Rembrandt, With a Complete List of His Etchings

Rembrandt, With a Complete List of his Etchings
Arthur M. Hind

144, II. Rembrandt and his Wife, Saskia, 1636, B. 19


Rembrandt Harmensz van Ryn, son of Harmen Gerritsz van Ryn, miller (d. 1630), and Neeltge Willemsdochter (d. 1640), daughter of a baker of Zuytbroeck; born at Leyden, July 15, 1606; entered Leyden University as a student of letters, May 20, 1620, but left before the end of the year; studied painting for about three years in his native town under Jacob Isaaksz van Swanenburgh, and at the age of seventeen for about six months under Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam; settled in Leyden from 1624 until 1631, removing with his sister Lysbeth to Amsterdam in the latter half of 1631; married Saskia van Ulenburch, June 1634; from 1639 to 1658 lived in the Breestraat (in the house which is now open to the public); lost his wife in 1642; from about 1652 Hendrikje Stoffels, who had been his servant, lived with him as his wife, until her death about 1664; Rembrandt's material success as a painter was counterbalanced by his zeal for collecting works of art, and in 1656 he was forced by his creditors to declare bankrupt; an inventory of the contents of his house, made in view of the sales which took place in 1657 and 1658, is still preserved; the last part of his life was spent in a lodging on the Rozengracht, and all the money that he earned went to his creditors whom he never satisfied; he died and was buried in the Westerkerk, Amsterdam, October 4, 1669.
The formal style of art, the essence of line-engraving, reached its zenith in Albrecht Dürer. And Dürer was so great a master that human feeling told through the medium of the severest formalism. But it was not till a century later that human expression found its full outlet in an artist whose sympathy was at once penetrating and comprehensive, who perfected a medium capable of the most spontaneous rendering of the deepest as well as the most fleeting emotions of life.
Rembrandt's affection for scriptural subjects is a striking fact in face of the general character of Dutch art in the seventeenth century. The reformation in Holland seems to have helped towards the exclusion of art from the domain of religion; and the merely formal and superficial rendering of biblical stories by the classicists of the late sixteenth century may have also had much to account for the secular reaction of the succeeding period. But Rembrandt had no need to seek new ground to escape from a formal rendering of well-known themes. Like most masters of supreme genius, his originality consisted in the realisation of his own deepest and most personal emotion in his treatment of the old stories. They appealed to him as the vehicle of the noblest thoughts of man in relation to himself and God, and he was practically the first artist who dared approach the Scriptures in the spirit of reality that implied a living faith rather than an official creed.