Original subtitles

We begin at the end, with questions.

We gaze upon the face of Rembrandt,

now in his later years, and we question

how the world's greatest painter

ended up alone and penniless.

Making art that wasn't fashionable,

but that would touch humanity for generations to come.

I think we can learn a number of things

in this exhibition of Rembrandt's late works.

One of them is how Rembrandt himself

seems to add up his achievements

and think very deeply and very hard

about what is most important for him to express

in a work of art, whether it's in terms of

the technique or the composition

and the formal aspects of it, or the content of it,

the emotional content or new ways

of interpreting different subject matter.

I think in his late works, I think it's that sense

of psychological engagement, not just on his behalf,

but on behalf of us, the viewer.

It becomes not passive looking, but very active engagement.

We have to work to get to know those people,

and it is like meeting those people,

and that gives him a great sense of relevance across time

because they're historical figures,

but we meet them as if they're in the same room as us,

as if their presence is before us.

That's a very extraordinary thing.

The late period of Rembrandt is the most exciting period

because then Rembrandt is not an artist

looking too much to other artists,

so I think at the end, he is so involved

with his own art that the late works

are yeah, the most sensitive,

the most technically exciting works.

In the 1630s and the 1640s,

Rembrandt was preoccupied with action in his paintings,

and then in the late period, he seems to be

preoccupied with the inner workings of people,

their innermost thoughts and that's really something,

I think it must have been an enormous challenge.

So often Old Master paintings

or drawings or prints can seem a bit remote,

and not really relevant to our lives in the 21st century,

but what I'm hoping is that people will understand

the basic motivations behind these works.

They're very similar to our motivations

and our concerns today.

I hope audiences will have a better sense

of who Rembrandt was as an artist

and a clearer sense of what these works

might have meant for Rembrandt.

Today, historians and art historians

call the 17th century in Holland the golden age.

This nation that hits the pinnacle, in many ways,

of a period of prosperity, one of great cultural riches,

but also social advancement.

The 17th century in some place like Amsterdam

absolutely deserves that terminology.

In the 16th century, the Netherlands was subject

to the Spanish Habsburg rule,

but in the early 17th century,

they gradually and definitively

won their independence from Spain.

They were developing a phenomenally successful world trade,

so you had a nation that was

very excited to be finally independent,

also achieving enormous economic success.

At the same time, people were interested in the arts,

because they're successful, they're independent,

what better to do than to celebrate that?

What's so fascinating about the artistic world

in the Netherlands in the 17th century

is that art was being collected

not just at the very highest level of the elite,

but even bakers and butchers and common tradesmen

had some form of art in their homes.

It was the one bit of Europe which had more political

and religious liberty than any other.

It's also, I think, a reason why the arts flourished.

Not just because there was wealth and commissions,

but also because people were able to be open minded

in their choice of subject matter, too.

Before, you had, in Italy and France,

you had paintings for the churches,

but now in the Netherlands they started to paint

a lot of portraits, the world had changed

in the 17th century for the Netherlands countries,

so that in that surrounding, an artist like Rembrandt

and all of the others could grow to make important art.

It was into this world on the 15th of July, 1606,

that Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born.

His hometown was Leiden, 25 miles from Amsterdam.

Flourishing with profit from the cloth trade,

Leiden was the second largest city

in 17th century Netherlands.

Rembrandt's father was prosperous too,

the owner of a malt mill on the River Rhine,

from where the family had acquired

its surname, of the Rhine.

Rembrandt, the youngest son of nine children,

was under no pressure to continue his father's trade.

Financially comfortable, his parents

concentrated on his education

in the hope that he might one day be of use to the city.

Rembrandt, though, had other ideas.

He wanted to be a painter.

Determined, age 14, he left his studies

to begin a three year apprenticeship

with the popular Leiden artist Jacob van Swanenburgh.

As a young studio assistant, his tasks included

cleaning the studio, stretching canvas

and grinding pigments for his master.

After his apprenticeship, he then traveled

to Amsterdam for six months to train

with the highly regarded Pieter Lastman.

Lastman was important for Rembrandt's formation.

And what Rembrandt really draws from Lastman

is an interest in biblical subjects,

particularly Old Testament subjects.

And the intrigue of those stories,

I mean, they're quite intense

and compelling stories, many of them.

I think Rembrandt would have been very inspired

by close predecessors, two in particular,

Caravaggio and Rubens.

I think what Rembrandt drew from Caravaggio

would have been the drama of his scenes,

his intense manipulation of contrasts of light and shadow,

and a particular earthiness

and observation of just the everyday.

And I think what Rembrandt would have gotten from Rubens

was again, a very dramatic approach to subject matter.

It wasn't only Italian,

the great Italian Renaissance masters

that influenced Rembrandt, but one of his major influences

was Lucas van Leyden, who was the greatest northern

printmaker of the 16th century,

and he came from Rembrandt's hometown, Leiden.

So Rembrandt also had a bond with him because of that,

and Rembrandt saw himself as, I think,

as the heir of Lucas van Leyden.

Still only a teenager,

Rembrandt returned to Leiden intent

on becoming an independent painter.

It was his dream to paint history,

and this is his first signed work,

The Stoning of Saint Stephen,

commissioned for a wealthy businessman in Leiden.

The painter depicts the biblical tale

of death by stoning imposed on a young Christian cleric.

There, among the crowd, is a concerned bystander,

none other than Rembrandt.

The first of the many self-portraits

he would produce throughout his lifetime.

Setting up a studio in his parents' house,

Rembrandt quickly gained stature

and attracted the attention of connoisseurs.

He was spotted by the most influential

of them all, Constantijn Huygens.

He saw in Rembrandt something unique.

The Netherlands was full of artists

who produced pretty landscapes and genre scenes,

but in Rembrandt, Huygens saw the Netherlands's answer

to Antwerp's Peter Paul Rubens.

Rembrandt was already a productive artist,

displaying considerable ambition.

A natural talent, his work was versatile

in subject, encompassing not just religious painting,

but a speciality in single figures

with eloquent emotion on expression.

He knew how to capture polished surfaces of things.

He knew how to highlight the beauty

and the opulence and the sumptuousness,

the textures and materials, and yet he didn't do

any of the tricks that an artist would have wanted,

he didn't show the eyes as the windows to the soul,

the eyes as the great tools of the artist.

In fact, his eyes are like two little black currants,

just stabbed onto a doughy face,

and it was this extraordinary creative disobedience.

He wanted to be successful, he wanted to have the patronage

of all the great people of Amsterdam,

he wanted to be recognized, but he wasn't prepared

to subvert his talent or to do anything to compromise.

In 1631, following the death of his father,

the 25 year old Rembrandt moved permanently to Amsterdam,

the flourishing artistic capital of the Netherlands.

Within a year of moving, Rembrandt was lodging

with a prominent art dealer, Hendrick Uylenburgh,

a specialist in securing commissioned portraits

from Amsterdam's wealthy citizens.

Portraiture offered Rembrandt the easiest entry

into Amsterdam's competitive art market.

Soon, the artist was painting remarkable portraits

of the city's residents.

With animated poses, convincing texture

and clever spotlighting of face and hands,

Rembrandt quickly became one of Amsterdam's

leading portrait painters.

Rembrandt's early success culminated

in this acknowledged masterpiece,

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp,

the chief lecturer of the Amsterdam Surgeon's Guild.

Dr. Tulp occasionally gave public dissections

of executed criminals, and Rembrandt was asked

to capture this event for the guild's board room.

The Anatomy of Dr. Tulp is an extraordinary painting

that he did, because he was commissioned to do

what would have been a fairly stiff, formal composition.

Here were all these surgeons, all very proud of themselves,

all very proud of their art,

and they wanted to be portrayed with the dignity

and the respect they deserved.

And yet, Rembrandt turns it into an extraordinary drama.

He gathers them around the corpse,

and if you look at the painting,

there's an extraordinary sense of thrust and dynamism in it,

because you like at their heads

and they're all peering, it's almost like an arrowhead

pointing directly at the corpse.

And where most artists, previously,

in looking at an anatomical picture

would have, perhaps, put the corpse into more shadow

or veiled the face, he turns this painting

into a memento mori, because there really is

a rather unnerving similarity

between the face of the corpse,

he looks rather like all the surgeons,

so, there but for the grace of God go all of them.

So, although this is a great portrait,

everyone can recognize themselves very very clearly,

no doubt as to who is who, it is also,

they're assembled into a drama

which means much more than a mere

description of physical characteristics.

This painting established Rembrandt

as the leading artist in Amsterdam.

This is the so-called Syndics,

The Sampling Officials of the Draper's Guild.

It's a certain type of group portrait

known as a corporate group portrait,

or a governor's portrait, and it basically shows

governors, or in this case, sampling officials,

seated around a table and this is the only portrait

of this kind that Rembrandt ever painted.

When Rembrandt came to Amsterdam in the early 1630s,

he became the most renowned

and sought after portraitist in the city.

In art theory of the time, portraiture

was not the highest genre, that was history painting,

painting of biblical scenes, mythological scenes,

and portraiture, because it was,

had less to do with the imagination

and more to do with the imitation of nature,

was set on a lower level,

but portraiture paid, and we could imagine

that it was with portraits that Rembrandt

paid most of his bills.

It is one of the impressive features of the painting

that it is so large and that the figures

are more than life-size.

All of the sampling officials look out at us,

and there were some changes made to the painting.

One of the largest changes, the biggest changes,

was in this figure, Volckert Janszoon,

who was first standing upright.

Here in the painting, he's in the process

of raising himself from his chair.

This action, as if in response to the viewer,

as if we've just walked in and he's getting up

in response to our coming into the room,

is quite extraordinary.

And the tablecloth here is painted very thickly,

and coarsely, as if Rembrandt were imitating

with the paint, imitating the actual structure.

It also has an effect on our depth perception,

a pupil of Rembrandt's, Samuel van Hoogstraten,

he later wrote a treatise on painting.

One of the things he discusses

is the concept of (speaking in foreign language),

which has been translated into English as perceptibility,

and he discusses how the eye perceives depth,

and one of the ways it does that

is by things that are closest to the surface,

if they're coarsely, thickly painted,

the eye picks up on that

and things that are further away from us,

deeper in the painting, if those things

are painted smoothly and thinly, they seem to recede.

I think it's his ability to make his sitters appear real.

There seems to be no distance between us,

350 years later and his sitters.

They seem to be in the same room with us,

they seem to be living flesh and blood.

In the case of Rembrandt,

it's probably got very much more

than a decade of pressure behind it as an idea,

and thought behind it as well.

The difficulty for me in deciding about this is,

is it the right moment to do it?

Because can it be comprehensive enough

and have we got the right partner for doing it?

And the Rijksmuseum seemed the perfect partner.

Not so very far away, but far enough away

that we wouldn't share the same exhibition public,

and also, of course, they have such great Rembrandts.

We have great Rembrandts, and between us,

we have lots of friends who've got Rembrandts.

When we have exhibition meetings here

at the National Gallery, the curator

is always asked, well, what do you want

the visitor to feel and think and do

when they're in the exhibition?

And my immediate reaction when they asked me

this question was I want the visitor to fall down

and weep when they get to the final room of the exhibition,

because I think it's gonna be incredibly powerful,

and I know that many of these works

just strike right at my core

and I think both the emotion that Rembrandt

puts into them and draws out of them,

and also, his incredible technique

that he's always attentive to, his technique,

the combination of those two is just gonna be amazing.

Yeah, I think that works.

Well, what you see here is an equestrian portrait

of a person called Frederick Rihel,

who was someone who settled in Amsterdam

I think in the second quarter of the 17th century.

The painting was acquired by the gallery in 1959,

and given a rather quick treatment

to get it on show as soon as possible in 1960.

In the last few years, last few decades,

it became very apparent that the varnish

that was used in that 1960 treatment

had discolored quite a lot,

and the picture was very difficult to see.

A full X-ray of the entire composition

wasn't made until around 2007, 2008,

and that had a very surprising outcome,

that we learned there was a whole other composition

underneath the existing one.

Here's the present image.

At right angles, there is a whole new different composition

of a man standing in a landscape with a staff,

taken quite far, although exactly how far

is difficult to say, and then simply abandoned.

I think knowledge of the underlying composition

has been essential, I think, to guide us in the restoration.

The cleaning process in this restoration

had to do with, certainly, removing their varnish

that was applied in 1960.

Once the cleaning has stopped,

a new brush varnish is applied,

and all the retouchings that occur now

are placed on top of that varnish.

In this case, retouching consists

both of making up for discrete losses, damages,

also reducing the tiny bits of pinpoint loss

and wearing as a consequence

of the picture beneath being exposed.

We don't replicate all of the materials

of Old Master painters, because some of the materials

they used are obviously not very stable,

but what we try to do is replicate

the kind of architecture of the paint layers,

and the manipulation of transparent

and opaque colors, glazings and equivalent,

modern equivalents, stable equivalents

to achieve some of the optical effects that are necessary.

The Rijksmuseum has large rooms to make exhibitions,

and we have place enough to show the finest works.

We've got gathered together of late Rembrandt.

Selecting the works is the one thing,

but arrange all of these works on the wall,

you have to make the display, is yeah,

like a composure, or like a conductor.

We are playing music.

If the public is entering this exhibition,

they shall meet Rembrandt himself,

with three self-portraits, so Rembrandt is himself

are greeting us, and are inviting us

to see his most important works of his late period.

One of the most beautiful pictures

ever painted, it's just so perfect, so right; Lucian Freud.

I have had three masters.

Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; Francisco Goya.

This is one of the most beautiful and moving

of Rembrandt's late history paintings.

It depicts the Roman heroine Lucretia

who was raped by Tarquin.

Rather than live with the shame of having been raped,

she took the decision to commit suicide,

and Rembrandt depicts her in the moment

just after she's plunged the dagger into her own breast.

Her hand reaches up to pull the bell cord

to summon her family members.

When they come, she tells them that

the reasons why she committed suicide,

and then expires.

What's so extraordinary about Rembrandt's depiction

of Lucretia is that he gives such a vivid sense

of the difficulty that she must have gone through

in making this decision, and her resignation to her fate.

And I think that's what Rembrandt

evokes so well in very subtle ways.

The expression in her eyes, the sort of dark hollows

around her eyes, and the deep shadows

of the far side of her face,

and the slight tilt of her head downwards,

it's almost as if she's beginning to fall forwards in death.

A couple of years earlier, in 1664,

he did another painting of Lucretia

that's also in the exhibition.

That depicts her in the moment before she plunges

the dagger in her breast, and it's fascinating

to compare the two images, because the earlier Lucretia

shows her struggling with that decision.

Her eyes are reddened, and there's a glint of tears

in her eyes, that she's really having difficulty

taking that final step,

of plunging the dagger into her breast.

But here, in this painting,

we see her resigned to her fate,

that she is going to die.

The painting is shown in the context

of Rembrandt's late technique.

One thing I find so extraordinary is the contrast

between the very rich painterly application

of paint in her sleeves, it's very textured.

He uses the palette knife to create these,

almost square areas of paint, and you see very clearly

the ridges made by the palette knife.

In contrast to that is the very smooth way

and streaky way that Rembrandt has applied the paint

in her chemise, and you get such a vivid sense

of the softness of that fabric

and these layers of very thin,

almost gossamer thin linen, and the blood

as it seeps through the fabric.

It's not flowing, it's just a gentle seepage

through the fabric, and I think that evokes

in such a wonderful way, that this is a more considered act

than a dramatic sudden plunge, you know,

she's really thought so deeply

and in such a prolonged way, and she's become resolute.

I think this painting is a beautiful example

of Rembrandt's late painting style

because of the variety of ways in which

he applies the paint to the canvas.

If you look at her sleeve, and you look at her chemise

and you look at her face, and her jeweled headdress,

they're all painted in a very different and distinct way.

In that way, Rembrandt evokes

the sense of texture and richness.

Other artists were more precise

in mimicking the details of a particular fabric,

but Rembrandt just suggests the richness and the texture.

I think what sets Rembrandt apart

from other artists is his willingness

to work with paint almost as a sculptor,

not just using a brush to apply it

to a canvas or a panel, but manipulating it, building it up.

Sometimes he used a palette knife to sculpt the paint

on the surface, or he would apply dots and dabs of paint

that really give a crusted impasto to the surface.

He's like an alchemist.

He takes paint, he takes this stuff

which is made of oil and base matter,

and he transforms it into something

which is spiritual, magical, it's an extraordinary trick.

Rough paint is pulled and scumbled and stabbed

and dragged and scratched and molded.

No one would use paint again like that, until Manet or Goya.

This is an artist who knows how to let paint

think for itself, that's what makes him

truly extraordinary as a technician.

In his late work, Rembrandt totally reinvents himself,

basically, and starts experimenting with technique

in a way that he had never done before.

And he paints very broadly and goes wild

with manipulating the paint and also scratching

into the paint for textural effects.

We are trying to figure out, for the exhibition,

when he uses the palette knife,

because it's the same as with the scratching

into the, in paint surface, in one painting,

he won't use it at all, and in the next painting,

he will use it, so he's constantly experimenting it seems.

He doesn't have this set method of, okay,

here a bit of scratching, and here's, applies the paint

with the palette knife, and it's every,

every painting seems to be a new experiment.

He almost tries to be better than before,

so he changed his style, as Picasso also did,

and it was all these periods,

and all his pupils were, lived together with Rembrandt

for some years, for one year or three years,

and they absorbed the style Rembrandt did in that time.

I think people were a bit surprised

and a bit shocked by how freely Rembrandt painted

and this very active surface of the paint.

Rembrandt's palette was quite basic,

and he used lots of earth colors

to give the paint lots of body for that

kind of thick, really textured paint

that he would put on the surfaces of skin and reflective.

He had a couple of things that he would add to it.

He could change the quality of the white

by adding different mixtures in.

This is just chalk, so I can take this now,

and create a lot more body in the white paint.

So just sort of roughing in these dark tints.

So this is just the underpainting, at the moment,

just establishing tonal values.

Rembrandt would've spent, probably quite a long time

establishing tonal value.

But really thinning the paint right down,

creating these thin glazes.

I can start putting in those highlights straightaway.

You can easily refine it, take paint out, move it around.

This would be the way that he starts to establish

a sense of light and shade,

chiaroscuro of light and shade in the painting.

Here, I want just, much thinner glazes.

Little bit of reflected light around the jaw,

and the figure starts to become a little bit more

three dimensional.

You see, little bits of sort of texture

on the surface being picked up,

where he's,

being quite, sort of, free, I think with the materials.

Say this was properly dry,

there's no sense ruining the fabric here,

but he would just put in beautiful sort of

powerful smears of this great rich cadmium red,

and you can tell them in this,

I think there's two kinds of painter.

Those who know precisely where they're gonna end up.

They start off, you know, the Vermeer technique,

the smooth technique, where it is a process

of very very controlled layers of paint,

and you get to the end and you know what the end is,

but I think with Rembrandt, there's the kind of joy

of the feel of the paint.

So then, he might start taking

this dry chalky white and popping it on,

putting on these bits which later on

are gonna reflect physically the light coming off it.

Before, I think, most artists would have just used

powder knives to mix, Rembrandt's really experimenting

in putting on paint with the palette knife,

really enjoying the kind of ridges it creates.

You can pull that off, take off,

a little too much texture.

And you get that kind of wrinkled skin

kind of quality, just like a kind of old person's skin

to make the paint look like skin.

That's where he's going all the time.

Here there are some I sort of put on last week

where it's created all these sort of ridges and texture.

The wash of this very thin paint,

when he puts that over here, and it becomes

really flesh like, so you can see, the paint

sort of gathers against the ridges.

For Rembrandt, I think, it's about this fleshy quality

that he could create.

Technically, he could paint like an academic master,

and he produced these incredibly smooth,

beautifully layered paintings.

Then he experimented with a much looser, rougher style,

and right at the end, then,

he's kinda playing with all of that,

and it's kind of like having a great big box of tricks.

He's not a slave to any technique,

but he can use them all to create whatever effect he wants.

Rembrandt's dream of becoming

a history painter was being realized.

Whether dramatic mythology, or rousing biblical stories,

Rembrandt was proving he could turn his hand to anything.

Rembrandt joined the Amsterdam

Painter's Guild of Saint Luke,

which allowed him to establish a workshop.

Its output was dazzling.

Rembrandt breathed emotional drama

into his narratives, just as he had into his portraiture.

His biblical paintings feature earthy characters

with naturalistic bodies.

Figures are sharply distinguished

with remarkable diversity, and Rembrandt

paints events at the moment of gripping climax.

Rembrandt increasingly captured

a substantial share of Amsterdam's art market.

So confident was he in his own ability,

he began to align himself

with legendary Renaissance artists,

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian,

signing his paintings as they did,

with just his first name, Rembrandt,

and presenting himself as a dashing nobleman

dressed in the outfit

of a 16th century Renaissance courtier.

In 1633, he became engaged to Saskia Uylenburgh,

the cousin of his art dealer Hendrick.

Three days after their betrothal,

Rembrandt drew this intimate portrait of Saskia,

writing, this is drawn after my fiance,

when she was 21 years old.

Saskia's late father had been mayor of Leeuwarden,

the most important city in the province of Friesland.

She was a catch.

It wasn't every day that a miller's son

married a mayor's daughter, and one with a healthy dowry.

Rumors soon spread that the painter

was squandering Saskia's money

on ostentatious display and pomp.

To which Rembrandt replied defiantly with this painting,

flaunting his luxurious lifestyle.

Painters tried to be, really, part of the upper class

in Amsterdam, but then you have also to live

with the conventions they had,

and so you have to be very friendly,

you have to go to every event, and so on and so on.

And I think Rembrandt had a little bit

difficulties with that, he was a very strong man

with a very strong ideas of himself.

He was ostentatious.

In 1639, he bought an extremely expensive house

on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, a street inhabited

by other successful artists and merchants.

Rembrandt would have expected a substantial family

to fill this home, but he and Saskia

were struck by heart breaking misfortune.

Over the years, they lost three young infants to sickness.

Only Titus, a son, survived.

Rembrandt filled his house

with numerous objects and curiosities.

The collection was the mark of a gentleman,

a connoisseur of the world.

Money was of no concern.

He would just make more.

By 1640, Rembrandt was at the height of his profession,

described by the chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers

as one of the most celebrated painters of the century.

His works were bought by the wealthiest men in the city

and beyond, even King Charles the First of England

owned one of his self-portraits.

And here he is, emulating Titian's portrait.

A deliberate and cocky attempt

to claim the crown from the Renaissance masters.

Rembrandt was commissioned to capture

what would become his most famous work,

The Militia Company of District Two,

under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq,

a painting better known as the Night Watch.

Rembrandt was a great baroque master,

you must remember, the drama of the baroque

replaces the cold classical stillness of the Renaissance

when people were posed as if

they were classical statutes almost, often.

So take a great painting, a very famous painting

like his Night Watch, and again, he takes a group

of eminent Dutch burghers, who have commissioned

him to draw them, and he turns it

into this fabulous drama.

This is a painting that moves.

If you look against the background,

you see the lances that they're carrying

all crossing and making angles.

It adds great movement.

There is the captain of the night watch,

standing in the middle, chest puffed out,

great red sash showing what he's doing,

everyone has a role to play.

There are drums, there's movement,

there's a clash of weaponry.

This is a painting that you can actually hear

as much as see, it's a painting to listen to,

and this is where Rembrandt was at his most spectacular.

It wasn't what was expected, he was going to astonish

his admirers, he was gonna grab them into his world

and he was gonna make them a part of it.

1642 was a pivotal year for Rembrandt.

At the peak of his fame and success,

Saskia fell ill with tuberculosis.

Rembrandt captured her last days

in a series of intimate drawings and etchings.

Saskia died on June the 14th, 1642, age 30.

A distressed Rembrandt became

increasingly less productive and unconventional.

With his son still an infant and a workshop to support,

Rembrandt employed a nanny, Geertje Dircx.

She soon became his mistress.

Cohabitation was not unheard of,

but certainly wasn't respectable in a Christian society.

Matters were further complicated

when in 1647, Rembrandt engaged

the even younger Hendrickje Stoffels

as a live-in housekeeper

who quickly replaced Geertje in the artist's affections.

The problems of Rembrandt's private life

did not immediately affect his patronage,

but the artist's output of the 1640s

strikingly departed from the portraits

and history paintings of his first decade in Amsterdam.

Turning to small biblical pictures

and local landscapes, with a growing interest

in experimental techniques and print making.

His work of this period suggests a newfound introspection.

At the beginning of the 1650s, Rembrandt's fortunes

took a turn for the worse.

His business was running into trouble.

His huge house was a liability.

His ostentatious living had led him

down a path towards financial ruin.

His personal life, too, had been compromised.

In 1654, his housekeeper, Hendrickje,

became pregnant with their daughter, Cornelia.

The Reformed Church Council accused her

of committing the acts of a whore

with Rembrandt the painter, and banned her

from receiving Communion.

It was during these troubled times, however,

that Rembrandt's art found new energy and direction.

It's the smallest painting in our exhibition,

and it's also the most tender and enigmatic painting

on the exhibition, and of Rembrandt's late work.

This painting is from 1654, we date the beginning

of Rembrandt's late period to 1651,

because that's the first time

that he begins using very broad

and elusive brushwork in his painting.

It used to be thought that this painting

was actually a sketch, that it wasn't a finshed work of art,

and it appears unfinished in some places

when you look up close.

You can actually see, in parts of the painting,

that the ground layer in her shift here at the bottom

and in her arm, and with only a few spontaneous strokes

of white, Rembrandt has evoked

the white shift that she's wearing.

The model for this painting

may have been Hendrickje Stoffels,

but unfortunately, we can't verify that one way or another.

In 1654, which was an eventful year for Rembrandt,

one of the events in that year

was that Hendrickje was pregnant with their daughter,

Cornelia, and she was called before the Church

by the Church elders, and the Church elders

accused Hendrickje of whoredom.

The point of the painting is that she is unaware of us.

You're telling a story and the rich robes

on that bank behind the figure

indicate that this is a history painting,

a biblical or mythological subject,

and I believe that Rembrandt has depicted here

Susanna and the elders, except,

and you'll immediately say, well, yeah,

but there's only one figure, where are the elders?

I think he's left the elders out

so that we take on the role of the elders,

but this woman doesn't realize that we're present,

that we're spying on her, and that we're lusting after her,

and in the next moment, she's going to be pounced upon

by the elders, and we know that because we know the story.

You also see that he leaves things out, for example,

in the painting of the hand in this work,

it's wonderfully free, and if you look up close to it,

it dissolves into paint, it's no longer a hand.

The viewer uses his own imagination.

We complete the painting.

We take those few little clues that he's given us in paint,

and we make a hand out of it, or an arm,

and it's the same thing with the story.

He leaves something out so that the viewer

can bring his or her own imagination to it

and put that back in.

Etching started, more or less, in the early 16th century

and wasn't much used then, and it was only later

that it started to develop as a medium in its own right.

But Rembrandt is one of the first to, basically,

to broaden the scope and show that you can make shadows

in other ways than just like you do with engraving,

like hatching, hatching, hatching,

and then crosshatching, crosshatching.

But made more, a tonal approach in a way

that was never seen before.

He basically approached etching as if it was a drawing

and completely transforms the medium.

So this is a waxed plate, Rembrandt began using etching,

but then would gradually add areas of drypointing

to the plates after they've been etched

to build up the texture and the tone,

and eventually began to create plates

that were solely drypoints.

For the finer details, he used drypoint,

which is basically etching, but you don't draw in the wax,

but you scratch directly in the copper plate.

So, as I draw a line on the metal,

I'm gouging a deep crevice into the metal,

and as I'm removing the metal from the crevice,

it comes out either side of the line,

and we call that a burr.

If I use light pressure, I'm going to get a very light line,

and there's only a subtle burr on that line.

If I draw a heavy line, using a lot of pressure,

this will be a dark line, and there'll be more of a burr,

so it'll also have more of a velvety texture to it.

At some point, he realized it's one of the side products

of drypoint could be used another way.

One of the things that drypoint does

is if you scratch in the copper plate,

the copper you scratch away ends up causing a rim,

what we call the burr, and if you ink the copper plates,

this burr will keep some of the ink on the copper plate,

which causes a fluffy, velvet like effect to it.

These drypoint lines, they are not sharp and clean,

but they are velvety and it's a beautiful effect.

So I've printed this plate a few times,

and it's started to wear away slightly.

I've lost some of the detail of the figures

that I'm just building up a little bit more,

so I've reinforced the line and the burr.

Rembrandt starts to generate stronger burr

because he wanted this effect.

And is able to create shadows in a way

that was completely novel, that was, nobody else did that.

And he could basically, vary much more between white

and black in very subtle steps

than could have been done before,

where you had to have regular hatching.

Okay, so before printing, you just have to make sure

that there's no loose burrs or shards of metal on the plate.

And then,

using a piece of rubber, I put ink all over the plate,

making sure that it goes into all of the lines.

I remove the surface layer of ink

using a special cloth called scrim

which just takes the ink off the surface of the plate

without taking too much away from my drypoint lines.

Once I'm happy that the plate is inked up correctly,

I'm ready to print.

In his life, he made an incredible number

of paintings, drawings and etchings,

and basically just, time and again,

did the same artistic idea, but in a new way.

He is very experimental in the way he uses etching.

At the time that he started, it was a very young technique.

He basically approached etching as if it was a drawing

and completely transforms the medium.

That's why he was so influential for later print makers

because he really paved the way in technical possibilities.

Rembrandt was always looking for something new,

trying to find what better way can I find

to depict what I wanna do, or what better way

can I find for a technique to show what I want to show?

That's in a very brief summary, what Rembrandt did

and what set him apart from all the other

printmakers in 17th century anywhere.

Rembrandt made this print in 1653,

and one of the unusual characteristics of it

is that it's executed completely in drypoint.

There is no etching at all.

You can see the velvety lines of the drypoint,

and completely tonal shadows to the sides.

There was no line in this etching

that's completely crisp and sharp,

it's all blurred, but you envision completely

what happens on Mount Golgotha when you see this image.

It's a very large print, because usually,

an etching would be like that, or even smaller, or,

but that's a considerable size for a print.

So this is basically a small painting.

What you see here is the crucified Christ,

with the two thieves, but here, you see the centurion

who recognizes that they crucified the wrong person.

So he is kneeling before Christ.

Here you see the Virgin fainting, and being supported

by the apostles, and there is the Apostle John.

There is a lot happening, but it's all part of the mood.

You don't recognize very clearly what everybody's doing,

and they're not like actors participating in a scene,

but they are there, they're grieving about what is happening

and it's a far more mature way of telling a story.

The very dramatic effects Rembrandt achieves here

by basically submerging the sides into the shadow,

and also the figures here, that you can,

in later impressions you can make them out,

but this is a very rich early impression,

and it's basically all, we have to make an effort

to see who is there and what they are doing.

It's almost like a drawing.

It's either an outline,

or it is in darkness, it's very tonal.

He used drypoint to make this etching,

but it has a very important disadvantage.

Burr, that you need for this velvety effect,

wears down incredibly fast.

After about 50 impressions,

he basically had a worn out plate

and he had to find a solution.

What he did is work the copper plate completely over,

then brush it into another composition.

And it's very recognizable still,

but it's not a composition because all of,

most of the figures have changed,

and if you look very carefully,

then you can see, underneath the composition

you can still see traces of the original composition there,

which basically proves it's still the same copper plate,

and that's something that you see often

in his later prints too.

Now he reworks there and combines that

with completely changing the image.

It is innovative, because nobody else did it.

So this is basically unprecedented.

No painter knew so well the extent

of his own powers and his own weakness.

Conscious of the power as well as the necessity of shade,

he took the utmost boundaries of darkness

and allowed but 1/3 of light, which dazzles the eye,

thrown upon some favorite point,

but where his judgment kept pace with his choice,

surrounded with impenetrable shade; J.M.W. Turner.

I feel convinced that Rembrandt would never have achieved

his power of representing character

by a significant play of gestures,

or those strong effects that make his scenes

so truly representative of nature,

if he had bound himself down to a studio method.

Perhaps they will discover that Rembrandt

is a far greater painter than Raphael; Delacroix.

I think one of the most exciting things for me

about this exhibition is the juxtaposition

of paintings, drawings, and prints,

and its particularly with the drawings

that we have such a direct transcription

of Rembrandt's thoughts, if you will,

and what he was observing, what he found worthy

of recording in the moment.

And coming upon this woman, grabbing a piece of paper

and a brush and just quickly, spontaneously,

recording this wonderful wonderful image,

I mean, it is such an intimate glimpse,

because the woman has no idea that this image

is being done, and we would never ordinarily see

this very private glimpse of her life.

What's so particularly remarkable about this drawing

and why we're so fortunate to include it

in the exhibition is the amazing

abstract quality of the brushwork.

When you look at the drawing, it really becomes

this wonderful wonderful abstraction of form.

It's remarkable how Rembrandt

has such a command of the brush.

You can, in a way, follow how he made this drawing.

There are a set of strokes that are very dark

where the brush is more fully loaded with ink,

so clearly that's where he started,

and then you can see the strokes become a bit lighter

as the brush begins to lose the ink.

It's as if Rembrandt knows intuitively

where he's going to need those darker bits,

those darker brush strokes,

so that's where he starts, and the lighter bits,

the contour of the woman's back or her ankle,

that are more strongly hit by the light,

that's where Rembrandt is using a brush

that's almost completely free of ink.

There's really just a ghost of ink

on the surface of the paper, it's so amazingly evocative.

This drawing was probably made about 1654.

It's commonly thought that the model

was his mistress, his common law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels.

Rembrandt is still living in his very grand house

at this point, but I think the financial dark clouds

are beginning to gather.

At the beginning of the 1640s,

Rembrandt had been the greatest artist in Amsterdam.

By the end, he was falling into bankruptcy.

What had gone wrong?

An economic depression that hit the Netherlands,

whether complacent with his artistic success,

or distracted by his turbulent relationships,

Rembrandt had not invested his money well

and he lived beyond his means.

He began to auction off his belongings.

Rembrandt's style was no longer fashionable.

The new generation of painters had emerged,

not inspired by Rembrandt's wild and rough techniques,

but by the international court art of Anthony van Dyck.

Paintings were based on blended brush strokes,

bright colors and classical poses.

Artists like Flinck, Bol, and van der Helst

presented their clients as elegant and idealized.

Rembrandt's work remained boldly unconventional.

It's considered that his late style begins in 1651.

Narratives are reduced to a few quiet figures

trapped in moral contemplation.

Portrait sitters avert their eyes,

or stare out without gesture.

He was obsessive, he was compulsive,

he was fantastically obstinate,

which must have made him ferociously difficult

to deal with, but also made him a great painter

because he obstinately stuck to painting

the way he wanted to paint rather than

the society expected him to paint.

He could be extraordinarily cruel,

but there is also the deep deep humanity

that comes out, so when you look at a painting

like The Jewish Bride, this is a picture

of the most tender love.

The touch between the husband and the wife,

the hands as they just placed with each other.

You can feel almost the pulse of the blood

in the fingertips, it's such a delicate,

such a tender picture.

So it shows the other side of him.

This man was ruthless, and yet somewhere deep inside,

he was attuned like a trilling wire

to human nature and to human feelings.

Technically, Rembrandt continued to break ground.

Nevertheless, in 1656, the artist surrendered

his goods to the Chamber of Insolvent Estates

and was declared bankrupt.

They moved to a more modest house in a poorer area.

His partner, Hendrickje, and his son Titus,

sent themselves up as dealers and employed Rembrandt,

taking control of his finances.

We know of only a few clients from these final years.

The Trips,

the Syndics of the Cloth Makers Guild,

Frederick Rihel.

Against all the odds, the painter received

one final public commission, a work

for Amsterdam's Town Hall,

the largest painting he would ever complete.

This sketchy work of barbaric ritual

hung in the Town Hall for less than a year

before being returned for changes.

Rembrandt, though, wasn't one for compromising.

Instead, he cut up the work into sections.

Well, we don't know the reasons why Rembrandt

had to rework the painting, and why it came back

to the studio, but we can understand it a little bit

if you look to the rest of the building.

The building is a palace in marble.

It looks like a Roman palace from the ancient times.

It is classicistic architecture,

so all of the things had to be done

very fine and very idealized.

He depicted people not as Roman heroes or Batavian heroes,

not appropriate to the burgomasters of that city,

not identifiable for the people of his time.

He had a very rough manner to paint, yeah,

so also this is not the delicate paint,

and to show the one-eyed Claudius Civilis,

is not appropriate to the rules of classicism.

So all of these things together could be the reason why

they denied this painting.

This was not what his clients expected

for a Town Hall in Amsterdam.

Rembrandt's self-portraits.

They showcase a singular defiance.

Dense and textured, here the painter

stands broadly, his expression weary.

These images are responsible for Rembrandt's

reputation as a solitary character.

His beloved Hendrickje died in 1663,

his son Titus in 1668, only 27 years of age.

11 months later, shortly after his 63rd birthday,

Rembrandt also died and was buried here

in the Westerkerk, in an unknown grave.

Rembrandt did about 80 self-portraits,

and this one, in his later life,

is important because there's a confidence to it,

and it's technically fantastic,

in his composition, in his use of color,

in his brushwork, different types of brushwork,

as well as these dark eyes, this stare

that kind of draws you into the painting,

and you can't quite grasp his emotional state.

It's at a very interesting time in his career.

He's had financial difficulties,

he's been declared bankrupt, his mistress has died

just in 1663, not that long before,

so there's been great sadness in his personal life.

And we don't know why he painted

so many self-portraits in his later life.

He obviously painted portraits throughout his whole career.

There might have been a demand for them,

also, he may just have been,

it was a form of him painting and experimenting

on perfecting the portraits.

The brushstrokes are interesting in this

in that they're very loose, you can't really tell

the detail, and so if you look at his golden fur collar

to the paintbrushes to the palette,

and his hands, you can hardly distinguish his hands,

so there's really interesting brushwork going on here

in the lower part of the painting.

And then, of course, you've got the device

drawing you into the face with the light

and the impasto, there's white in his nose,

white in his hair to draw you into his face.

There's been X-rays taken of him, in 1970,

and it shows that he is changing composition

as he goes along, so previously in the X-ray,

you can see that he's at more of an angle,

his shoulders more of an angle,

and he's in the act of painting.

So, Rembrandt's obviously made a decision

to change hands with the mahl stick and brushes

and turn the shoulder out so he's facing directly

at the audience, so that's obviously a major change,

compositionally in how you read the painting.

But he is an artist, but he's not an artist at work.

And there's lots of theories about the circles

and why they're there, and there is no definitive answer.

Theories have ranged from, it has some religious meaning,

is it to do with the perfection of God,

or something maybe more sort of mundane.

One of the more popular theories at the moment

is that it refers to Vasari's Lives of the Painters of 1550,

and in that publication, he talks of the artist Giotto

being able to do a perfect circle in one stroke,

so it may refer to that,

although I find that a little unsure of that,

simply because they aren't perfect circles, are they?

They're broken circles, so debate will continue

about what the circles mean.

You can imagine him sitting in front of a mirror

with a canvas in front of him, and looking at himself,

and all the while, all the time that it takes

to apply the paint to the canvas

and try to capture not just tints of light

or flesh tints, but the emotion, the feeling

which is lying behind them, like the bones under the flesh.

That all that time, he must have been thinking

and meditating, so you actually see thought,

you see reflection.

One really important thing to notice

about the 17th century and its part

in the creation of modern mentality, really,

is the rediscovery of the concept of the self.

And you think about Rembrandt's self-portraits

as very much an examination of somebody aging,

somebody having life written on his appearance,

and an exploration of that.

The American critic Harold Bloom claims

that Shakespeare had reinvented the concept of the self

in the soliloquy in his plays.

But actually, of course, it was emerging anyway

from the Renaissance idea of the importance of life

in this world, in our own time.

And all through the 17th century,

you get this increasing debate

about what the self is, and how it persists through time.

There is some speculation that Rembrandt

and Descartes knew one another,

they were both in Leiden roundabout 1629, 1630.

They both had the same patron, Constantijn Huygens.

It's quite likely that two relatively young men,

who met and talked and discussed ideas

wouldn't have been conscious of the fact

that both of them were gonna become world famous,

and yet they might have planted seeds of ideas

in one another's minds, and in the case of Rembrandt,

because you know, this essay in the study of the self,

which his self-portraits represents,

is one of the great contributors, really,

to thinking or making us think about the idea of the self

as it emerged in the 17th century.

Descartes is famous, of course, for the saying,

I think, therefore I am, and this is something

that comes out of his most famous philosophical work,

which is called The Meditations on First Philosophy,

and in that work, he was trying

to find the basis for certainty.

On what rock can we build our knowledge?

And he began by saying, look, if we could call

everything we think we know into doubt,

is there anything that we simply cannot doubt?

And the answer, of course,

is that you can't doubt that you exist.

I believe that I've seen all of the self-portraits,

and I'm very struck by the record they represent,

not just of a face as it changes and ages,

but also of the way in which it represents

the inscription of experience onto a face.

You could almost pinpoint, in a way,

those moments in his life where things were changing,

where sorrow underlay the representation that he gave

of himself, and his own fascination at the idea

of this self examination.

You have a very moving representation of the way

that his life, which, had a lot of sorrow in it,

a lot of tragedy, and a lot of difficulty,

a lot of struggles, and he was a person

perfectly conscious of his genius,

of his capacity, and tremendously interested

in his materials, how you achieve those wonderful

rich effects of light in painting.

It's very very natural, and very easy, indeed,

to draw a connection between Descartes in the

Second Meditation saying, I think,

I think, therefore I am, that is,

the realization that the one great point of certainty

is one's own existence, and then

in the Rembrandt self-portraits, especially those late ones,

the full, sometimes sorrowful and tragic realization

that one is, and that this is the center of the universe.

No, we think, sometimes, about the self

as the beginning of experience

and the focal point of it, but this deep, heavy

consciousness of existing, of being the I am

of one's world, is fully present

in Rembrandt's self-portraits, and therefore,

it's very very natural to draw that connection

between Descartes and Rembrandt.

We have here a figure who is thinking on canvas.

Maybe it's unique in the annals of art,

because who else has given us such an autobiography in oils

as Rembrandt has done?

Rembrandt isn't just a painter of his era,

he was a magnificent painter of his era.

He broke new ground, his obstinance,

belief in his own vision, and that he was

a completely unique one-off, I think he's one

of the very few to whom the word genius

can be applied without it being bandied around idly.

And yet, what makes him lasting,

what makes him important to us now

is that he touches upon unchanging human truth.

You see that he is telling you something

which is very true about mankind,

and this is always true, and had been, in all times true.

He is not so fixed in a special time

and fixed in a special manner of fashion,

he is standing above the, his own time.

And this make his art so everlasting.

He wasn't satisfied, he kept working it

until he was satisfied, and I find that

absolutely remarkable and incredible

in an artist and a human being.