Lecture 34: Rembrandt

Rembrandt ......................................................................................

Lecture 34

Rembrandt is among the most famous names in the history of world

art. His art touched upon every aspect of human life and left its mark

on our art history. An unsurpassed painter, he was also a superb

printmaker—an etcher whose subtlety, spontaneity, and technical

prowess established the canon for the art of etching.

I

n this lecture, we look at the art of Rembrandt, a superb printmaker and

portraitist and the only great Protestant religious painter. We’ll look ¿ rst

at his explorations of the then-relatively-new technique, followed by a

discussion of his religious painting and his famous portraits and self-portraits.

As we’ll see, he possessed great powers of empathy for his subjects—an

understanding of the range of human experience and a tolerance for human

foibles and sins.

The art of Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606–1669) touched on every

aspect of human life and left its mark on art history. An unsurpassed painter,

he was also a superb printmaker, an etcher whose subtlety, spontaneity, and

technical prowess established the canon for the art of etching. He painted

and drew and etched nearly every subject that his world offered to artists:

landscape and still life; scenes from mythology, the Bible, and Dutch history;

and during the period of his greatest public fame and success, in the 1630s,

he was in continuous demand as a portrait painter. His portraits convince us

equally of their exterior appearance and their interior life—the thoughts and

emotions that animate the faces and bodies of his subjects.

Although the Eighty Years’ War did not of¿ cially end until the Treaty of

Munster in 1648, there was relative peace and stability following the truce of

1609. Thus, Rembrandt’s childhood—indeed, most of his life—was spent in
      the ¿ rst period of extended peace in Holland following 40 years of war. He
      was born in Leyden, a miller’s son. He attended Latin school there and, at 15,
      studied for a year at Leyden University before he was apprenticed to a painter.
      His artistic training continued in Amsterdam with Pieter Lastman. He returned
      to Leyden in 1625, where he lived and worked with the painter Jan Lievens.