Late Rembrandt art exhibition in Amsterdam

Stuart Forster reports from the Late Rembrandt art exhibition in Amsterdam.

Disclosure: Some of the banners and links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Rembrandt in Amsterdam

Rembrandt van Rijn is one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated artists. He lived from 1606 to 1669 yet it took until 2015 for an exhibition of the artist’s late works to be shown in the city where he spent the majority of his adult life.

The exhibition Late Rembrandt, displaying works created from 1651 onwards, was held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The ninth child in a miller’s family, Rembrandt was born in Leiden, enrolling in the city’s prestigious university aged 14. He did not move to Amsterdam until he was 25. Yet ahead of other creators from a richly productive era of artistic patronage, Rembrandt is associated with the city’s Golden Age.

He married a wealthy woman, Saskia van Uylenburgh, and in 1636 the couple moved to Jodenbreestraat, today the site of the Rembrandt House Museum. He lived and worked there for two decades before being declared bankrupt.

Rembrandt House Museum

In parallel with Rijksmuseum’s exhibition, the Rembrandt House Museum showed Rembrandt’s Late Pupils – Studying under a Genius. The exhibition examined relationships between the master artist and pupils studying under him from 1652 until his death.

Sixty drawings and 20 paintings – from private collections and international museums – helped elucidate the teaching methods employed by Rembrandt. His influence over young artists – including Willem Drost, Nicholaes Maes and Abraham van Dijck – also comes under scrutiny.

Of course, Rembrandt is best known for his group portrait The Night Watch, which he completed in 1642. The celebrated work is today displayed in the Rijksmuseum, hanging in a grand room that’s known as the Rembrandtzaal, in honour of its creator.



Royal Palace Amsterdam

The work was hung previously in Amsterdam’s town hall on Dam Square, today the Royal Palace. During the early part of 2015, a reconstruction of Rembrandt’s painting The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis was projected onto the palace, where it was previously displayed.

The canvases of both of the vast paintings were long ago trimmed down, so the projection marked a rare opportunity to see The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis in its entirety.

The National Monument and Royal Palace on Dam Square, Amsterdam.
The National Monument and Royal Palace on Dam Square, Amsterdam.

Late Rembrandt exhibition

The Late Rembrandt exhibition was developed in collaboration with the UK’s National Gallery, where it was displayed from 15 October 2014 to 18 January 2015.

However, the paintings Jacob with the Angel, Portrait of Jan Six, Self-Portrait as Zeuxis Laughing and The Family Portrait were shown only in the Amsterdam leg of the exhibition. In total, more than 100 of Rembrandt’s paintings, drawings, etchings and prints were brought together from art museums and international collections.

As he became older, Rembrandt’s work become more introspective and his output decreased. Yet he continued to be technically innovative. Girl at a Window, painted in 1651, utilises broad brush strokes – a technique that preempts a facet of Impressionism, the school which evolved more than two centuries later.

In painting the sleeve of Lucretia, on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Rembrandt applied overlapping layers of paint with a palette knife. Today there is nothing remarkable about using a knife but Rembrandt, remarkably, was the first artist to paint in such a manner.



Rembrandt’s innovation and etching

The exhibition has ten themed areas, including Experimental Technique, Self-portraits and Intimacy. Works such as The Jewish Bride, Young Woman Sleeping and The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild are celebrated for their intimacy.

Rembrandt rejected the accepted conventions of beauty and ugliness. He painted and sketched from life, resulting in works depicting an older woman at her bath, the execution of a criminal and the dissection of a criminal’s brain. There’s realism in his works unlike few artists of his time.

The interplay of light and shadow in a number of his etchings evokes masterful plasticity. Even in this area, Rembrandt was innovative, developing the dry-point technique of etching.

Map of Amsterdam

Zoom into or out of the map of Amsterdam below to find places of interest:

Google Map showing the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
 

Travel to Amsterdam

Schiphol Airport is approximately 30 minutes’ by rail from central Amsterdam.



Amsterdam Centraal Station has a Eurostar station for direct connections with London’s St Pancras International.


Hotels in Amsterdam

Search and book accommodation in Amsterdam via HRS:



Books about Rembrandt van Rijn

Appreciate art by Rembrandt van Rijn and planning a trip to Amsterdam? You can buy the following books from Amazon by clicking on the links or cover photos:

Taschen’s Rembrandt: The Complete Paintings:

The National Gallery published Rembrandt: The Late Works:

Rembrandt: His Life and Works in 500 Images by Rosalind Ormiston:

Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art by Michael Zell:

Further information

The Late Rembrandt exhibition closed on 17 May 2015. View works by Rembrandt in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum (Museumstraat 1) and Rembrandt House Museum (Jodenbreestraat 4). See the museum websites for information about ticket prices and opening times.

Combine a boat tour with an introduction to places associated with the artist’s life during an Amsterdam canal cruise (Blue Boat Company, tel +31 (0)20 6791370).



If you enjoy the idea of participating in walking tours in Amsterdam, there’s a Rembrandt in Amsterdam walking tour available via Viator. It visits places in the city where he lived and worked and the Wersterkerk (West Church), where Rembrandt is buried.

Find out more about museums, art galleries and other attractions on the I Amsterdam tourist information website. The Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions site also has ideas for travel to the Netherlands.

Thank you for visiting Go Eat Do and reading this post about the Late Rembrandt art exhibition in Amsterdam. You may appreciate this article about celebrating the Dutch Golden Age.

Photos illustrating this post are by Why Eye Photography.

If you enjoyed this post why not sign up for the free Go Eat Do newsletter? It’s a hassle-free way of getting links to posts on a monthly basis.

‘Like’ the Go Eat Do Facebook page to see more photos and content.

Dutch Golden Age artists on the facade of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Dutch Golden Age artists on the facade of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

2 Comments

Post a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.