Rembrandt van Rijn

After serving his first apprenticeship with Jacob van Swanenburgh in his home city of Leiden he continued his training with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. Rembrandt refused to be bound by rules and experimented freely in the areas of composition, paint handling and texture rendering. He also used powerful light-dark contrasts to intensify the sense of drama in the scenes he depicted. Early in his career he painted relatively precisely and accurately, but with time his brushwork became increasingly loose. Rembrandt regularly received prestigious commissions. One was for his best-known and largest painting The Night Watch. Instead of making a static portrait, in this painting he captured a dynamic moment, with each figure performing some form of action. In addition to this masterpiece, the Rijksmuseum collection holds 24 other paintings, 64 drawings and some 1300 prints by Rembrandt.