Rembrandt van Rijn Prints

About Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606, the son of a miller. He trained for about three years with Jacob van Swanenburg in Leiden and then for six months in Amsterdam with the history painter Pieter Lastman, whose dramatic staging he absorbed and intensified. By 1625 he had a studio in Leiden shared with Jan Lievens, and at the end of 1631 he moved to Amsterdam, where the group portrait The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp of 1632 established him as the city's leading painter. The Night Watch, painted in 1640 to 1642 for the Kloveniersdoelen, the hall of the civic militia, turned a conventional company portrait into a scene in motion. Rembrandt kept a large workshop, collected compulsively and declared insolvency in 1656, but his late work, including The Jewish Bride and The Return of the Prodigal Son, is the most sought after. He was also the most important etcher of his century, with around three hundred plates, and painted or etched himself roughly a hundred times. He died in Amsterdam in 1669. His handling of light, a warm glow surfacing from deep shadow, is the quality that reproductions keep, and the reason a Rembrandt reads from across a room.