Nationality: Dutch

Birthdate: 15 July 1606

Date of Death: 4 October 1669

GMC Ranking: 3

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. It is estimated Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.

Unlike most Dutch painters of the 17th century, Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of styles and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes and animal studies. His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age.

Perhaps one of the secrets of Rembrandt's reputation is his variety. Collectors responded to his art relatively early on. The galleries of Brunswick, Cassel and Düsseldorf were formed in the early years of the eighteenth century. Quite often, collectors preferred the artist's earlier pictures. Later in the eighteenth century Sir Joshua Reynolds made a collection of Rembrandt's pictures in which those of the middle period predominated.

In the nineteenth century his late pictures became popular; the Jewish Bride was discovered and became better known than much of the rest of his work. But it has been left to the twentieth century to produce a more balanced assessment of his genius. Blind admiration has gone too far. Rembrandt has been credited by Romantics with painting the spirit of man, which is not the secret of his greatness.

Rembrandt observed the world around him more clearly and with greater insight than any of his contemporaries. In the words of the late nineteenth-century French critic Emile Michel, 'Rembrandt, in effect, belongs to the race of artists who cannot have descendants, the race of Michelangelo, the race of Shakespeare, of Beethoven; like these Prometheuses of art he wanted to ravish the celestial fife, to put the vibrations of life into still form, to express in the visible, that which by its very nature is non-material and undefinable'.