III.

Early Painting

Rembrandt probably created about 400 paintings in addition to an enormous number of drawings and etchings. The style of his earliest paintings, executed in the 1620s, shows the influence of his teacher, Pieter Lastman, in the choice of dramatic subjects, crowded compositional arrangements, and emphatic contrasts of light and shadow. The Noble Slav (1632, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) shows Rembrandt's love of exotic costumes, a feature characteristic of many of his early works.

A magnificent canvas, Portrait of a Man and His Wife (1633, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), shows his early portrait style—his preoccupation with the sitters' features and with details of clothing and room furnishings; this careful rendering of interiors was to be eliminated in his later works. Members of Rembrandt's family who served as his models are sometimes portrayed in other guises, as in Rembrandt's Mother as the Prophetess Anna (1631, Rijksmuseum), or the wistful Saskia as Flora, (1634, the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg).

Perhaps no artist ever painted as many self-portraits (about 60), or subjected himself to such penetrating self-analysis. Not every early portrayal, however, can be interpreted as objective representation, for these pictures frequently served as studies of various emotions, later to be incorporated into his biblical and historical paintings. The self-portraits also may have served to demonstrate his command of chiaroscuro; thus, it is difficult to tell what Rembrandt looked like from such a self-portrait as the one painted about 1628 (Rijksmuseum, on loan from the Daan Cevat Collection, England), in which deep shadows cover most of his face, barely revealing his features. On the other hand, in none of these youthful self-portraits did he attempt to disguise his homely features.

Biblical subjects account for about one-third of Rembrandt's entire production. This was somewhat unusual in Protestant Holland of the 17th century, for church patronage was nonexistent and religious art was not regarded as important. In Rembrandt's early biblical works, drama was emphasized, in keeping with baroque taste.

Among Rembrandt's first major public commissions in Amsterdam was the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632, Mauritshuis, The Hague). This work depicts the regents of the Guild of Surgeons gathered for a dissection and lecture. Such group portraits were a genre unique to Holland and meant substantial income for an artist in a country where neither church nor royalty acted as patrons of art. Rembrandt's painting surpasses commemorative portraits made by other Dutch artists with its interesting pyramidal arrangement of the figures, lending naturalism to the scene.