Early Painting
Rembrandt created more than 600 paintings as well as many drawings and etchings. The style of his earliest paintings, executed in the 1620s, shows the influence of his teacher, Pieter Lastman, in the choice of dramatic subjects, crowded compositional arrangements, and emphatic contrasts of light and shadow. The Noble Slav (1632, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) shows Rembrandt’s love of exotic costumes, a feature characteristic of many of his early works. A magnificent canvas, Portrait of a Man and His Wife (1633, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), shows his early portrait style – his preoccupation with the sitters’ features and with details of clothing and room furnishings (this careful rendering of interiors was to be eliminated in his later works). Members of the Rembrandt family who served as his models are sometimes portrayed in other guises, as in Rembrandt’s Mother as the Prophetess Anna (1631, Rijksmuseum), or the wistful Saskia as Flora (1634, the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg). Perhaps no one artist ever painted as many self-portraits (about 60), or subjected himself to such penetrating self-analysis. Not every early portrayal, however, can be interpreted as objective representation, for these pictures frequently served as studies of various emotions, later to be incorporated into his biblical and historical paintings. more...