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| | July 15, 1606, marks the day that Rembrandt van Rijn was born in the city of Leiden in the Netherlands. His father, a miller, wanted Rembrandt to learn a profession. Instead, Rembrant left the University of Leiden to take up and study painting. The early works of Rembrandt were devoted to showing the lines, light and shade of the various people that he saw around him. Rembrandt was greatly influenced by the works of Caravaggio and some of the other Italian artists. After Rembrandt established himself as a painter, he began to teach, which he would continue teach for the remainder of his life. He is considered one of the greatest European painters of all time. He is the most important Dutch painter in art history. In addition to being a painter, Rembrandt was also a printmaker and created many, many drawings. He painted during what has become known as the Dutch Golden Age, which is roughly the seventeenth century. The Dutch Golden Age was the period in time when the Dutch truly were a world power. It has been said that Rembrandt's treatment of people in his work is filled with human sympathy.
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669), the Dutch painter, graphic artist and etcher. The artistic skills of Rembrandt were inspired by his deep philosophical understanding of life and the internal world of human beings with all the riches of his spiritual experiences, took him to the top of development of 17th century Dutch art, one of the peaks in world art culture. Rembrandt’s art legacy is quite different with its exclusive variety: he did portrait, stills, landscapes, genre scenes, paintings on the themes like history, bible, and mythology. He was a consummate master of painting and etching. After a brief study in the Leiden university (1620), Rembrandt decided to devote himself towards art and studied the art of painting from Jacob van Swanenburgh in Leiden (around 1620 -1623) and P. Lastman in Amsterdam (1623); in 1625-1631 he worked in Leiden. Rembrandt’s works from the Leiden period are recorded with the reconnaissance of creative independence, though in them there is some influence of Lastman and masters of Dutch Caravaggism (“Presentation in the temple”, around the 1628-1629, Kunsthalle, Hamburg). In the paintings “The Apostle Paul” (in around 1629-1630, national museum, Nuremberg) and “Simeon in Temple” (1631, Moritshuis, Hague), for the first time he used chiaroscuro (light-and-shade) for strengthening the spirituality and emotional expressiveness of images. In the same years, Rembrandt persistently worked on a portrait, studying the mimicry of the human face. In 1632, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam where he marries a rich patrician Saskia van Uylenburg. The 1630s are the years of family happiness and Rembrandt’s huge success in art. The painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632, Moritshuis, Hague) in which the artist innovatively resolved the problem of a group portrait, by giving a vital ease to the composition and uniting all the spectators by a uniform action, brought wide popularity to Rembrandt. In many of the portraits that were done on order, he thoroughly created the features of the face, clothes and jewelry (“Portrait of Burggraf”, 1636, Dresden gallery).
But his self-portraits and portraits of the people close to him are freer, in which the artist bravely experimented in the reconnaissance of psychological expressiveness (self-portrait, 1634, Louvre, Paris; “Smiling Saskia”, 1633, Picture gallery, Dresden). The reconnaissance of this period finished with the very famous “Self-portrait with Saskia”, “Cheerful Society ”; around 1635, Picture gallery, Dresden), boldly breaking off with his art canons, evolving with live spontaneity of composition, free pattern of painting, cheerful, filled with light and on a colorful scale. Bible compositions of the 1630’s (“The Sacrifice of Abraham”, 1635, State Hermitage, St. Petersburg) which bear imprints of influence of paintings from the Italian baroque era, which is exhibited in a bit of forced dynamics in the composition, in the sharpness of the angles and the light and shade contrasts. Mythological scenes have a special place in the creativity of Rembrandt's from the 1630’s in which the artist has courageously challenged the classical canons and traditions (“Abduction of Ganymede”, 1635, Picture gallery, Dresden). His monumental masterpiece “Danaë” (1636, State Hermitage, St. Petersburg) became a bright embodiment of the aesthetic views of the artist, in which he as though enters into a debate with the great masters of the Renaissance: the naked figure of Danaë, far from classical ideals, was done by him with a courageous realistic spontaneity, and a perceptive-bodily, ideal beauty of images of the Italian masters was opposed by him with the beauty of spirituality and warmth of human feelings. During this period, Rembrandt worked a lot on the technique of etching (“The rat poison seller”, 1632) and made courageous pencil sketches in a generalized pattern.
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