What makes rembrandt so great

However, one figure wearing a beret and peering up from behind a helmeted figure near the standard bearer has been identified as Rembrandt himself. Rembrandt was at the height of his career when he painted this ambitious painting, which was a success at the time and is still regarded as one of his most celebrated works. Critic Clement Greenberg once defined the pre-Modernist painting as the struggle against confinement to two dimensions.

The Night Watch certainly seems to burst forth from the canvas, a virtuoso of Baroque vigor, dramatic intensity, and powerful lighting. This life size canvas presents the biblical character Bathsheba in an ambiguous shallow space, illuminated from the left posed in front of a darker, obscure background.

The story from the Old Testament describes how King David noticed a woman bathing out-of-doors when he was on the terrace of his palace. He learned that she was the wife of one of his generals. Bathsheba is shown holding a letter in her right hand while her servant dries her feet; King David had summoned her to appear before him.

Her somewhat melancholy yet still musing expression reveals that Bathsheba is pleasantly interested but sadly concerned for if she goes to King David, she will betray her husband. In order to conceal his adultery and marry Bathsheba, King David sent Eliam into battle and ordered his other generals to abandon him, leaving him to certain death. God later punished King David dearly for this sin.

Earlier artists had painted the scene of King David spying on Bathsheba but Rembrandt's depiction brings a tighter pictorial focus and more erotic vitality, achieved through broad, thick brushstrokes and vibrant coloration. The model was probably Rembrandt's mistress Hendrickje Stoffels, and here the nude young woman is sitting on delicate white drapery; an opulent body caressed with delicate shadowing and finely worked jewelry amid fine fabrics.

The warm harmony of the cream, gold and copper tones, inspired by Titian and Veronese, create a luminous setting for the pensive Bathsheba. The mellow chiaroscuro, chromatic richness, and psychological subtlety made the painting one of the artist's most popular; a study of innocence and seductiveness. For the art historian Kenneth Clark, this canvas was " Rembrandt's greatest painting of the nude For Rembrandt, the boundary between art and daily life was not so strict; in his portraits of the s, he adapted his painting technique to express his perception of the sitter.

In another Old Testament scene, Joseph, who has become a successful chief advisor to the pharaoh of Egypt, brings his two sons to their almost blind grandfather Jacob on his deathbed to receive the family blessing. Although according to tradition, the eldest son should be blessed first with the elderly patriarch's hand, Jacob deliberately puts his right hand on the head of the younger, fair-haired, and more angelic son. Jacob, apparently guided by God, could foresee that the younger son would be a greater person.

The children's innocent Egyptian mother Asenath looks on during the solemn but tender family moment. The dark draperies are shown drawn aside to permit the viewer to observe the intimate scene, illuminated from the left in golden cream tones.

Joseph's right hand and the children mark the center of the composition but our eyes are also guided by the diagonals of the red blanket, the golden fur shawl, and the faces which are all focused upon the central action. The paint is applied quickly, thickly, or thinly depending upon how much is needed to attract the light and the viewer. Rembrandt's signature can be seen in the lower left of the painting with the date His practice of signing his work with his first name, later followed by Vincent van Gogh, was probably inspired by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo who then, as now, were referred to by their first names only.

Rembrandt's Biblical paintings from this mature period are often cited as his most masterful works but they were not truly known by artists and critics until nearly the end of the 19th century. Rembrandt believed that human emotions were more important than any other aspects of life and two centuries earlier, he began expressing those beliefs in his art.

His subjects' feelings and experiences are what he wanted to depict more than history, religion, or society. Rembrandt painted more than 40 self-portraits yet he did not routinely pose himself plainly dressed for painting as he did here. He is not artificially posed or acting out a part dressed in an elaborate costume. He is simply dressed in a fur-lined robe over a red garment and a white beret.

He holds his wooden palette, brushes, and a long maulstick used as a rest to steady his hands while painting. The artist stares directly at the viewer with one hand on his hip, while standing in front of a light-colored wall or canvas with large circles depicted upon it. This late work has seemingly unfinished areas such as the face and hat where the paint was rapidly and thickly applied.

In some areas, Rembrandt drew or scratched into the paint; lines are cut into the moustache, left eyebrow, and shirt collar. The face shows his vulnerability and realism while the soft shadows suggest an actively searching and intelligent mind.

The flat, pale background with circular designs was atypical for Rembrandt and the meaning has been speculated upon greatly over the years. The favored explanation, which has historical precedents, is that a perfect circle symbolizes artistic skill.

The early Italian Renaissance artist Giotto was once summoned by the pope to demonstrate his mastery so he drew a perfect circle in one single motion. An older story describes how Apelles, court painter to Alexander the Great, engaged in drawing perfect lines to prove his superior talents. It is possible that Rembrandt's intent was to create an honest image of himself for posterity, more profoundly concerned with his personal character than a conventional self-portrait.

Rembrandt may not have considered the work complete, which is suggested by the omission of his signature and date, which was unusual for a self-portrait by the artist. This painting from Rembrandt's mature period was intended for a small selective audience who could appreciate him as a painter of psychologically expressive paintings. The size of the canvas is moderate, there is no scenery, and the focus is completely on the intimacy of the moment. Although the true identity of the couple has been debated over the centuries, the most credible identification is that they were the Biblical Isaac and Rebekah.

Historically the story explained that the patriarch Isaac pretended that Rebekah was his sister while they lived among the Philistines, only daring to embrace her in private for fear that the local people might kill him due to Rebekah's beauty.

In this depiction, Issac's left hand rests protectively and gently on Rebekah's left shoulder while his right hand is placed on her bosom with affection rather than lust.

Rebekah touches his right hand with her left; the lightness of physical contact between the pair suggests a deep and loving innocence. Their hands and faces are so expressive of sincere human elements; the drama is played out in the center of the composition. As one of Rembrandt's tenderest Biblical paintings, it is serene, thoughtful, and gentle.

This is a perfect example of the portrait historie , which was common during the 17 th century Dutch Golden Age. It gave patrons an opportunity to dress as biblical or mythological figures to stress their fidelity, piety, and virtue. Also characteristic of Rembrandt's later paintings, the paint is as much the subject of the composition as the figures. Rembrandt surpassed the inventiveness of Titian and Velazquez in that he was leaving the paint loose or as rough brushwork.

The surface of the canvas might be smooth and creamy as it is on the glistening forehead of Rebekah or Isaac's brow. But in the garments he used a palette knife to apply layers of pigment to represent textures such as rich brocades, delicate lace, glistening jewelry, and intricate folds. He experimented with different effects according to the different rates of drying.

In , Vincent Van Gogh sat in front of this painting in the Rijksmuseum and stared at it as if he was in a trance. He later told a friend " I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting in front of this picture for ten days with only a crust of bread Content compiled and written by Cheryl Van Buskirk. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols.

The Art Story. The Baroque. In so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about. Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it.

I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy. Won't she? Does she want to? If so, how much? The questions are left hanging in the air, but we are left intensely conscious of them - of the ambiguity, so to put it, that hangs over all beauty, all desire. But then, her beauty is of a different order to the conventional; those broad hips, those sturdy hands, connect her to the actual world we live and feel in. And what lends a further dimension to the subject is that we know, if we are Biblically literate, something that Bathsheba, inside the Bible story, does not: that the amoral King David wants her so much that he is going to murder her husband, get him out of the way by putting him in the front line of battle.

Sometimes Rembrandt's subjects are too connected to the commonplace world for everyone to like them. There is an extremely vulgar side to Rembrandt. This in itself is no surprise, given the bawdry for which 17th-century Holland was notable. It may well be that giving vent to it was Rembrandt's compensation for the anal obsession with neatness and cleanness that characterised Dutch domestic life.

He did etchings of a man peeing and a woman defecating. A dog, tensely extruding a large turd from its backside, appears in the foreground of The Good Samaritan. And his large painting of the infant Ganymede snatched up into the sky by Zeus in the form of an eagle shows the child uncontrollably pissing in terror, which must be about the most anti-classical rendering of a scene from the classics ever given by a major artist - though it is certainly what you would expect a baby boy to do under the circumstances.

Cognate with this is Rembrandt's capacity for conveying unvarnished, unedited pain. In that he had something in common with the as-yet-unborn Goya, and with his own contemporary, the great Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera Probably the most fearsome example in Rembrandt's work was that enormous canvas, The Blinding of Samson, a monument of sadistic fury which the painter sent as a gift to his friend and patron Huygens, secretary to the Stadtholder and author of the first memoir to heap praise on the as-yet-young painter.

It is a perfect horror-show of a painting, fully in accord with Jacobean taste. Such is the spirit of The Blinding of Samson, except that the good, or at least the not-bad, are doing the bleeding. There are soldiers pinioning the helpless strongman; there is Delilah, escaping with scissors in one hand and his mat of hair in the other; and there is another soldier, like some gleaming and malignant beetle in his armour amid the confused tangle of limbs and weapons, pushing the dagger into Samson's eyesocket.

There is no record of whether Huygens liked this repulsive and enormous present, or hung it in his house; it remains a striking example of the diplomatic ineptitude which, in combination with Rembrandt's personal extravagance and his general financial incompetence, would eventually lead him to bankruptcy. Rembrandt had a strange way of acting, sometimes, as though he were alone in the world, but the popular idea of the artist as solitary genius does not fit him at all: in fact it represents the opposite of the way he worked.

He identified with "the people", from whose midst he knew very well he had come. His life was crowded, rather than peacefully isolated, and certainly never of an Olympian detachment, even though he was capable of quite deranged gestures of show-offy extravagance - such as buying an enormous house, more suitable for a banker than a painter, on the fashionable Sint Antoniesbreestraat, for 13, guilders, a sum he must have known he could never pay off, no matter how many bread-and-butter portraits he turned out.

His working days were full of people, crammed with pupils and assistants, not because he wanted selflessly to give away his time to the young, but because he badly needed their time and money; at the height of his career he had 25 young people working for him and being taught by him, which, at the relatively high fee of guilders a year - not all parents could afford so much for a son's apprenticeship - brought him 2, guilders annually.

He actually had to rent a house on the Bloemgracht in to give them all working room. What did they do? They learned the nuts and bolts of the trade: grinding colours, stretching and priming canvases, and so on, to drawing the human face and body from models.

They had the benefit of his sprawling Kunstkammer-like collection of art objects, curios, costumes and studio props. The inventory of his possessions made in lists dozens of paintings by others, folios of prints, scrapbooks, a dozen busts of Roman emperors, scores of "specimens of land and sea creatures", pieces of armour, old weapons, numerous musical instruments including "a wooden trumpet" - what on earth did that sound like? Such things were collected, in quantity, to be used as sources for quotation and examples in an age that did not, as yet, know photographic reproduction.

All this was tremendously valuable for young talent, as were the living models he hired - one need only consider how difficult it would have been for a student to get the opportunity to draw a naked woman: young Dutch painters tended not to be married, for obvious reasons of poverty, but respectable unmarried girls did not pose naked, an activity which in 17th-century Amsterdam was considered fit mainly for prostitutes.

Add to this the obvious prestige of working, even as a studio dogsbody, for a painter of Rembrandt's reputation and one can see why the master was never short of assistants and why they would pay top guilder to work for him. Some of these had no clear relation to Rembrandt except that they picked up some professionalism in his studio - Dou being the clearest example, since there seems to be no possible link between his ultra-detailed, nitpicking miniaturist's realism and Rembrandt's broader and more dashing brushwork.

Some were mediocrities but others were remarkably good, due in part, no doubt, to what rubbed off on them from Rembrandt himself. Moreover, Rembrandt would hardly have wanted to take on duffers, since he profited from their work and had standards to uphold. If one of them did a painting he liked, he was quite capable of signing it with his own name, keeping it and selling it as an autograph work by "Rembrandt".

Criteria of originality and authorship were much more relaxed in the 17th century than they are now. If the mighty Rubens could touch up student work, there was no earthly reason why Rembrandt should not. But this, of course, raises problems for the modern picture-lover, which begin with the supposed supremacy of "handwriting" as a test of authenticity.

Beginning with the pseudo-scientific physiognomist Giovanni Morelli, on whose work Bernard Berenson based his own criteria for identifying Italian artists of the distant past, it was assumed - often correctly - that a painter will reveal who he is in those very parts of the painting over which he takes the least conscious control: the "handwriting", the squiggles and tweaks, with which he semi-automatically draws an ear-lobe, a nostril, an eye.

This is all very well, and it is useful much of the time, but the curious thing about Rembrandt's disciples is that they so often managed to reproduce the characteristic hooks and crotchets of their master's line with astonishing and, it seems, convincingly unconscious fidelity.

Hence the sharp and even embittered character of arguments about Rembrandt attribution. Today the focus of Rembrandt insecurity is the Frick Collection's The Polish Rider, which has been "questioned" as the ominous term has it by the much-feared Rembrandt Research Project, an independent group of experts whose mission is to construct an unassailable corpus of genuine Rembrandts out of the welter of attributions inherited from earlier days.

But it is in certain respects unlike other Rembrandts - starting with the fact that Rembrandt's equestrian paintings are few and far between; in all the body of his work, there is only one other portrait of a man on horseback, the portrait of Frederick Rihel in London's National Gallery, and this prosperous-looking civic guardsman astride his baroque rocking-horse is a world away, both in looks and in feeling, from the bony, Rocinante-like nag that bears its young rider across the canvas on his urgent, inscrutable errand.

The picture was found in a castle in Poland, hence its entirely gratuitous title; but nobody knows who the rider was, or even whether he was, in fact, Polish: probably he is wearing those clothes because Rembrandt had them in the heterogeneous clutter of costumes in his studio.

The art historians, from Julius Held to Kenneth Clark, who have argued that the starting-point of the painting was actually or "possibly", or "probably", or "very likely" or "almost certainly" a skeleton man mounted on a skeleton horse that Rembrandt saw and drew in the dissecting-room of Leiden University may very well be right.

Or not. There can be few paintings of comparable quality of which less is known for sure than The Polish Rider. But the doubts cast on it by the RRP are also guesswork. The efforts to reattribute it to one of Rembrandt's pupils, Willem Drost, about whose life and work very little is known, are quite inconclusive. They are like attempts to "prove" that Hamlet was really written by someone other than William Shakespeare - but someone who was still as good a writer as Shakespeare, for whose existence there is no actual evidence.

Until such a phantom turns up, to imagine Rembrandt without The Polish Rider is rather like trying to imagine Wagner without Parsifal. But there have often been doubts about the authenticity of Rembrandts - not just the obvious fakes or the minor pictures, but about works that were once and perhaps, given the changes of fortune that reattribution brings, should be again placed among the best of his work.

I became a fan of his genius when I was about eight. I had a Ladybird book about great artists. The story of Leonardo da Vinci was like a fairytale — there was a picture of him buying birds at market just so he could release them. And how many copies would The Rembrandt Code sell? To grasp the real wonder of Leonardo you need to look at his drawings. In page after page he studies nature, designs machinery, invents weapons, plans fortifications and seeks the secret of flight.

The greatest of all these visual investigations are his anatomical drawings. He wrote of the dread he felt when he stayed up all night in a dissection room full of cadavers, alone with the dead. Out of these experiments he produced drawings that go — literally — deeper than Rembrandt. His anatomical drawings belong to the Queen and many will be touring the country this year.