Rembrandt lighting is a way of lighting a face in a portrait photograph or a film, named after the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt.
A single lamp shines from high on one side. It leaves half the face in shadow, except for a small triangle of light, point down, on the dark cheek just under the eye.
The name was born in early Hollywood. It is credited to the director Cecil B. DeMille, who used it in 1915 while making a silent film called The Warrens of Virginia.
The painter behind it, Rembrandt van Rijn, often set a lit face against a dark ground. Take the self-portrait he painted in 1659, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His face is worked in fine detail, while the clothes and background around it fade into shadow and blur.
That contrast, a bright face pulled out of the dark, is what the name took from the painter, a general impression more than a recipe.
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The story behind the name, in its most repeated version, is an argument about money. Films were sold to the owners of movie theaters, and on his 1915 film DeMille had lit his actors from the side, leaving part of each face dark.
His business partner, Sam Goldwyn, saw the result and panicked. Theater owners shown only half of an actor's face, he feared, would pay only half price for the film.
DeMille answered that this was Rembrandt lighting. The shadows, in other words, were not a mistake but the manner of a great master, and it was not his fault if the buyers failed to recognize it.
Goldwyn's comeback, in the version the film magazine Screenland printed about thirty years later, was that for Rembrandt lighting the buyers would pay double. Today the label lives on in portrait studios, though the triangle photographers aim for is not quite the one Rembrandt painted.
A light borrowed from the theater
The shadows that alarmed Goldwyn did not begin on a film set. They came from a stage, and from the man who had taught DeMille his trade.
What You'll Discover
Why a French critic calls the name a stunt.
The early self-portrait Rembrandt left in shadow.
How photographers build the triangle today.
What happens when the triangle grows too big.