The return of the prodigal painter

You don’t need to be an art expert to appreciate Rembrandt as an artistic genius, whose work has given pleasure to millions.

Rembrandt Van Rijn was born 400 years ago on July 15 1606 in Leyden in the Netherlands. His parents were not wealthy. His father was a miller and his mother a baker’s daughter.

His parents, though, were Calvinistic and strict in their religion. Rembrandt was the only one of their six children who survived infancy. He left school at the age of 14 to go briefly to Leiden University and then to become apprenticed to Jacob van Swanenburgh, a local artist, for three years. Rembrandt didn’t follow his style of painting, but developed his own, using light and shadow and human activity and emotion, to great effect. The backdrop to all his art is the Protestant ethos of 17th-century Netherlands, yet his art has a universal appeal, as the greatest Dutch artist of his century.

Biblical scenes

Though Rembrandt was eventually to move in higher society, he was always a little scruffy, wiping and cleaning his brushes on his clothes! He began his career as an independent artist in 1625. His earliest known painting, ‘The stoning of Stephen’ dates from that year. It was the beginning of a major theme in his paintings, that of biblical scenes.

He made more than 70 etchings of biblical stories and themes. As well, he is known to have completed over 400 illustrations of Bible stories, about a third of his total output of paintings, even though religious painting was becoming increasingly unpopular in Puritan Holland at that time. His great masterpiece is, of course, the large ‘The Night Watch’ painted in 1642, which is guarded 24 hours a day in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Rembrandt is loved for his quality portrayal of humanity, painting people with a weighty seriousness that flatters his thought-shadowed subjects. I admire the variety of subjects he chose to depict, varying from ‘The anatomy lesson of Dr. Tulp’ to ‘The slaughtered ox’, and ‘Belshazzar’s feast’ to ‘Rembrandt’s mother’.

Financial problems

Today, his paintings are loved and valued the world over. It is hard, therefore, to think that in his lifetime financial problems and tragedy dogged him. (Rembrandt loved auctions and frequently over-bid for the art he purchased). He married in 1633, but virtually nine years later, to the day, his wife Saskia died. They had been very happily married, though they had lost their two little girls in early infancy.

Rembrandt never remarried, though he did have a complicated relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels, whom he painted looking lost in thought in his ‘Bathsheba with King David’s letter’. Rembrandt died on October 4 1669, less than a year after his beloved only son Titus.

No wonder, then, that one of his favourite themes was that of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Perhaps it was Rembrandt’s way of comforting himself with the truth that the grave is not the end, but that there really is life after death. We are each eternal creatures.

Self-portrait

Though in one medium or another he painted over 90 self-portraits, Rembrandt did not often use himself as a model in the depiction of biblical stories. Yet when he painted his picture of Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, he chose to paint himself as the wasteful, proud, wayward son squandering his inheritance. The glamorous woman by his side was his wife.

Many of the paintings took years to complete. He hated to be interrupted or have people look over him while painting, and would warn them off by telling them how unpleasant they would find the smell of his paint! He painted or sketched many pictures of the crucifixion of Jesus. Their focus was not so much the physical sufferings of Jesus, but the emotions displayed by him, and those around him.

Rembrandt would have been familiar with the Christian gospel that Jesus died carrying in his own body the sins of the world. He knew too of Jesus’s burial and resurrection, for he painted both in pen and ink, or oil. When the resurrected Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, Jesus is portrayed wearing a 17th-century Dutch hat and, when he disappears from the two he met on the road to Emmaus, it appears quite comical as a flash is all that remains.

We don’t know Rembrandt’s personal Christian convictions. His quiet, solid portrayal of humanity and Scripture is in contrast to his, at times, turbulent life.

My collection

I have two Rembrandt prints on display in my house. The first is the famous painting of the ‘Return of the Prodigal Son’, which was possibly Rembrandt’s last. The second, my favourite, is that of the prophet Jeremiah weeping over Jerusalem at the time of its destruction. It expresses the grief I often feel when people reject the God who loves them, and the inevitable judgement that follows.

I encourage you to beg, borrow or buy a book of Rembrandt’s biblical scenes. It’s an excuse to treat yourself to celebrate the birth of this great artist.

The return of the prodigal painter

Roger Carswell reflects on the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth

Biblical scenes

Financial problems

Self-portrait

My collection

Roger Carswell

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