A Brill Calendar: October 4

The Stature of Rembrandt van Rijn

Few artists who have the power to universally inspire in posterity attain the stature of Rembrandt van Rijn, who died in Amsterdam October 4th, 1669.

His genius as it is appreciated presently, took a long time to develop. Rembrandt is still seen as one of mankind’s ultimate cultural heroes - rather than just a superb painter. This notion involves the (mistaken) idea of lack of recognition during his lifetime and starvation in his final years, when the glory of his last self-portraits was attained. Nothing could be more misleading.

In this misapprehension, it is also readily forgotten that Rembrandt, born in Leyden in 1606, enjoyed an excellent general education in his hometown; much more elaborate than the eight other children of the prosperous miller Harmen van Rijn. His son completed the Latin School in the only Dutch city featuring a university, where Rembrandt also matriculated and studied, albeit for a short while, in 1620. He settled in Amsterdam, Holland’s wealthiest city – and of the world, for that matter – in 1631, only after he had reached full adulthood.

It is seldom that this aspect of creating a national icon is taken into account in non-scholarly views of Holland’s greatest painter, who was also its greatest graphic artist. The etchings and drawings speak for themselves. Rembrandt spent his youth and adolescence in an environment bristling with typographers, draughtsmen, engravers, printers and publishers, many of them closely associated with a burgeoning University.

In misguided myths of genius, the hero (or heroine) reigns in divine solitude, far beyond our pedestrian world. In reality, Rembrandt owed a vital debt to Leyden with its scholarly and entrepreneurial climate.