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MĂźnster (1648), are magnificent examples of his talent. Terborch was the Grand Master of Dutch painting, which began to show signs of decline soon after his death on the 8th of December 1681.
Rembrandt and his Time
58. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, aged 23, 1629. Oil on wood, 89.7 x 73.5 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was initially directed by his father to seek a scholarly career, but was able to assert himself and was finally allowed to follow his aptitude for painting. He was barely able to follow this ambition in Leyden, a city in which trade, business and scholarship were of higher value than art. Rembrandt served his apprenticeship with the Italian-inclined Jacob van Swanenburgh, who in turn had studied under Adam Elsheimer in Rome. Adam Elsheimer tended above all towards Caravaggio and painted mostly biblical and mythological subjects in small formats. But Rembrandt had little feel for this direction. Rembrandt only returned to Leyden in 1623 and trained himself; totally released from the ideal of the academician, he selected Nature as his teacher and then relied on his own observations. Besides quill and pencil, his first method of expression was quickly and surely the etching needle. The first spark of his genius was not in his paintings but his etchings. While his earliest known paintings St. Paul in Prison (1627) and The Moneychanger (1327) (pp. 85, 86-87) are clearly his first forays into the medium, his etchings of the period show that in this art he had reached absolute mastery some years earlier. One such masterwork of etching in which the strongest effects were achieved with the simplest means is Rembrandt’s Mother (1628). Etchings played a large part in the artistic career of Rembrandt. For him they were not a reproductive but a self-creative art form. What he could not or did not wish to express quickly enough with the brush, he trusted to his etching needle. For this reason, his art can only be appreciated in its full scope when, in addition to the 300 to 350 paintings he left behind, one adds the almost 1000 drawings and also the approximately 300 etchings in which he expressed his thoughts. After overcoming his first difficulties, Rembrandt’s painting capabilities developed themselves quickly. The year 1631 brought forth the magnificent Holy Family, a painting of great accomplishment. It shows his complete independence and his fundamental realistic concept of nature but also his quest to explain and idealize nature through the magic of life and colour. In this combination of simple nature with a high idealism of colouristic expression lies the essence of the artistic importance of Rembrandt. At the end of 1631, he decided to leave Leyden and to seek a wider field of activity in Amsterdam. His painting now began an approximately twelve-year period of free artistic creation that resulted in a long series of masterworks.