The Leiden period (1625–31) of Rembrandt

Over the course of 1625, Rembrandt settled in Leiden as an independent master. During the following six years, he laid the foundations for many of his subsequent works and preoccupations. His earliest paintings relied heavily on Lastman’s work. In several instances, he took apart, as it were, the colourful compositions by Lastman and reassembled them into new compositions. (Later, although in a less drastic fashion, Rembrandt’s own pupils would also produce variations on the basis of Rembrandt’s own works.) For an aspiring painter, this was one of the typical methods employed to develop a personal style under a master’s guidance. Given the fact, however, that Rembrandt painted his variations on Lastman’s prototypes after he had returned to Leiden as an independent young master, one can speculate that Rembrandt actually may have been trying to emulate his former teacher by choosing the latter’s subjects but completely “rephrasing” them.

During his Leiden period, Rembrandt’s production as a painter was mainly devoted to small-scale history paintings and tronies (single figures in historicizing, Middle Eastern, Asian, or imaginary costumes that connote old age, piety, soldierly bravery, Asia, the Middle East, transience, and so on). Tronies were not meant to be portraits, although individuals must have posed for them (among them Rembrandt himself, in the mirror). Also during this period, Rembrandt may have shared a studio with Lievens, who, like Rembrandt, had received his final training with Lastman—although six years earlier. The two young painters experimented with the consistency of paint, attempting to use variations in the paint surface to render different materials. It may well be that Lievens had a stronger influence on Rembrandt in these early years than vice versa. The fact that, about 1630, they both several times painted the same subject (such as the Raising of Lazarus) might suggest that they were competing with each other.

In 1628 or 1629 Rembrandt finished the Judas Repentant and, among other works, painted The Artist in His Studio. After amazingly rapid changes in style from 1625 onward, Rembrandt reached a first major peak in his artistic development in the late 1620s.

The paintings he created soon after leaving Lastman still have a waxworks quality, with evenly lit, colourful figures acting in a clearly organized space. The revolutionary change that took place in Rembrandt’s style between about 1627 and 1629 involved the role of light. By concentrating the light and by exaggerating the diminuendo of the force of light in relation to the distance from the light source, Rembrandt arrived at what could crudely be termed “spotlight” effects. In order to create convincing light effects, Rembrandt—like Caravaggio, his great Italian precursor in this field—had to compensate by leaving large areas shrouded in shadow.

In 1628, in particular in the Peter and Paul Disputing, Rembrandt developed a method by which the lit elements in the painting are basically clustered in one area, in such a manner that little shadow is needed to separate the various forms. By assembling light hues of yellow, blue, pink, green, and other colours, he developed a system of bevriende kleuren (“kindred [or related] colours”). This area of the painting was surrounded by coherent clusters of darker tones that occupied the foreground and background and especially the edges and corners of the work. Through this method Rembrandt not only created a concentrated, almost furnacelike, intensity of the light, but he also obtained a strong unity in his composition. This unity enabled the viewer’s eye to grasp the image in one glance, before focusing on the details.

In order to achieve this result, Rembrandt had to sacrifice strong, saturated colours, since these would impair the desired effect. He also had to sacrifice much detail in order to maintain tonal unity throughout the painting. One could speculate that these pictorial dilemmas eventually led to an artistic crisis that may have become manifest during the work on Night Watch (see below), which was in fact meant to be a scene lit by daylight.

Other developments in Rembrandt’s Leiden period, such as his activity as an etcher and a teacher, would also prove to be important for his whole artistic career.

Etching

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About 1628 Rembrandt made his first etchings. Unlike drawing, etching is not a natural counterpart to painting, and his decision to begin etching meant taking a significant new direction in his career. Much of his international fame during his lifetime would be based on the widely disseminated prints he produced from the 300 or so etchings he made over the course of his career.

Analysis of Rembrandt’s early etched oeuvre gives the impression that he was basically self-taught in this field. Whereas Rembrandt’s contemporaries adopted the regular, almost stylized manner of applying lines and hatchings that could be found in the much more common copper engravings, Rembrandt almost from the outset used a much freer technique, which at first strikes the viewer as uncontrolled, even nervous. Thanks to this new technique, however, he succeeded in developing a method of working that appears partly sketchlike, yet which could also be described as painterly. The painterly quality of his etchings is mainly due to the way in which he achieved an extraordinarily suggestive play of light and dark and how he created a convincing sense of atmospheric space using different methods of hatching.

As early as the 18th century, specialists had thoroughly described and explored Rembrandt’s etched oeuvre, mainly for the benefit of print collectors. In the process, much attention was paid to the different stages—the so-called “states”—through which many of Rembrandt’s etchings evolved as well as to the striking variety of papers upon which the etchings were printed. The latter fact led to the general belief that Rembrandt printed his etchings himself. About 1990 the technique of X-ray radiography was applied to the watermarks on the paper; this technique made it possible to reconstruct editions of prints and, as a result, to obtain greater insight into Rembrandt’s studio practice in this field.