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Saints Men

Rembrandt’s New Testament

By Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Peter C. Sutton, Anne T. Woollett

Throughout his long and extraordinarily productive career, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) turned repeatedly to the Bible as a source of inspiration for his paintings, drawings and etchings. Although his composition, themes and pictorial style changed dramatically over the course of his career, he always demonstrated a remarkable empathy with the human dimension of these accounts, whatever their theological implication. Whether portraying the Old Testament patriarch Abraham preparing to sacrifice his beloved son or the Holy Family at rest in a simple dwelling, Rembrandt transformed the written word into vividly compelling pictorial language, replete with all the text’s nuances of […]

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Endnotes

1.

Jakob Rosenberg, Rembrandt: Life and Work, rev. ed. (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 181.

2.

This entry is largely taken from Arthur K. Wheelock, Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, the Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995), pp. 241–247.

3.

Lentulus is quoted by Rembrandt’s student, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tod de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst anders de Zicht baere Werelt … (Rotterdam, 1678; reprint Utrecht, 1969), p. 105; trans. Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 284.