The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (398 page)

(1606–69).
Dutch painter, etcher, and draughtsman, his country's greatest artist. He was born in Leiden, the son of a prosperous miller. After attending a Latin school he registered at the city's university in 1620, but probably never actually studied there. At about this time he was apprenticed to the mediocre local painter Jacob van Swanenburgh (
c.
1571–1638), with whom he is said to have studied for about three years. However, much more important for Rembrandt's development were six months spent in Amsterdam with Pieter
Lastman
,
c.
1624. From Lastman he took not only his predilection for mythological and religious subject, but also his manner of treating them, with dramatic gestures and expressions, vivid lighting effects, and a meticulous, glossy finish, as in his earliest dated work—
The Stoning of St Stephen
(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, 1625).
Houbraken
says that Rembrandt also studied with Jacob
Pynas
and Joris van Schooten (1587–1651), but this can have been only briefly, for by 1625 he was working as an independent master in Leiden. There he had a close association with Jan
Lievens
, and both artists were highly praised by the scholar and diplomat Constantin Huygens, who visited them in 1629. Rembrandt's paintings of his Leiden period (which lasted until he settled permanently in Amsterdam in 1631/2) are mainly figure subjects, often involving old men depicted as philosophers or biblical characters. He also did portraits of himself and of members of his family, but it is not until 1631 that he painted his earliest known formal commissioned portrait. The sitter was Nicolaes Ruts, a prosperous Amsterdam merchant (Frick Coll., New York), and Rembrandt no doubt realized that here he had a recipe for success, as this type of work dominated his output in his early years in Amsterdam. It was the busiest period of his life, as he quickly established himself as the leading portraitist in the city—about fifty of his paintings are dated 1632 or 1633 and all but a handful are portraits. The most important—the work that most clearly demonstrated his superiority to rivals such as Thomas de
Keyser
—is the
Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp
(Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1632), which brought a wholly new vitality to the group portrait. Rembrandt's great energy in his early years in Amsterdam comes out also in his religious works. The most important commission he received during the 1630s was from the Stadholder Prince Frederick Henry of Orange for five pictures depicting scenes of the Passion (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and the
Baroque
tendencies of his work at this time are even more emphatically expressed in his sensational, life-size
Blinding of Samson
(Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, 1636). Rembrandt presented this painting to Huygens, who probably had secured the commission from the Stadholder. Rembrandt's success in the 1630s was personal as well as professional. In 1634 he married Saskia van Uylenburgh, cousin of a picture-dealer associate, and from the evidence of his marvellously tender portraits of her it must have been a blissful union. In 1639 he bought an imposing house (now a Rembrandt museum), and he spent lavishly on works of art and anything else that took his fancy or looked as if it might be useful as a prop—armour, old costumes, etc. His domestic happiness was, however, marred by a succession of infant deaths; of the four children Saskia bore him, only his son Titus (1641–68), who became one of his favourite models, lived longer than two months.
Saskia died in 1642, and in this year Rembrandt painted his most famous picture,
The Night Watch
(Rijksmuseum , Amsterdam), which Jacob Rosenberg, in his standard monograph on the artist, calls ‘a thunderbolt of genius’. The erroneous title dates from the late 18th cent. when the painting was so discoloured with dirty varnish that it looked like a night scene. Its correct title is
The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch
, and it is the culminating work of the Dutch tradition of civic guard portraits (a genre particularly associated with Frans
Hals
). Rembrandt showed remarkable originality in making a pictorial drama out of an insignificant event. To do this he subordinated the individual portraits to the demands of the composition, and according to popular legend the sitters who had paid for the picture were appalled at this and demanded that Rembrandt make radical changes, paint a new picture, or refund their money. Rembrandt's refusal is supposed to have been his downfall and to have led him into penniless obscurity. There is, however, no basis in fact for the story, which is a 19th-cent. invention; indeed all the available evidence suggests that the picture was well received by contemporaries. Samuel van
Hoogstraten
, for example, wrote ‘It is so painter-like in thought, so dashing in movement, and so powerful’ that the pictures beside which it hung were made to seem ‘like playing cards’.
Nevertheless, in the 1640s Rembrandt's worldly success did decline as the direction of his art changed. Formal portraiture took up much less of his time and he concentrated more on religious painting, while his style grew less flamboyant and more introspective. The change has been explained as a response to the death of Saskia (and of his mother in 1640), and religion may well have been a solace to him in this difficult period. At the same time, some of his market in portraiture must have gone to pupils such as
Bol
and
Flinck
, who imitated his style so well. It seems just as likely, however, that Rembrandt was tired of routine portraiture and wanted to return to his first love—painting subjects from the Bible. In the 1640s Rembrandt also developed an interest in landscape and it has been suggested that he spent more time in the countryside during this period to escape from the domestic problems he encountered after Saskia's death. A widow called Geertge Dircx was employed as Titus's nurse, and she sued Rembrandt for breach of promise after his affections turned to Hendrickje Stoffels, a servant some 20 years his junior who entered the household in about 1645. After some unpleasant legal action Rembrandt succeeded in having Geertge shut up in a reformatory and the litigation did not end until her death in 1656. Hendrickje remained with Rembrandt for the rest of her life and bore him two children, including a daughter, Cornelia, born in 1654, who was the only one of his children to outlive him. Rembrandt's portrayals of Hendrickje are just as loving as those of Saskia, but he was unable to marry her because of a clause in Saskia's will.
After he turned his back on fashionable portraiture, Rembrandt's extravagance led him into financial difficulties, which became acute by the early 1650s. In 1656 he was declared insolvent; his collections were sold and by 1660 he had to leave his house and move to lodgings in a poorer district of the city. Houbraken says that ‘in the autumn of his life he kept company mainly with common people and such as practised art’, but the romantic image of him as a pauper and a recluse is grossly exaggerated. He continued to be a respected figure who received important commissions (his patrons included the Sicilian nobleman Don Antonio Ruffo), and Hendrickje and Titus established an art firm with Rembrandt technically their employee, a device that protected him from his creditors. Indeed, with some weight thus lifted from his shoulders, Rembrandt may well have felt renewed energy, and there are more dated paintings from 1661 than from any year since the early 1630s. In 1661–2 he painted two of his greatest works—
The Sampling Officers of the Cloth-Makers' Guild
(sometimes called
The Syndics
, Rijksmuseum) and
The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis
, painted for Amsterdam Town Hall, but for unknown reasons removed in 1663 and cut down (apparently by Rembrandt himself)—the magnificent fragment is now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Rembrandt's final years were clouded by the deaths of Hendrickje in 1663 and Titus in 1668, but his art was in no way impaired. On the contrary, his work seemed to grow in human understanding and compassion to the very end, and his last self-portraits, the culmination of an incomparable series that began 40 years earlier, show him facing his hardships with the utmost dignity—someone who has no illusions about life, but equally no bitterness. Two self-portraits date from the last year of his life (NG, London, and Mauritshuis), but the painting that best stands as his spiritual testimony is perhaps
The Return of the Prodigal Son
(Hermitage, St Petersburg,
c.
1669), a work of the utmost tenderness and poignancy, which Kenneth
Clark
described as ‘a picture which those who have seen the original in Leningrad may be forgiven for claiming as the greatest picture ever painted’. The emotional depth and range of Rembrandt's work was matched by the total expressive mastery of his technique. Even as a young man, when surface polish and attention to detail were a necessary part of his skill as a fashionable portraitist, he had experimented boldly in his more private works, sometimes, for example, using the butt end of the brush to scrape through the paint. When he began to paint much more to please himself in the 1640s, his handling grew much broader, and Houbraken wrote that ‘in the last years of his life, he worked so fast that his pictures, when examined from close by, looked as if they had been daubed with a bricklayer's trowel.’
It is not only the quality of Rembrandt's work that sets him apart from all his Dutch contemporaries, but also its range. Although portraits and religious works bulk largest in his output, he made highly original contributions to other genres, including still life (
The Slaughtered Ox
, Louvre, Paris, 1655), and he painted some pictures, such as
The Polish Rider
(Frick Coll., New York,
c.
1655), that virtually defy classification. Rembrandt was prodigious, too, as an etcher and draughtsman. He is universally regarded as the greatest of all exponents of etching (and
drypoint
), capable of expressing the airy breadth of the Dutch countryside with a few quick strokes, but also prepared to radically rework a complex religious scene such as
The Three Crosses
perhaps a decade after he had begun it in 1653 to create one of the most awesome of all images of Christ's Passion. His drawings were done mainly as independent works rather than as studies for paintings and often with the thick bold strokes of the reed pen, of which he was an unsurpassed master.
Rembrandt was a great teacher; Gerard
Dou
became his first pupil in 1628 and Aert de
Gelder
, who was with him in the 1660s, continued his master's style into the 18th cent. Between these two, Rembrandt taught such illustrious names as Carel
Fabritius
(his greatest pupil), Phillips de
Koninck
and Nicolaes
Maes
, but often his pupils later abandoned his exacting standards for a more facile popularity. Rembrandt continued to have many admirers after his death, and his work often fetched high prices in the 18th cent. He was generally regarded as incomparable in his mastery of light and shade, but most critics considered him a flawed genius, whose failing was his ‘vulgarity’ and lack of decorum. It was during the age of
Romanticism
, when it was felt that artists should give expression to their innermost feelings and flout conventions, that his reputation began to rise towards its present supremely exalted heights. In 1851
Delacroix
suggested that one day Rembrandt would be rated higher than
Raphael
—‘a piece of blasphemy that will make every good academician's hair stand on end’; his prophecy came true within 50 years.

 
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(1861–1909). American painter, sculptor, and illustrator, the most famous portrayer of the ‘Wild West’
. He was a burly, athletic man and after attending Yale University he travelled widely in the West, prospecting and cowpunching as he worked to establish himself with his illustrations. Reproductions in
Harper's Weekly
and other popular journals made him a household name, and with his success he was able to turn more to painting and sculpture. His love of horses was so great that he had barn doors built in his studio, enabling them to be brought inside. He continued to travel (to Europe and North Africa as well as in America), and he wrote as well as working as an artist, covering the Indian Wars of 1890–1 and the Spanish-American War (in Cuba) of 1898 as a war correspondent. There is a collection of his work at the Remington Art Memorial, Ogdensburg, New York State.