Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn Rembrandt originally spelled Rembrant The phenomenon of the art lovers and their studio visits may be key to understanding Rembrandt's self-portraits. The greater part of Rembrandt's activity in front of the mirror has long been considered to be a highly personal quest for the “self.” According to the latest insights, however, these works must be seen, on the one hand, as portraits of an uomo famoso (“famous man”) and, on the other hand, as specimens of the reason for that fame: Rembrandt's singular style and his exceptional technique in painting and etching.
In a number of his self-portraits, Rembrandt is wearing various types of antiquated dress. These costumes have been identified as allusions to great predecessors. For instance, the 16th-century northern European costume he is wearing in his famous 1640 self-portrait presumably referred to Albrecht Dürer, a fellow great peintre-graveur whom Rembrandt greatly admired and tried to emulate.
The 1640 self-portrait belongs to a category of paintings that could be termed trompe l'oeil works. With these paintings viewers are momentarily deceived by the sensation that they are in the same space as the painting's subject, forgetting that they are looking at a flat surface and subsequently experiencing the pleasure of this deception. Among Rembrandt's paintings from the period 1639–42 there are also still lifes with dead birds, portraits, and group portraits that use trompe l'oeil tricks. Some of his pupils of that period, including Samuel van Hoogstraten, Fabritius, and Rembrandt's German pupil, Christoph Paudiss (1630–66), continued to exploit trompe l'oeil effects.
Night Watch
The artist with whom Rembrandt was most preoccupied during the second half of the 1630s was Leonardo da Vinci, and in particular his Last Supper (1495–98), which Rembrandt knew from a reproduction print. It is evident from several of Rembrandt's sketched variants (1635) on Leonardo's composition that he was above all intrigued by the problem of the symmetry/asymmetry in the grouping of the figures. The Wedding of Samson (1638) can be seen as Rembrandt's attempt to surpass Leonardo in the challenge set by this compositional problem and as an effort to accomplish a much livelier scene than Leonardo had achieved in his Last Supper.
In 1640–42 Rembrandt must have been occupied mainly with the large group portrait depicting members of an Amsterdam civic militia company. In a family album belonging to the captain of the company, the work is described as: “the…captain gives order to his lieutenant,…to march out his company of citizens.” This implies that the 34 figures in the painting—actually only 18 militia men out of a company of some 100 men who had decided to have themselves portrayed, plus the 16 extras Rembrandt had added in order to suggest a large group of people—were crowding together just before the company was to assemble for a parade.
In his painting of this scene, which later would acquire the name the Night Watch, Rembrandt revolutionized the formula of the group portrait as part of his continuing effort to achieve the ultimate liveliness in his work. In the words of van Hoogstraten, Rembrandt's former pupil, “Rembrandt made the portraits that were commissioned subservient to the image as a whole.”
According to van Hoogstraten, Night Watch was conceived by Rembrandt to be a unity (eenwezich). Rembrandt's intentions in this respect are difficult to appreciate in the painting's present state, since it has been trimmed on all sides, most of all on the left side. As a result, the figures of the captain and his lieutenant have moved to the centre and into the utmost foreground of the composition. A copy, painted by Gerrit Lundens (1622–after 1677) soon after the Night Watch was finished, shows that the original composition was much more dynamic and coherent than its present state indicates.
The present condition of the painting also reveals the work's crucial problem, which is at the same time its most intriguing feature. Two intensely lighted figures dominate the composition: the girl in the middle ground and the lieutenant in the foreground. Both are clad in yellow costumes, which strengthens the light effect. Because of this double “spotlight” effect, the tonal values of the painting as a whole seem to be subdued. Consequently, the painting makes a dark impression that no doubt contributed to the epithet “Night Watch.” Van Hoogstraten, who had praised the unity in the Night Watch's composition, criticized his former master by complaining, “I would have preferred if he [Rembrandt] would have kindled more light into it.” Van Hoogstraten's remarks were published in his book on the art of painting. His notes on the subordination of the portraits to the conception as a whole, and the lack of light in the painting, have contributed to the myth of Night Watch being rejected and of Rembrandt's subsequent “fall.”
Third Amsterdam period (1643–58)
The myth of Rembrandt's fall
In the decade following 1642, Rembrandt's production changed in several ways. His output of paintings diminished drastically, and the few paintings he made varied in subject, size, and style. Moreover, he produced no painted portraits, a fact that can be interpreted in two ways: either he did not receive any portrait commissions during that period or he did not accept such commissions for the decade. At the same time, he embarked on a number of extremely ambitious etchings, such as the portrait (1647) of his friend Jan Six (1618–1700) and especially the Hundred Guilder Print, a large (unfinished) print with episodes from chapter 19 of The Gospel According to Matthew.
The sparseness of Rembrandt's production of painting in the period from 1643 to 1652 is one of the enigmas of his career. Speculations about what happened after he finished the Night Watch have contributed to the development of the “Rembrandt myth,” according to which Rembrandt became largely misunderstood and was ignored after 1642 and, as a consequence, suffered increasing financial difficulty, eventually dying in poverty. At the same time, according to this myth, his art deepened. The post-1642 Rembrandt would develop into the “real” Rembrandt, profoundly at one with his inner self and a classic example of a misunderstood genius. As art historian Jan Emmens argued in his book Rembrandt and the Rules of Art, the formation of this myth owes much to a standard biographical model that might be called the “Saul-Paul model”—according to which the subject's life suddenly undergoes a radical change in direction as the result of a crisis or conversion.
The death of Rembrandt's wife, Saskia, and the presumed rejection of the Night Watch by those who commissioned it were long supposed to be the most important events leading to the presumed change in Rembrandt's life after 1642. But modern art-historical research has questioned the myth of a crisis in 1642, not least because there is simply insufficient evidence that the Night Watch was not accepted. The painting was paid for and remained exhibited in the place for which it was intended. Consequently, it cannot have been rejected. As to the other cause of the presumed turning point in Rembrandt's life, nothing is known about Rembrandt's feelings over the deaths of Saskia and three of the children they had together, although these and other aspects of his private life have been amply romanticized in the older Rembrandt literature. One must also take into account the omnipresence of premature death in the 17th century. Death during or after childbirth was a fate that awaited many women, while waves of the plague repeatedly ravaged Europe throughout the century, claiming many victims in Amsterdam.
The “underrated genius” myth arose mainly out of the criticism of Rembrandt's art that was expressed after his death by some of his largely younger peers. On the face of it, a significant number of 17th-century writings seem to have portrayed Rembrandt in an unfavourable light. He was said to be a heretic in the field of painting or an artist who, with his use of impasto (locally applied thick paint), painted with “dung.”
Such criticisms should be examined in light of the rise of Classicism imported from France, which had brought about a radical change in taste over the course of Rembrandt's later life. Rembrandt's drastic and uncompromising realism had no place in the universalizing and idealizing approach of Classicism. For example, von Sandrart, writing in 1675, was judging Rembrandt by the new ideology:
Adhering to the practice [Rembrandt] had adopted, he was prepared to challenge our rules of art, of anatomy, human proportions and perspective, arguing against the use of antique sculptures, against Raphael's draughtsmanship and the systematic training of young artists, and against the Academies, so vital to our profession, asserting that one should rely only upon nature and observe no other rules.
Yet this criticism of Rembrandt was not an indication that his genius was underrated; on the contrary, as Emmens writes:
The criticism levelled against Rembrandt by the writers of the 1670s makes it clear that he was still the towering figure of an older, and now old-fashioned, generation of Dutch painters. That is why the blows of the classicistic attack, which could have been just as well delivered to any other painter of his generation, all fell on his head.
Negative remarks from Rembrandt's critics were in fact almost always counterbalanced by the highest praise. The brilliant artist and writer on art Gérard de Lairesse (1640–1711), who met Rembrandt as a young man and was portrayed by him in 1665, confessed in 1707: “I do not want to deny that once I had a special preference for his manner; but at that time I had hardly begun to understand the infallible rules of art.” De Lairesse's laudatory words that follow explain why Rembrandt was admired:
Everything that art and the brush can achieve was possible for him, and he was the greatest painter of the time and is still unsurpassed. For, they say, was there ever a painter who by means of colour came as close to nature by his beautiful light, lovely harmony, and unique, unusual thoughts [as to the narrative?] and so forth?
But if criticism of Rembrandt's art became manifest only in the 1670s, how could the sudden decline in Rembrandt's production of paintings between 1643 and 1652 then be explained? It is not impossible that, after having painted the Night Watch, Rembrandt arrived at the awareness that he may have overstretched the possibilities of the pictorial language he had developed over the previous two decades. It seems as though he had reached an impasse with his spotlight effects. Might it be that in the end Rembrandt's crisis was an artistic crisis? This possibility seems to be strengthened by his apparent search for ways out of this cul-de-sac.
The great variation in style in his sparse paintings from the decade after 1642 can be seen as an indication that Rembrandt was searching. A scene with the Holy Family (1645) is one of Rembrandt's most striking efforts to arrive at a different approach to the function of light in his paintings. Here, he introduced three light sources and made abundant use of light reflecting on one surface from another. In this painting he also introduced strong colour, through the glowing red of Mary's gown. Colour, which up to this point he had increasingly sacrificed to light, now returned—usually a strong red—in the centre of some of his images, such as Jakob's Blessing and, later, in the so-called Jewish Bride (). Compositions—which were often diagonal in early works by Rembrandt, according to the logic of the concentrated light—were now more frontally constructed.
After creating several highly detailed images, such as The Woman Taken in Adultery (1644) and The Supper at Emmaus (1648), Rembrandt eventually seems to have sought the solution to his artistic “crisis” in a style grafted onto that of the late Titian, a style that was only effective when the painting was seen from a certain distance. Rembrandt's contribution to this Titianesque manner of painting was a deliberate use of impasto that created a light-reflecting surface in the lighter foreground passages of his paintings. His efforts to develop this new approach to painting started about 1645 and would bloom from the early 1650s onward. That period marks the beginning of what is usually called Rembrandt's “late style.”
Rembrandt's late style
The most obvious aspect of Rembrandt's late style is that the brushwork is, in general, broader. Individual brushstrokes sometimes remain visible, although the differentiation in the brushwork is extraordinary. Another aspect of the late style is that the brushwork, on whatever scale applied, seems to be governed much more by chance than before. Specifically referring to Rembrandt's late style, Sir Joshua Reynolds observed, in the 12th of his lectures published as Discourses on Art: “Work produced in an accidental manner, will have the same free, unrestrained air as the works of nature, whose particular combinations seem to depend upon accident.”
This freedom of the hand, however, does not lead to gratuitous sketchiness. The mysterious quality of Rembrandt's later work is that the intensity of observation and the painterly execution seem only to have grown, compared to his earlier work. But whereas the brushwork is livelier, the figures in Rembrandt's later works are characterized by a remarkable stillness. In the early Rembrandt works, each gesture, each movement of the bodies was typified by the naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt (“the most natural liveliness”), fulfilling Rembrandt's aim to create convincing “drama.” Despite the near absence of gesture in his late work, however, the viewer senses that the image is not frozen but rather potentially dynamic. It may well be that the figures seem to be alive because of the vitality of the execution as well as the blurring of the forms that results from an “open” treatment of contours. No doubt it is the vitality of either the brushwork in the paintings or the line in the etchings and the drawings that contributes to this feeling of a continuous state of transition.
In all this, light plays a new role, different from the role it played in the early works. From early on, one of Rembrandt's major concerns was the creation of a hierarchy in light intensity within a painting. In the works of the 1650s and '60s, this logic seems to develop a magic quality as well. While in the early works strong local light effects prevail, in the later works the space seems to be filled with light lingering around the figures. An example is the seemingly illogical way in which the light radiates from the bust of Homer in the Aristotle of 1653. The same phenomenon is evident in the figure of Jakob in Jakob's Blessing (1656) or in the Conspiracy of the Batavians (1661). The light reflecting in the space around some of the figures seems to act as a mysterious aura.
Domestic turmoil
A number of events in Rembrandt's domestic life during the 1640s point to a crisis of another kind. A large number of documents have survived concerning marriage, childbirth, and Saskia's death, as well as the tensions between Saskia's family and Rembrandt over matters of inheritance after her death. A considerable volume of archival material also documents Rembrandt's legal problems with a woman by the name of Geertje Dirckx (1610/15– 1656), who after Saskia's death nursed Rembrandt's only surviving child, Titus (1641–68). Rembrandt must have gotten entangled in an intimate relationship with Dirckx, who had become his housekeeper. In 1649 Dirckx said that Rembrandt had promised to marry her. In that same year, the situation came to a climax when she pawned some of the jewelry that was part of Saskia's inheritance to Titus; she claimed to have received it as a present from Rembrandt. In 1650 Rembrandt arranged for Dirckx's confinement in the House of Correction (Spinhuis) at Gouda; she remained there until 1655.
In 1649 Hendrickje Stoffels (1626–63), a young woman from Breedevoort in the eastern part of Gelderland, succeeded Dirckx, first in the function of housekeeper, later in Rembrandt's affection. The problems associated with Titus's inheritance prevented Rembrandt from marrying the young Stoffels, who bore him a child and lived with him as his common-law wife from 1649 until her death in 1663.
Despite the artistic crisis of the 1640s, Rembrandt's fame certainly had not waned. Between 1652 and 1663 he sold several paintings to the nobleman Don Antonio Ruffo, from Messina in Sicily. It is clear from the correspondence concerning these commissions that Rembrandt's art, especially his etching work, was highly esteemed in Italy. Since Ruffo must have bought the first of these paintings, the famous Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, without knowing its subject, it must surely have been mainly Rembrandt's fame that attracted him. Van Hoogstraten in his book on painting refers to “name-buyers,” a phenomenon that apparently grew parallel to the emergence of the art lover. Once Ruffo was aware of the subject of his painting, he subsequently ordered an Alexander the Great (1662; lost in a fire) as a companion piece and a Homer Dictating to His Scribes (1662/63), which, though heavily damaged—probably in the same fire—is preserved in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
Despite this fame, in the first half of the 1650s Rembrandt increasingly incurred financial problems, brought on to a considerable extent by his own financial mismanagement. He had neglected to pay off the debt on the house he had bought in 1639. On top of that, he had not received or accepted portrait commissions since 1642. Calculations show that the sums he spent on his collection () up to the year 1656, when he finally went bankrupt, would have been more than adequate to pay off the loan he had taken out to purchase his house.
Rembrandt's collecting
Already in his Leiden period, Rembrandt may have started to build what was to become a richly varied personal collection. From 1628 onward, his works exhibit carefully depicted ethnographic and other exotic objects. In that period Rembrandt may have begun to assemble a collection of both naturalia (natural objects such as shells and coral) and artificialia (man-made objects such as medals, plaster casts from busts of Greek philosophers and Roman emperors, weapons, and musical instruments from a variety of cultures). This collection also contained numerous prints and paintings by other artists or after their works and, among other items, a number of Mughal miniatures. The size and scope of this collection is known from the inventory of Rembrandt's possessions drawn up in 1656 when, along with the house, the entire collection had to be auctioned in a vain effort to meet the demands of his creditors. (A reconstruction of Rembrandt's collection—as it may have existed about 1650 and arranged in the way Rembrandt kept it in his kunstkamer [“art room”]—can be seen in the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam.)
The functional significance of this collection for Rembrandt is still not entirely clear. Was it just a varied range of studio props, or an accumulation of precious objects for trade? (It is known that Rembrandt was also active as an art dealer.) Or was it perhaps an encyclopaedic collection of the type that might enable the miller's son to move in higher circles as a gentleman virtuoso? As to the collection of prints and paintings, this must have been the source of Rembrandt's considerable art-historical knowledge, which at times became manifest in his own works. It is hard to escape the impression that, for Rembrandt, collecting must have been virtually an addiction. Having sold his house and moved to a much smaller rented house, Rembrandt soon began to collect again. By the time of his death, two rooms of that house had been filled with this new collection.
But was he really ruined only by his collecting mania and his financial mismanagement concerning his house? The historical context provides another clue to his bankruptcy: it occurred at a time when many other artists went bankrupt and when other sorts of business concerns also ran into financial difficulties. It transpires that this wave of insolvencies coincided with or followed the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54), when a blockade of the Dutch coast dealt a severe blow to the country's trade with the East. There is evidence that it was precisely the manufacturers of luxury goods—and Rembrandt's expensive paintings can certainly be included in this category—who suffered most as a result. This general financial malaise caused by the blockade led creditors to call in their debts. The documentary evidence suggests that it was this effect of the war that was fatal for Rembrandt.
Fourth Amsterdam period (1658–69)
Having sold his house in 1658, Rembrandt rented a house on the Rozengracht. In 1660 a contract was drawn up between Rembrandt, his son, Titus, and Hendrickje Stoffels. This was designed to protect Rembrandt from his creditors and to enable him to continue working. The agreement entailed that Rembrandt should “give aid and assistance” to the other two parties, and then it stipulated that “[Rembrandt] would live with them, receive free board, and be exempt from housekeeping expenses and rent on condition that he will aid the partners in every respect to the extent possible, and promote the business.” In reality, Rembrandt now worked in the service of his son and his common-law wife, as the agreement continued: “Having been granted some time ago cessio bonorum [conveyance of goods], the reason why he has given up everything and has to be supported.”
This does not mean, however, that the painter had been pushed to the margins of society, not even after both Titus and Stoffels had died. Emmens's conclusion, mentioned above, that the old Rembrandt was still considered a “towering” figure in his time is supported by several interesting documents. For instance, on December 29, 1667, Rembrandt was visited by Prince Cosimo de' Medici, the future grand duke of Tuscany. In the prince's travel journal, Rembrandt was referred to as “pittore famoso” (“famous painter”). Only two of the other artists he visited were referred to as “famoso,” Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris. Cosimo probably bought one of Rembrandt's late self-portraits in the summer of 1669 on a second visit he is thought to have paid to Rembrandt. These visits surely indicate that Rembrandt was esteemed highly until his death. This is confirmed by the discovery among the papers of the southern German art lover Gabriel Bucelinus of a list with the “Names of the Most Distinguished European Painters” in which Rembrandt is mentioned. It is striking not only that Bucelinus recorded his name as a distinguished painter but that Rembrandt is the sole painter in this list of 166 names to whose name he appends the note “nostrae aetatis miraculum” (“miracle of our age”).
Nevertheless, there is a puzzling discrepancy between such evidence of Rembrandt's fame and the fact that he was never chosen as the first candidate for a prestigious commission. An outstanding example is the case of the mausoleum in Palace Huis ten Bosch in The Hague, to be erected in the Central Hall, known as the Oranjezaal. For this octagonal hall a grand ensemble of paintings was planned depicting the life and triumphs of stadholder Prince Frederik Hendrik, who had died in 1647. The extremely ambitious plans for this hall were developed by Amalia van Solms, his widow; Huygens, his secretary; and the painter and architect Jacob van Campen. Those considered to be the best painters of that moment from the northern as well as from the southern Netherlands were invited to contribute one or more works to add to this ensemble. Rembrandt was not among these painters; in the extremely well-preserved Oranjezaal there is no work from his hand, although Lievens, the friend of his youth, did contribute a work.
A similar example is the new Amsterdam Town Hall, now the Royal Palace, which had an extensive decoration program. This would contain a great number of large history pieces painted by different masters. Rembrandt was not invited, but his former pupil Flinck received the most prestigious of these commissions: he was commissioned to paint a series of monumental history pieces in the lunettes of the Central Hall. However, Flinck died before he could finish the first painting of this series. It was only then that Rembrandt was invited, as a stand-in for Flinck, to paint one of these works, the Conspiracy of the Batavians. It seems that the painting ultimately was not accepted.
The fact that both these projects, the Oranjezaal and the Amsterdam Town Hall, can be termed Classicist in style may explain the absence of Rembrandt's works. Rembrandt did not fit the new fashion and apparently was not willing to adapt his style to these projects. It is true that his huge Conspiracy of the Batavians was mounted for a short time in its place in the Town Hall, but then it was removed. Surviving documents mention that Rembrandt expected payment for changes he was to carry out. However, the painting did not return to its place. At some unknown point, it was cut down, possibly by Rembrandt himself, to a manageable size.
This may have been one of the situations in which Rembrandt proved to be a headstrong, self-willed man. He may well have gained the reputation of a man not malleable to his patrons' wishes. Baldinucci, on the authority of Rembrandt's Danish pupil Eberhard Keil, makes mention of “Rembrandt's lack of conformity” and points out that “his singularity in his way of painting corresponded to his way of life.” Baldinucci continues, “He was an umorista [capricious man] of the first order and disdained everybody. When he worked he would not receive the greatest monarch in the world; a king would have to return again and again until he finished his work.” These statements may be exaggerated, but other documents confirm that they must contain some truth. Baldinucci further remarks that “Rembrandt associated with people below his station; the artist's ugly and plebeian face was accompanied by dirty and untidy clothes because it was his habit to wipe his brushes on himself while he worked and to do other things of a similar nature.” But one should temper Baldinucci's characterization with the testimonies of Rembrandt's contemporaries, such as Huygens and von Sandrart, from which Rembrandt emerges as a person who was so intensely devoted to his work that he neglected everything that would interfere with it, including many social niceties.
Nevertheless, the old Rembrandt still received commissions, mainly for portraits, among which a group portrait of the sampling officials of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild (The Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild, 1662), an anonymous family group (mid-1660s), and an anonymous Portrait historié as Isaac and Rebecca (1667), better known as The Jewish Bride (portrait historié is a phrase used to indicate a portrait in which the sitter is—or in this case the sitters are—rendered in a historic role with historicizing costumes). Shortly before his death Rembrandt was preparing a number of copperplates for an etched Passion, commissioned by the Amsterdam art lover Dirck Cattenburgh (1616–1704). He did not finish this project.
Rembrandt died at age 63 and was buried in the Westerkerk in Amsterdam. The cause of his death is not known.
Assessment
Rembrandt's legacy
Rembrandt is renowned for his outstanding ability to render the human figure and its emotions. He also was unusually gifted as an artist; the way in which he handled his pen or chalk, the etching needle, or the brush betrays a great sensitivity and spontaneity, and the resulting works convey a sense of freedom and creativity. Rembrandt thought about and experimented with purely pictorial matters—the possibilities of composition; the role of tone and colour in the creation of pictorial space, light, shadow, and reflection; and how to vary the properties of his paint to obtain specific effects—with sharp intelligence and originality.
Another aspect of Rembrandt's genius is the acute and loving attention with which he observed the world around him. In his renderings of women and children and of animals and landscapes, he showed a strong understanding of the significant detail, but he noted these impressions with extraordinary freedom and economy. This dual quality made him exemplary for later artists and, in some ways, one of the first “modern” artists.
Rembrandt was an innovator in technique in all three of his media. From his early, colourful history paintings to his glowing late works, it is clear that he was an artist continuously in search of new stylistic modes of expression and that he belongs to that small category of artists whose development never ceased. Rembrandt's evolution culminated in his remarkable late style, usually considered to be the summit of his art. In this sense he may be compared with painters such as Titian and Goya or composers such as Beethoven and Verdi.
Research and attribution
Paradoxically, Rembrandt's continually changing style, which seems so personal, was faithfully imitated by his pupils in each of its phases. This accorded with the common workshop practice of his time. However, since so many young artists wished to be trained in Rembrandt's workshop, this training practice—in which his pupils produced marketable paintings and etchings in Rembrandt's style—subsequently caused much confusion (still unresolved) over the authenticity of many of the works that were traditionally attributed to Rembrandt.
The Rembrandt Research Project has extensively researched the authenticity of paintings attributed to Rembrandt ( Sidebar: Rembrandt Research Project). Among those paintings that have survived to be investigated, however, many have suffered the ravages of time. Some have darkened over time, others have been changed in format, and still others have been cleaned and restored too drastically. One thing is certain, however: the number of faked Rembrandts is negligible because so many school works could easily—often mala fide—be upgraded to “genuine” Rembrandts or were for long not recognized as school works due to their closeness to a (corrupted) image of Rembrandt's personal style.
Many of the same attribution problems that apply to Rembrandt's paintings continue to challenge scholars studying his drawings. Adding to this challenge is the fact that many of his drawings have been lost.
Authenticity issues regarding Rembrandt's etchings have also arisen, albeit to a lesser degree than with the paintings and drawings. The posthumous impressions from Rembrandt's copperplates that continued to be printed until well into the 19th century and the production of photographically generated facsimiles have all caused, and still cause, much confusion. Scholars are aware of about 80 of Rembrandt's etching plates that have been preserved.
In the past, scholars struggled to find methods that could solve questions concerning attribution and Rembrandt's artistic practices. This struggle came about in part because very few of Rembrandt's works are so conclusively documented that there can be no doubt as to their authenticity. Consequently, the foundation on which to reconstruct his oeuvre is very narrow. At the same time, written statements by Rembrandt on artistically and biographically relevant issues are extremely rare. Only a few (business) letters from his own hand have survived, and they rarely bear on artistic matters. Because of this scarcity of contemporary evidence, scholars long felt constrained to speculate on issues of authenticity.
Rembrandt research took a step forward in the later decades of the 20th century, when works by Rembrandt and his school began to be investigated as material objects subject to scientific methods of inquiry. These investigations provided information about the artist's technique and, indirectly, his ideas on art and teaching. In correlating this information with relevant contemporary treatises on art (especially the book on the art of painting by Rembrandt's former pupil van Hoogstraten, published in 1678), it has been possible to reconstruct aspects of the contemporary art-theoretical background and terminology that would have shaped Rembrandt's ideas and practices. A great quantity of notary reports and other documents on legal, financial, and family affairs have come to light and are still being discovered, while a growing amount of recovered archival material sheds light on early owners of Rembrandt's works. As a result, Rembrandt studies continued to evolve into the 21st century. The results of such studies will always leave room for new interpretations as historical perspectives continue to change.
- Ernst van de Wetering
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