The Artist Rembrandt

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REMBRANDT VAN RIJN BIOGRAPHY

REMBRANDT (in full REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN), Dutch artist was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, July 15, 1606 and died in Amsterdam, Oct. 4, 1669. Although he was perhaps more immediately communicative with his brush and etcher's needle than any other artist, he was sparing with words, and all that we have from his pen is a sheaf of letters, all of them about art commissions. For this and other reasons, biographical knowledge about him is sadly incomplete.

Early Life

Rembrandt was the son of Harmen Gerritsz van Rijn, a miller of Leiden, and Neeltje .(Cornelia) Willemsdochter van Zuytbroek. He had six brothers and sisters, some of whom died young. He attended the Latin school at Leiden, and enrolled at Leiden University in 1620, although he seems not to have completed even his first year there. His generous family permitted him to leave the university and become apprenticed to Leiden's best-known painter, Jakob van Swanenburgh, with whom he worked for three years. In 1624 he moved to Amsterdam-the cultural, political, and economic center of the young Dutch republic-and apprenticed himself to Pieter Lastman, a fashionable painter who, like most other Dutch artists of the time, had lived in Italy and been deeply influenced by the Italian approach to art. Rembrandt stayed with Lastman only six months, and there is no recorded reason for his leaving, but by 1625 he was back in Leiden, working with Jan Lievens, Gerard Doti, and Joris van Vliet. That year he began to sign his own works. We know little of this period of withdrawal and earnest labor except that he was visited in his studio by Constantin Huygens, then secretary of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, and that he made brief visits to Amsterdam.

Years in Amsterdam

The year 1632 was important for Rembrandt, in both loss and gain. With his father's death, the family unit at Leiden had been broken and he moved to Amsterdam. Here he received an assignment, which a more solidly established painter would have envied, to do a regents' piece, one of those great group portraits sponsored by a rising middle class that loved painting and wished to commemorate itself. Nikolaes Pieterszoon (known as Dr. Tulp because there was a tulip carved above his door) was the center of this painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (Mauritshuis, The Hague). Its success must have been marked, for Rembrandt's commissions redoubled and he set up a thriving studio for painting and teaching.

Through an art dealer, Hendrick van Uijlenburgh (the name also appears as Uylenburgh, Ulenburg, Ulenburch, and Ulenborck), he met Saskia, Hendrick's cousin and the daughter of a rich and distinguished Friesland family. They were betrothed in 1633 and married in 1634. In 1639 he bought a mansion on the Jodenbreestraat large enough to house his growing art collection and to give him more space for teaching. He taught assiduously during most of his life and had as apprentices such well-known painters as Ferdinand Bol, Govaert Flinck, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, and Aert de Gelder.

Rembrandt's first three children died in infancy. Although he had taken a large mortgage on his house, he continued to collect avidly; in his collection were valuable works by such painters as Jan van Eyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Hercules Seghers, and Adriaen Brouwer. In 1640 he was commissioned to do another regents' piece, The Sortie of the Company of Captain Banning Cocq (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). While he was working on this great group portrait of the civic guardsmen (erroneously known as The Night Watch because smoke and grime had darkened its originally brilliant noontime surface), Saskia was dying. In 1641 his son Titus was born. On June 14, 1642, Saskia died at the age of 30. Precisely when Hendrickje Stoffels, the daughter of an army sergeant, came into his household is not known. She was hired as a maid to help the already ensconced Geertje Dircx, an aging widow who accused Rembrandt of breach of promise and was later confined in an asylum. Some time after 1645, Hendrickje became Rembrandt's mistress. In 1655 she bore him a daughter, Cornelia.

Rembrandt's commissions had decreased, the payments on his mortgage had nqt been made, and in July 1656 he went into bankruptcy. His history from that time is a tragic one. In 1661 he received a large commission to paint The Conspiracy of Julius Civilis (National Museum, Stockholm) for the 'Town Hall of Amsterdam, but the picture hung in its allotted place only a few months before it was removed and replaced by an inferior work by Juriaen Ovens. His last large commission came from the Syndics of the Cloth Hall of Amsterdam, and his painting of them, known as De Staalmeesters or The Syndics of the Cloth Hall (Rijksmuseum), was finished in 1662. The contrast between this sun-drenched, warmhearted, carefully perfected work and the eerie, violent, slashing Julius Civilis that preceded it is vast, but there is no indication that the Syndics canvas made a stir in Amsterdam. Rembrandt continued to paint in relative obscurity. Hendrickje died July 24, 1663; Titus who had been married in 1667, died in 1668.

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