Rembrandt van Rijn was a Dutch painter and etcher, an artist who also drew on copper plates to print images. He was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606, and died in Amsterdam on October 4, 1669, at sixty-three.
He is best known for The Night Watch, for nearly a hundred self-portraits made across forty years, and for the rough, golden paintings of his last years, made after he went bankrupt.
He rose from a prosperous family in Leiden to fame in Amsterdam. Then he lost his house, his collection and most of the people he loved, and he went on painting until the end.
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Rembrandt was the youngest son of a miller, Harmen Gerritsz van Rijn, in a family of at least ten children. As the youngest, he was not expected to take over the mill, and the family had the means to keep him at school.
His parents sent him to the Latin school, where boys learned the language they would need at university, and he spent a short time at Leiden's university itself. Then he left his books to learn to paint.
His first teacher was a local master, Jacob van Swanenburgh, who kept him for about three years. Six months in Amsterdam followed with Pieter Lastman, a history painter, the name given to artists who told stories from the Bible, mythology and the past.
Back home, by the late 1620s, he shared a studio with his friend Jan Lievens, another young artist from Leiden. The self-portrait he made around 1628 shows a young man with a mass of curly hair, his eyes lost in shadow.
At the end of 1631 he moved to Amsterdam, the fast-growing trade capital of the Dutch Republic, and lodged with the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh. Within months, the body of a hanged man on a surgeons' table would make his name in the city.
A corpse on the table
The Amsterdam surgeons' guild allowed one public dissection a year, always on the body of an executed criminal, and the public paid to watch…
What You'll Discover
Whose body lay on the surgeons' table.
What he wrote about his own pictures.
What was cut from the Night Watch.
What the house on Breestraat cost him.
What he painted after the crash.
Who carried him to the Westerkerk.