Rembrandt: The Light Behind the Canvas

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript, with inappropriate language and sensitive content removed or altered for clarity:

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Before we get started with today’s video, I want to mention another channel that I host called Business Plays. It’s about business, but it’s really not. It delves into various topics, including unusual stories, interesting characters, and social media campaigns, along with whatever else the writer on that channel decides to put together for me. In a sense, Business Plays is quite different from Biographics, mixing silliness and fun with facts. If you’re curious and in the mood for something different, check it out through the link below. Now, let’s get into the video.

To an artist, there is no greater degree of success than the mononym—think Michelangelo, Basquiat, Madonna. To need only one name means you are a legend in your field; you are foundational and a blueprint for future generations. Even if you don’t get your own Ninja Turtle, for most of his career, Rembrandt painted people who were not conventionally attractive. In an age of filters, it’s hard to see the appeal of looking at some of his subjects. So what made him famous in the first place, and why did he fall out of favor just as his fame was reaching its peak? The story of Rembrandt is filled with drama, passion, romance, heart-wrenching tragedy, and a redemption arc that ultimately ends in betrayal. Buckle up because today’s episode is going to get a touch Shakespearean.

One of ten children born to Harman and Niels van Rijn, only six survived. Rembrandt was chosen out of all his siblings to attend Latin school. They were a family of millers, and “van Rijn” refers to the river they lived next to. Rembrandt’s education focused on biblical studies as well as Greek and Roman classics, which clearly had a big impression on him, as these subjects became the focus of many of his celebrated works. However, the wonders of the ancient world failed to hold his attention quite as much as painting, and at the tender age of 14, he asked to study the craft at Leiden University. He apprenticed under two masters, Jacob van Swanenburg and Peter Lastman. Van Swanenburg is best known for his paintings of hell, where Rembrandt learned how to play with light and reflections. Lastman painted historical epics, the kind of paintings you think of when you see old important art.

As of late 1625, Rembrandt settled in Leiden and began work as a guild-certified master of painting. His early work draws heavily from Lastman’s historical style, but immediately, Rembrandt set out to experiment with the composition of both the visual elements of the painting and the physical composition of the paint itself. He painted fur and feathers by adding extra linseed oil to the pigment, making it thin and applying it to the canvas with a brush holding only three or four bristles.

Take a look at this wealthy fellow with the delicate feathers in his cap and the shining ornament around his neck. Even the scepter under his arm speaks of a quiet, reserved aristocracy. At first glance, he might not look exceptionally wealthy, but to the upper crust of Amsterdam, subtle elegance was the mode of the day. What was once an unimpressive backwater had been transformed almost overnight into the country’s foremost trading hub. Tobacco farmed on New World plantations arrived by the boatful, along with fine silks and exciting new ideas, and with that came money.

The first patrons to support Rembrandt had grown up poor and suddenly experienced an explosion of wealth in middle age or later. They didn’t socialize in saloons or pubs; the church was their foremost social venue. So, people had to master the art of subtlety or risk total social ostracism. Sumptuous furs, understated jewelry, delicate lacework—these fine details were what his customers wanted, so he set out to showcase the art of human expression. His etchings and sketches especially capture almost spontaneous moments of emotion—how the face crinkles during a laugh, the weight of sadness that accumulates in his mother’s eye. Here is the artist who shows us as we are, not as we would have ourselves look—honest and unstaged.

He used the term “natural liveliness” to capture the kind of accidental, unrestrained motions normal to real life but absent from static images. He also took in some of his first students, including Govert Flinck, an ambitious history painter whose untimely death would play a part in Rembrandt’s later challenges. Historians estimate that at least 50 individuals spent time with Rembrandt, which partly explains how many works have been falsely attributed to him. The official count now ranges between 300 and 350, though it was once much higher.

He was famous for his self-portraits, creating over 40 portraits and 37 etchings, leading some journalists to ask if he invented the selfie. Absolutely not, but let’s take a look at an early example and see what made them so compelling to the public. Here we see the artist in his natural habitat—look at the rough floors, the cracked plaster, the shabby clothes he worked in. Notice how small Rembrandt himself is compared to the foreground canvas. Every detail is meant to convey noble simplicity, a dignified austerity rather than humiliating poverty.

But look at this mysterious aura glowing from the canvas. Intentionally turned away from the viewer, his expression is unreadable. He sees something we do not; he knows something we can only guess at. The glow is heavy with possibility, mysterious emanations of light are a recurring motif in Rembrandt’s work, almost always representing some kind of divine blessing.

In 1630, Rembrandt uprooted himself from Leiden and headed for the burgeoning metropolis of Amsterdam, where the money was just piling up. This was the start of the Dutch Golden Age, where poverty and conflict were giving way to a new passion for science and trade. A ceasefire in the Eighty Years’ War had been negotiated a decade earlier, and the Dutch Republic had managed to establish itself. People were ready to start living large, Dutch style.

He was already pulling in commissions from The Hague and selling to princes when he moved, so he had little trouble finding representation with the dealer Hendrick van Ulenburg. The two shared accommodations, and three years later, Rembrandt would marry Hendrick’s cousin, Saskia van Ulenburg. As is often the case with marrying an artist, her family had some reservations about the 29-year-old Rembrandt. Saskia’s father had been a wealthy burger master and had left behind a considerable inheritance, socially she towered above him. He grew up in a millhouse; she was the darling of the political class. Defying convention, she demanded a speedy betrothal, and in 1634 they were wed. None of Rembrandt’s family decided to show up, which is ominous, but it certainly didn’t slow down the young couple.

In 1639, they bought one of the most expensive houses on the broad street of Amsterdam and filled it with art and fancy furniture. Rembrandt’s career was red-hot; copies of his work were turning heads all across Europe, and he was cranking out more commissioned portraits than ever. Everything the couple touched turned to gold, and as we all know, once you’re successful, nothing bad can ever happen to you again. So, he started spending like his status depended on it.

With multiple incomes and Saskia’s considerable inheritance, they could have paid off the mortgage with a handful of frugal years. Instead, Rembrandt hit the town, paying handsomely for imported Asian weapons, beautiful objects, and antiques, which sprawled throughout his impressive estate. Fun fact: it stops being a sensible business expense at the point where it impacts your ability to repay your debt.

Earlier in the mid-1630s, Rembrandt had reinvented himself. He stopped signing his work “RH” and instead added the famous “D” to his first name. His work became physically darker, dominated by looming shadows punctuated by clusters of lighter shades. He called these clusters “kindred colors,” which draw focus like a flashlight on key details.

In 1639, Rembrandt was commissioned by cotton merchant and part-time militia captain Bennet to produce a guard room scene of his company, the Kloveneers. Rembrandt earned a cool 1,600 guilders for the commission, which he used to build an addition onto his house large enough to contain his massive canvas while he worked on it. To understand why this painting is so groundbreaking, let’s put it in context. The war’s front line was several thousand miles of ocean and a formal ceasefire away. None of these men were in any danger of actual fighting; these militias were funded by wealthy patrons in the same way that tech CEOs now buy basketball teams. They weren’t soldiers; in the likelihood that they ever had to face combat, they probably would have fled to their secondary homes in the country.

To commemorate their fun times together, they would commission portraits of themselves to hang in their fancy clubhouses. Here’s an example of a traditional guard room scene. While these certainly look like two rows of soldiers polished up for a school photo, do they really feel like soldiers, or are they just well-groomed heads on top of nice clothes? Is being a soldier something you are, or is it something you do?

Imagine that these lifeless lineups are what you expect art to look like, and then someone shows you this. Your expectations are absolutely shattered, and the horizon of the possible widens beyond what the audience can imagine. This is what artists do—they take the normal and blow it up.

It’s important to stress how physically large this work is. The figures of the captain and lieutenant are as big as their real-life counterparts, and the only reason it currently measures 12 by 14 feet is that someone cut off a bunch of the sides. Pictures cannot really capture the grand size of this piece. Here we have Captain Bennet along with 18 of his loyal citizen soldiers spilling out of the city gates, ready for action. For ease of reference, I’m going to call this piece “The Night Watch.”

The leap from guard room photos to this action-packed scene is like the switch from listening to your grandpa’s war stories as he falls asleep in an armchair to watching a blockbuster war film on a big screen. Nothing else in the gallery could even come close to the action, the movement, the sense that these soldiers were going to march right out of the frame. This isn’t just a picture of people being; these are men captured in the midst of doing, and there was simply nothing else like it at the time.

Arranging people side by side gives them a sense of equal weight and importance, but Rembrandt flipped the script on that and framed his piece front to back, with the leaders clearly in the forefront surrounded by their troops. The captain is flanked on both sides by glowing individuals, almost like parentheses in the edges and corners of the work. The lieutenant is a perfect example of the second-in-command trope, clearly exhibiting confidence with his brilliant clothes and weapon.

The captain’s clothes are black, save for a brilliant sash of scarlet and a collar that helps frame his face. The captain isn’t concerned with the vanities of fashion; he needs his mind clear to safeguard his troops. But wait, is that a little girl, and she’s got a dead chicken on her belt? Either she’s out of place, or war in the 17th century was much stranger than it is today.

In actuality, this is Rembrandt engaging in symbolism, a habit he would explore more heavily in his etchings. The chicken’s claws are taken from the Kloveneers’ coat of arms, and the chicken itself is a reference to the Dutch word for “rooster.” The girl is also holding a goblet next to an oak leaf, both significant to the Kloveneers, clearly acting as a kind of battlefield mascot.

So how did the public react? It’s popular to state that “The Night Watch” was rejected and that this collapsed Rembrandt’s career, but the truth is much more complicated. Before we get to that fallout, let’s talk about other issues in his life. In the midst of their dramatic rise in society, Saskia and Rembrandt tried multiple times to start a family, but only their fourth child, Titus, survived infancy. Shortly after his birth in September 1641, Saskia fell ill, likely with tuberculosis, and Rembrandt started having an affair with Gertie Diks, their maid. Saskia died on June 14, 1642, the same year “The Night Watch” was finally released.

Plot twist: her will stipulated that Rembrandt would lose access to Titus’s trust should he ever remarry. While still involved with Gertie, he started seeing Hendrickje Stoffels, his second maid, who was also 20 years his junior. Outraged, Gertie sued for reneging on his promise to marry her. This all happened in just one house, and now you know why artists touch on popular subjects for historical romances—the drama is apparently very juicy.

The popular narrative claims that “The Night Watch” was rejected almost immediately, which, combined with the tragic loss of Saskia and three of his children, supposedly sent Rembrandt into a spiral of despair. On the contrary, there’s no proof that “The Night Watch” was ever actually rejected; it hung in the club as intended. It is true that he painted no portraits in the decade after, but he may have simply refused all commissions rather than not being offered any in the first place. He focused on sketches and etchings instead.

He did have to use legal measures to compel one subject to pay, having to defend the merits of his work to a court of peers, which clearly irked him. If there’s any one external factor that hurt Rembrandt, it was the changing tastes of the Dutch Golden Age. The children of Rembrandt’s original patrons had returned from their fancy international schools and were ready to party. This new generation craved sensual experiences, rich foods, glitzy clothes, and loud parties, rebelling against their parents’ stoic simplicity.

They wanted nothing to do with Rembrandt’s style, which they considered outdated. His work was praised until his death, even if it didn’t keep up with the trends. Another misattributed detail of his legacy concerns the so-called “Rembrandt brown,” an almost gauzy earth tone present over much of his work. Most of that is varnish added after his death to smooth out the effect of thickly applied paint that manipulates the play of light on the surface.

The Night Watch suffered the most; initially, it was a daylight scene, but the thick varnish blotted out much of the color. History automatically isn’t brown and grimy. Some museum curators simply chose to ignore this. At one point in history, it was so heavily varnished that it successfully deflected a knife attack.

The ultimate truth of his fall lies not in some existential crisis inflicted by the loss of his wife, but rather the fact that he was difficult to work with. His contemporaries joked that he would not interrupt his painting to meet with a prince, and no matter how respected an artist you are, having that kind of attitude is going to cost you. Talent can elevate you to the upper echelons of society, but cannot compel power to kneel. If you are unlikable, your prospects will suffer.

On top of his personal challenges, debts and spending continued to dog him until he died on July 15, 1656. He declared bankruptcy, adding insult to injury. The chamber of insolvency where he made his case had a doorway crowned with a marble carving of rats crawling out of an empty money box. His house and possessions were sold at auction, but they failed to fully cover what he owed. The only surviving piece of furniture, a huge mirror in an ebony frame, broke on the way to the new house. Even after downsizing to a modest cottage, his obsessive collections would again grow to fill two large rooms.

His bankruptcy stripped him of his guild membership and the ability to work as a master artist, so he only managed to continue painting by setting up a dummy corporation where he was the sole employee. To add insult to injury, he was technically owned by his then-lover Hendrickje and son Titus. So how did a man with Rembrandt’s ego cope? Two years later, he painted himself dressed like a king, and you’ve just got to respect that move.

One of the most consistent themes of Rembrandt’s later works is how he blurred the line between finished painting and sketch. He knew how limited the cone of visual focus really is and how much detail the human mind fills in around it. He was very particular about letting people get too close to his work because he knew the effect would be ruined. He often joked about the offensive smell of the paint, but that didn’t stop him from cleaning the brushes on the coat he was wearing.

Perhaps the perfect example comes from this painting of Hendrickje Stoffels. When taken as a whole, it looks like a normal, complete painting, maybe a little on the saucy side with those bare thighs and plunging neckline, but you wouldn’t call this unfinished, would you? Let’s zoom in on her hands, though. What happened here? It looks like she tried boxing a meat grinder. Her thumb is a single brush stroke. Compare that to where her leg enters the water and the reflection it casts below. Look how fine the detail is.

When his critics claim his work is incomplete, they’re pointing to contrasts like this. But if the artist decides it’s finished, why does it matter that they’ve left the unimportant details rough and cursory? The hands clearly aren’t the point of the picture. We don’t need to see every branch and leaf in the foliage behind her because they’re not relevant. It’s not a portrait of a river; it’s a portrait of someone bathing. From this, we got a work of immense genius.

We know him now primarily for his paintings, which never left the Netherlands in his lifetime. He is one of the few master artists who never studied outside his country of birth. In life, his international reputation was built almost entirely from his line work, producing over 300 etchings and over a thousand sketches. To this day, he is considered one of the foremost masters of etching, having invented new ways of playing with line shape and thickness.

Even the physical composition of the resin he etched into was done with intent, always pushing the limits of his tools. He would work on the same print for years at a time, releasing drafts even as he continued to make sweeping changes to the composition. Bankruptcy put an end to his etching, and in a mysterious twist, none of his tools or originals were sold at auction; they simply vanished. Perhaps sold earlier on the sly or given to a friend for safekeeping, either way, the majority of the plates had been destroyed or lost by the time of his death.

Remember Govert Flinck, one of Rembrandt’s early students? He had gone on to establish a respectable career producing technically competent histories and portraits, his life relatively free of conflict or strife. He was commissioned to paint a series of 12 canvases for Amsterdam’s new town hall—a mix of biblical stories and scenes of mythologized Dutch history. After