standard set by the tamer vision of Flinck and his successors. Rembrandt's rude characters, led by the one-eyed Claudius, are inelegant heroes, probably far too barbarous to suit the tastes of the Amsterdam burgomasters, who believed themselves to be the Batavians' political descendants. Perhaps the picture was also hard to see due to its penumbral lighting; certainly the project was eventually abandoned, presumably for the reason that none of the pictures could actually be seen well.
Rembrandt continued to spend most of his time painting single figures or pairs enacting some fundamental human experience. After Hendrickje died in 1663, he seemed to concentrate even more on themes of death, love, and reconciliation. Two suicides of Lucretia, one in Washington, DC (National Gallery of Art, dated 1664) and one in Minneapolis (Institute of Arts, dated 1666), are profoundly moving portrayals of loss, regret, and redemption through the ultimate self-sacrifice. The Jewish Bride (so called; dated ca. 1665, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) is Rembrandt's greatest essay on human love. Painted with the molten golden colors, mixed with whites and red (which Rembrandt now favored), his figures use simple gestures and subtle expressions to describe the transcendent qualities of that finest of human emotions. Eliciting thoughts of fulfillment as well as loss, the picture alternately reflects and absorbs light--its mass of scumbled and brushed areas coalesce into tangible forms and palpable feelings, then dissolve into pure paint.
Rembrandt's personal losses continued. In 1668, just a year after he married, Titus died, and by then Rembrandt himself had only about a year of life left himself. Is it a coincidence that Rembrandt would thereupon return to the theme of human redemption in his great Prodigal Son (dated 1669, St. Petersburg, Hermitage)? Having lost his only son, Rembrandt undoubtedly understood his character's feelings. He endowed this final portrayal of the reconciliation of father and son with the holiness of a religious ritual. Three self-portraits can also be dated to the last few years of Rembrandt's life. Two--one in The Hague (Mauritshuis) and the other in London (National Gallery, dated 1669)--are fairly conventional, showing the aging painter rendering himself with resolution, empathy, and no diminution of power. The final example tells us that Rembrandt's sense of originality and irony remained intact: in the self-portrait preserved in Cologne (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum), Rembrandt depicted himself as the painter Zeuxis, who died laughing while painting a funny-looking old woman. Typically adept at adjusting the story, one senses that Rembrandt intended to show himself dying laughing while looking at himself.
Though other painters and styles had become fashionable during the last decades of Rembrandt's life, his reputation was not entirely eclipsed, his influence was still profound, and his abilities were not impaired. The impact of Rembrandt on Western art during and after his life was profound. His pupils and followers are legion, including such formidable talents as Gerrit Dou, Carel Fabritius, and Willem Drost. His influence lasted into his final years with loyal adherents such as Aert de Gelder. Despite a decline in his importance during the eighteenth century, when most painters were looking for more polished and elegant models, the nineteenth century witnessed a revival of Rembrandt followers among the Barbizon school, the impressionists, and innumerable students in German and American art academies.
Since then, Rembrandt has become established as the acme of painterly achievement. The study of Rembrandt's pupils and followers now encompasses several volumes; the team currently assigned to ferret out the true Rembrandt from the chaff has spent years dedicated to this task; the few Rembrandts that remain in private hands command impossible sums. The literature on Rembrandt is so vast that a complete bibliography would require several volumes. Though he is so much the subject of specialists, Rembrandt, far more than any other painter of the seventeenth century, has remained a part of our general culture and is still the standard against which other artistic achievements and interpretations of humanity are measured. Although much has already been said about him, more remains to be learned. Rembrandt's use of his family, his wife, child, and mistress in his art; and his interpretation of women, to name several topics, would benefit from study and yield much important new understanding.
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