Rembrandt van Rijn

The towering figure of Dutch Golden Age painting, and arguably the greatest portraitist in the history of European art. Rembrandt was born in Leiden, the son of a miller, and trained briefly with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam before setting up his own studio. His rise was rapid and spectacular: by his late twenties he was the most fashionable portrait painter in Amsterdam, capable of commanding fees that made him wealthy. The Night Watch (1642), a colossal group portrait of a civic militia company, is the most famous Dutch painting in the world and was recognized immediately as a breakthrough work. But the personal catastrophes that accompanied the second half of his career — the death of his wife Saskia in 1642, bankruptcy in 1656 when he was forced to sell his house and collections, the death of his companion Hendrickje Stoffels and then of his son Titus — are inscribed in his work. The more than forty self-portraits he made across his life constitute a private autobiography unlike anything else in art: from the confident, richly dressed young master of the early work to the naked, hollow-eyed old man in the great final self-portraits of the 1660s, they track the accumulation of experience and loss with a directness that still stops visitors in their tracks. Rembrandt's technique — the building of paint surfaces through layers of transparent glaze and opaque impasto, the orchestration of warm light from a concentrated source against deep shadow, the psychological penetration of facial expression — has been studied by every serious student of painting since his death. He never recovered his early commercial success after bankruptcy, but the artistic work of his last two decades is the most profound of his career. He died in Amsterdam in 1669, a few months after his son Titus.