Works by Rembrandt

In his portraits and self-portraits Rembrandt nearly always turned the face so that the ridge of the nose marked the edge between light and shadow.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, a miller's son, opened a studio in his home town of Leiden in 1625 with his friend Jan Lievens. In the Self-portrait of about 1628 the light grazes one cheek and an ear while the eyes sit in shadow, and fine lines scratched into the wet paint with the handle of the brush pick out the curls. The two friends also made tronies, heads of a costumed model that cost less than a portrait and portrayed no one; some of the men below in turbans or feathered caps are tronies.

At the end of 1631 he moved to Amsterdam and, for the first time, took portrait commissions, with success; more of the works below come from the 1630s than any other decade. In 1634 he painted Marten Soolmans and his wife Oopjen Coppit life-size and standing at full length, the only couple he ever painted so. Both wear black set off with lace, down to the lace rosettes on Marten's shoes, and Oopjen, then 23, was expecting her first child. In The Night Watch of 1642 he was the first to show the sitters of a group portrait in action: the captain in black orders the march while his militia company falls in. Its darkness comes from age, not from night.

In the 1650s his brushstrokes grew more visible, against the fashion for fine, detailed work, and he was said to keep visitors from peering too close. In The Jewish Bride, from about 1665–69, the man's gold sleeve is built up in heavy ridges and the paint is scratched with the brush handle, as in the curls of about forty years before. Prints are nearly as common below as paintings: he etched from 1626 until 1660, when he had to sell his press. The Three Crosses is pure drypoint; when the plate wore down after about forty impressions he reworked it, and in this fourth state dense slashing lines sink the onlookers into darkness around the lit figure of Christ. Others often went on printing from his plates until at least the 1800s, and many plates were reworked as they wore.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Rijksmuseum, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art.