Rembrandt. Image source · Public domain
The people behind the art
15 July 1606 to 4 October 1669
Rembrandt was a Dutch painter and printmaker whose portraits, historical scenes and self-portraits explore expression through light and shadow. Born in Leiden, he trained locally and with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam before establishing his own workshop. He moved to Amsterdam around 1631, where commissions, teaching and collecting became central to his career.
6 artworks in the archive
In the archive
Artist: Rembrandt
Rembrandt painted himself in the final months of his life, at sixty-three, in a work whose concentrated surface, shadowed background, and ambiguous half-smile have made it one of his most discussed late self-portraits. This short tour looks closely at what he chose to put in, what he painted out, and how the National Gallery's curators read the result.
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn
Rembrandt paints the moment of intrusion: two elders accost Susanna while she bathes in a garden. This docent tour moves from the visible action to the biblical story, the painting's making and its later market history, using only the supplied evidence.
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn
A late Rembrandt portrait of Margrieta Wijnants, seated half-length with a white ostrich-feather fan laid across her dark skirt. The evidence for the sitter, date and authorship is secure; what the fan means to her presentation is a matter of careful looking rather than documented fact, and the account stays within that boundary.
Artist: Rembrandt
In Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, painted in 1653 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the philosopher Aristotle stands beside a bust of the blind poet Homer, his right hand resting on the sculpture's crown. This historiated portrait invites you to read the touch of the hand and the weight of the gaze as philosophy meets poetry, and it was commissioned by a Sicilian nobleman as part of a series of seven paintings.
Artist: Rembrandt
A docent-led reading of Rembrandt's 1632 group portrait, showing Dr Nicolaes Tulp demonstrating a dissected forearm to guild members. The tour connects the painting's staged composition and the anatomy lesson's public function, using the supplied object record.
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn
Rembrandt's small panel shows Andromeda, the princess of Greek myth, bound to the rocks by the sea and left for the monster. The guide reads her lifted wrists, averted face and the grey water beside her as a scene of captivity, waiting and rescue to come.
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