Only the richest museums can boast of the paintings of Rembrandt, a brilliant Dutch painter who glorified his country. His unique style gave rise to a huge number of followers and imitators, but none of them could compare with the mastery of the great artist. At the same time, Rembrandt was, so to speak, a universal painter – he worked in various genres, and invariably successfully.
He had nine brothers and sisters. At the same time, the artist was the youngest in the family. With age, Rembrandt’s vision steadily deteriorated, but he did not stop and continued to paint. The St. Petersburg Hermitage houses the world’s second largest collection of Rembrandt paintings. The first is in his homeland, in the Netherlands, in the museum named after him. Rembrandt is a name, not a surname, but the artist signed with his name. His full name was Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn. Rembrandt’s painting “The performance of the rifle company of Captain Frans Bunning Bock and Lieutenant Willem van Reutenbürg”, now known as the “Night Watch”, actually simply darkened with soot. The fact that it actually depicts daytime was accidentally discovered only in 1947 during the restoration.
The “Night Watch” was so disliked by the customers of the picture that they refused to pay for it. Throughout his life, Rembrandt painted about 6 hundred paintings, created more than 3 hundred prints and a great many drawings. The painting “Portrait of Jacob de Hein III” by Rembrandt stole four times, which is more than any other. Each time she was found and returned to her place. This painting was even nicknamed Rembrandt Takeaway. In an effort to earn more, the cunning painter resorted to various tricks. So, once he secretly went to another city for a month, and his wife, meanwhile, announced his death. This news stirred the public, and art lovers rushed to buy Rembrandt’s paintings.
He had four children, but three of them did not survive infancy. His fourth child, a son, died at the age of 27, which was a severe blow for the artist. Rembrandt’s painting “Danae”, which is stored in the St. Petersburg Hermitage, was once cut with a knife and doused with acid by an attacker. After this event, it was restored for almost twenty years, and then placed under protective armored glass. To make the hair in the portraits more realistic, Rembrandt scratched the not completely dried paint with the handle of his brush. This helped give the image volume.
Typically, artists start canvases from the foreground, but Rembrandt always first painted the background. After the death of his wife, the painter never married again, but not because he didn’t want to, but because his wife left him an inheritance, but if he remarried, he would have lost it. Therefore, officially, he did not conclude a second marriage. A group of art historians “The Rembrandt Research Project” has been studying the work of the great artist since 1968. The above picture of Danae was originally different. A study of the canvas showed that the woman depicted on her initially had facial features similar to that of Rembrandt’s wife. Later, he changed this part of the picture, and Danae became like his mistress. The ancestors of Rembrandt owned mills on the River Rhine. From here comes his last name “van Rijn”, which means simply “from the Rhine.”
