Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606. By his late twenties he had moved to Amsterdam, where The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) made him the most sought-after portraitist in the Dutch Republic. The Night Watch (1642), his civic-guard group portrait, broke every convention of the form — dramatic lighting, restless movement, a young girl illuminated as if from within. Tragedy followed: his wife Saskia died in 1642 leaving an infant son, and his fortune dissolved; he was declared insolvent in 1656. From the wreckage came his greatest work — the late self-portraits, in which a man's whole life shows in the brushwork, and the etchings that influenced every printmaker afterward. He died in poverty in 1669 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Westerkerk; his bones were exhumed and discarded after twenty years.
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Painter · Etcher · Master of the Dutch Golden Age
Rembrandt van Rijn
1,606 CE – 1,669 CE
The Leiden miller's son whose mastery of light and shadow, and his unsparing self-portraits across forty years, made him the most psychologically penetrating painter of the seventeenth century.
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