The life of Rembrandt van Rijn, born on 15 July 1606 in Leyden, is still shrouded in historical uncertainty. He did not write his memoirs, he kept no daily diaries, and the few surviving letters are pleas for patronage. Contemporary biographies are of little help as they write, “he was moved toward the art of painting and drawing, and it was clearly evident that he would one day become an exceptional painter.”
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Ancestry
Rembrandt van Rijn’s self portraits
Rembrandt was born in Leyden, one of the most important towns in the province of Holland. The town had gained notoriety and declared independence from Spain by resisting a lengthy siege in 1574. As such, Rembrandt was born during a period that saw the opening of the first stock exchange in Amsterdam and when the Dutch Republic became the world’s foremost mercantilist economy.
Rembrandt made his name during the dawn of the “Dutch Golden Age,” when wealthy citizens were eager to display their wealth through the purchase and display of artwork. He spent his childhood and youth among the lower burgher class, a social class of privileged citizens of medieval towns in early modern Europe. His father, Harmen Gerritsz, was a miller, while his mother, Neeltie Willemsdr Van Zuytbrouck, was the daughter of a Leyden baker.
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Childhood and Education
Rembrandt’s House in Amsterdam
The couple married in 1589, and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was the eighth of nine children. The name “van Rijn” was simply an addition to the family name and refers to the location of the town of Leyden on a branch of the Rhine. Rembrandt had a comfortable childhood and a strong religious upbringing. His brother Adriaen became a shoemaker, Willem became a baker, and the young Rembrandt seemed destined for a career in public life.
He first attended the Leyden Grammar School, and at the age of fourteen, he enrolled in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leyden. Rembrandt, however, seemed to have had other plans for his career, and he did not stay enrolled long at the University. He must have told his parents about his wish to study the arts of painting and drawing, as he was apprenticed to the Leyden master Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburgh. He remained with van Swanenburgh for three years, and his progress was such that he became apprenticed in 1624 to the famous historical painter Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam.
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Apprenticeship
Rembrandt: The Night Watch
Rembrandt only stayed for six months before returning to Leyden to open a studio. He began to accept students and sold his first painting in 1628. Once he had returned to Amsterdam in 1632, he drew the attention of Constantijn Huygens, the private secretary to Prince Frederik Hendrik. Huygens was “arguably the most strategically influential patron in the Dutch Republic,” and he declared that Rembrandt was capable of masterpieces to be compared “with all Italy, indeed, with all the wondrous beauties that have survived from the most ancient days.”
Having completed his formal training, Rembrandt was expected to make a pilgrimage to Italy. However, the painter quickly decided that the most useful thing he could do was paint and not waste time traveling. The paintings that best describe his extraordinary legacy are embodied in a number of delectable self-portraits. Rembrandt left us with a unique record of a single human face, “observed by its owner as it passes through changing times and fortunes, and presents us with the story of a life.”
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The Self-Portrait
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An art critic writes, “Rembrandt’s intense concentration on individual character and expression was something new, and it arose out of an increasingly questioning attitude to human life.” In essence, Rembrandt established a convention of portraiture where the emphasis is on emotional features and character rather than the identity of the sitter. This fundamental concept also transferred to his larger mythological and biblical paintings, in which characters are treated in a peculiarly personal way.
Rembrandt was not particularly handy with money, nor was he overly concerned with maintaining a respectable position in society. His own interior vision was certainly more important than the requirements of the world surrounding him. As he experimented with new techniques and explored new forms of expression with rougher and ticker strokes of the brush, his self-portraits “continued to look on the world without flinching.”
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