Rembrandt

The Dutch Golden Age of painting spawned some of history's greatest artists and artisans, but few can boast the genius and legacy of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669). Despite never leaving his native Netherlands, Rembrandt projected his oeuvre past the boundaries of his own experience, producing some of art's most diverse and impactful works across portraiture, biblical, allegorical, landscape, and genre scenes. In all their forms, Rembrandt's paintings are built of intricacies-the totality of each subtle facial wrinkle, gaze, or figure amounting to an emotional force that stands unmatched among his contemporaries and artistic progeny alike. Each work is imbued with feeling. Biblical scenes, like Bathsheba at her Bath, become vehicles for meditations on human longing, probing depths beyond that which is canonized in scripture or depicted in other representations. His portraits, be them of wealthy patrons or tradesmen, communicate the essence of an individual through fine demarcations, their faces bathed in an ethereal light against darkened earthtones.