REMBRANDT, rem'brant or -brint MIME written REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN KlJN or RYN), Dutch painter and etcher: b. Leyden, 15 July 1607; d. Amsterdam, 8 Oct. 1669. He was the son of a miller settled in Leyden; and an early shown disposition toward the life of an artist caused him to be taken from the Latin School at .an early age and put into the studio of a Leyden artist who took pupils. In 1622 he was sent to a studio in Amsterdam. In 1623 he seems to have been working as an artist and there is a signed and dated picture of 'Saint Paul in Prison' in the Stuttgart Gallery, which is his earliest piece with an ascertained date. By 1630 he was settled in Amsterdam and in 1634 married Saskia van Ulenbiugh, who lived with him only eight years, leaving one son, Titus. Saskia had property; and her death caused confusion in Rembrandt's affairs because of her will leaving all of this property to Titus, with only a life interest to her husband, while in the meantime Rembrandt's affairs had been in a bad condition. In 1656 he was finally sold out as a bankrupt. It is not perfectly known why the very prosperous painter who, in his early manhood, had a great deal of work to do as a portrait painter (always a profitable branch of the art), and whose etchings sold remark ably well, should have become so straightened in his circumstances. It is known that he bought very freely, surrounding himself with works of art of all kinds, of which he was a constant and diligent student and by means of which he gave himself that knowledge of the world which he did not obtain from travel, as it appears that he never crossed the frontiers of the United Provinces. It is also asserted that a certain change in popular taste left him at one side while it followed men whom we now deem greatly his inferiors in artistic power. He had many pupils and many assistants and even the interruptions caused by death and by loss of fortune do not seem to have checked the great production of his work, for between the time of his bankruptcy and the time of his death, 13 years later, he was as busily engaged and his work was fully as important as at any former time. The mention of a few works of
art with their dates in the course of this article illustrates this fact sufficiently well.
At a very early date Rembrandt's style as a painter was fixed. It is extremely original, founded on the work of no other artist of any school, based upon a strong perception of the beauty and value of pure light and shade in nature and in art. In one sense he was a great colorist, namely in that he conceived a painting as strictly the result of a disposition and com bination of the hues and tints, treating all his work with as complete a color-scheme as that used by the great Venetians. There is this pe culiarity, however, that Rembrandt's coloring is sombre and reaches its highest achievement in combinations of browns and grays with but few passages of primary color or of those hues which approximate to primary color. A blue sash may appear in a portrait and its effect of pure, bright color may be led up to and assisted by the glimmer of steel and the warm yellow ish-brown of a buff coat; but as a general thing these effects are not his happiest achievements as we see the pictures now, and those are the most delightful to us in which he departs the least from his accustomed gravity of tone. There is a certain disappearing of the subject in blackness which is very disagreeable to many lovers of painting; and it is hard to form a con ception of how far this had been the result of time producing changes in the pigments. Mean while the effect of a brilliantly modeled head coming to light from a profoundly gloomy background and helped by the painting of cos tume similarly relieved by light colors upon darkness, is very pleasing to many students; and apart from his obviously surpassing ability, Rembrandt is a delightful painter to many ardent lovers of the art of painting. To paint ers by profession Rembrandt must always be one of the men whose work commands the highest respect.