Rembrandt van rijn

(15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669)

Rembrandt  goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things

for which there are no words in any language.” Vincent van Gogh

"Don't ever confuse genius and saint," biographers of Rembrandt warn us. If Rembrandt van Rijn, (1606 - 1669) the greatest European painter and draughtsman of all time, were alive today, he would probably be charged with mental cruelty for his callous and disposable treatment of women. He wasn’t always that way. He started out caring, enchanted with his adored and rich wife, Saskia, but she died, too young, . . . and then he didn’t do well. That is, after Saskia’s death, when the nanny that he had hired to care for his one surviving son, Titus,( Saskia had lost three children in infancy) demanded - after six years of being his mistress- that he marry her as he had promised instead of the new “housekeeper” who had replaced her - he had her locked up in an insane asylum. For “destitute and diseased prostitutes.” Cold!

But was he a genius? Absolutely. His many portraits and self-portraits are so psychologically acute that they encounter you - not the other way around. Rembrandt, who was recognized and sought after, by the time he was twenty as one of the best painters alive in the Netherlands, “believed that human emotions were more important than any other aspects of life,” (theartstory.org)  He was, according to Martin Gayford in the UK Spectator, “the outstanding chronicler of the human face, daily altered by experience, and of the heart’s journey through love, grief, despair and every imaginable emotion” (https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/why-everyone-loves-rembrandt)  In fact, if there’s any point to getting up in the morning, it is to do this: to journey through love, grief, despair, and every imaginable emotion.” And Rembrandt did all of that —  he just did it messily.

Rembrandt had been the most successful painter in all of Amsterdam, and, with his income, combined with Saskia’s money, had purchased a three-story townhouse in the fashionable Jordaan. But Saskia died  in 1642 at 29- probably from tuberculosis - and the terms of her will were that if he ever remarried, he would lose all of his inheritance from her. Well, he didn’t marry, but he also didn’t paint, and he spent money he didn’t have until by 1656 he went bankrupt - the richest painter  in all Amsterdam! - and was forced to sell the townhouse and all the furnishings in it, and all his unsold art. But even  that was not enough, So, fourteen years after her death, he sold Saskia’s grave in the Oude Church of Amsterdam. And he lost his inheritance. 

Now a disgraced man, with his housekeeper/mistress Hendrickje, and his surviving son Titus procuring his commissions and managing his business, he entered into his ‘late” and entirely brilliant stage of painting. He excelled in the rendering of light and darkness and experimented with his palette knife in applying thick paint.  One of his final paintings, The Jewish Bride, (also known as Rebecca and Isaac) painted in 1667 is so extraordinary that van Gogh, upon seeing it, predictably said: ‘I should be happy to give 10 years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.’ According to vangoghmuseum.nl, “the intimacy of the double portrait appealed to Vincent, and he was probably also pleased by Rembrandt’s use of coarse brushstrokes – a way of painting that saw him tear up the rulebook on how one was expected to paint in the 17th century.” 

Rembrandt died a pauper at the age of 63. He was given a  customary funeral for the poor. He was buried in an unknown grave owned by the church. A few years later, as was customary, his remains were dug up and casually destroyed. Maxim Kantor, a Russian painter and essayist, wrote these lines about Rembrandt: "Rembrandt van Rijn was a very sad artist. Only in the beginning had he an easy life, then it went hard, and he did not paint laughing people in his maturity.” But, happily for all of us, he really did paint.