Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden in the Dutch Republic in 1606, the son of a miller, and became the defining master of the Dutch Golden Age — arguably the most psychologically penetrating painter in the history of Western art. He studied in Leiden under Jacob van Swanenburg and then briefly in Amsterdam under Pieter Lastman, before returning to Leiden to establish his own studio. By the early 1630s he had relocated permanently to Amsterdam, where his talents as a portraitist brought him immediate success, culminating in the monumental 'Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp' (1632), which secured his reputation as the city's leading painter.\n\nRembrandt's mastery extended across portraiture, history painting, landscape, and — perhaps above all — printmaking, in which he pushed the possibilities of etching and drypoint to previously unimagined expressive depths. His celebrated series of self-portraits, numbering nearly a hundred across his career, charts the passage of time and the accumulation of experience with unsparing honesty. The later decades of his life were marked by financial ruin following the bankruptcy of 1656, the death of his beloved partner Hendrickje Stoffels, and the loss of his son Titus; yet these years produced some of the most profoundly moving works in his catalogue, including 'The Return of the Prodigal Son.' He died in Amsterdam in 1669, aged sixty-three, leaving behind an output of over three hundred paintings, nearly three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.