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.
As a painter Rembrandt was chiefly devoted to portraiture, a devotion no doubt largely due to the conviction that its study gives the most immediate opportunity for depicting human character. But it must also be confessed that the overwhelmingly large proportion of portraits to other subjects in his painted work may be partly owing to the demands of clients. That it was not entirely so is immediately evident when one considers the master’s untiring industry in painting portraits of himself after his popularity had waned, and commissions nearly ceased. Nevertheless as works for the most part uncommissioned and less lucrative than the paintings, we may take it that the etchings are a true reflection of the actual tendency of Rembrandt’s genius when least affected by demands from outside. In his etched work we find that portraits are much less numerous, and by far the largest place is given to the subjects from scripture, treated with the same reality that characterises his sketches from daily life.