Original subtitles

Welcome to Great Art.

For the past few years we've been filming the biggest exhibitions

in the world about some of the greatest artists and art in history.

Not only do we record these landmark shows,

we also secure privileged access behind the scenes of the galleries

and museums concerned. We then use the exhibition as a springboard

to take a broader look at these artists.

In this film we focus on what was genuinely a once-in-a-lifetime show

entitled Rembrandt: The Late Works,

which, after a 15-year gestation period,

began at London's National Gallery in 2014

before transferring to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum in 2015.

Rembrandt is unquestionably one of the greatest artists

ever to have wielded a brush and, like so many great artists,

it was in his later years, living in Amsterdam,

that he created his most significant works.

It's almost as if when an artist reaches middle age or beyond

he or she can combine their knowledge and experience

with a freedom and realisation that now is the time to do what they want,

irrespective of the demands of others.

And that leads to extraordinary creativity and innovation.

This exhibition focused on these later works,

though in the film we look at his entire life.

This is an artist that still today artists look back to and learn from.

Four centuries may have passed but as both the exhibition and our film show

there are very few artists like Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.

'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.'

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, you know, 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 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 "de Rijn".

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, aged 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 travelled 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 every day.

And I think what Rembrandt would have gotten from Rubens

was again a very dramatic approach to subject matter.

'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 painting 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 emotional expression.'

He knew how to capture polished surfaces of things,

he knew how to highlight the beauty and the opulence

and the sumptuousness of 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 blackcurrants

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 recognised,

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 the 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.'

This is the so-called Syndics, the sampling officials

of the Drapers' Guild. It's a certain type of group portrait,

known as a corporate group portrait, or a governors' 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 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 can 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,

Volkert 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.

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 the painting.

One of the things he discusses is the concept of "kennelijkheid",

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're 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.

The Rijksmuseum has large rooms to make exhibitions

and we have place enough to show the finest works

we could get together of late Rembrandt.

Selecting the work is one thing

but arranging all these works on the wall, to make the display,

is like a composer

or like a conductor playing music.

(speak Dutch)

If the public is entering this exhibition,

it shall meet Rembrandt himself with three self-portraits,

so Rembrandt himself is greeting us and inviting us

to see the 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, Velazquez 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 resign to her fate,

that she is going to die.

The painting is shown in the context of Rembrandt's 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.

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 jewelled 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 moulded. 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.

Rembrandt's palette was quite basic, he used lots of earth colours

to give the paint a lots of body for that thick, really textured paint

that he would put on the surfaces of, like, 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 tones.

So this is just the under-painting at the moment,

just establishing tonal values.

Rembrandt would have spent probably quite a long time

establishing tonal value.

By really thinning the painting 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

that sense of light and shade,

the chiaroscuro, the light and shade in the painting.

Here I want just much thinner glazes,

a 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 been quite, sort of, free with the materials.

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've used palette knives to mix.

Rembrandt's really experimenting and putting on paint

with the palette knife.

Really enjoying the kind of ridges it creates.

You can pull that off.

Don't want 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 are some I've put on last week,

where he'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 gathers against the ridges.

For Rembrandt, I think, it's about this fleshy quality 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 he's playing with all of that,

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

You know, 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 realised.

Whether dramatic mythology or rousing biblical stories,

Rembrandt was proving he could turn his hand to anything.

Rembrandt joined the Amsterdam painters' Guild of St 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 fiancee, 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.

Rumours 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 try to be really part of the upper class in Amsterdam,

but then you have also to live with the conventions they had,

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 of difficulty with that.

He was a very strong man with 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 heartbreaking 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.

A 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 I 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 II

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 statues most 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 they are carrying,

all crossing and making angles, and it adds great movement.

There is the captain of the night watch, standing in the middle,

chest puffed out, a 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 going to grab them into his world and 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 14th, 1642, aged 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 Dircks.

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 printmaking,

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.'

'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 had 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.

A 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 brushstrokes,

bright colours and classical poses.

Artists like Flinck, Bol and van der Helst

presented their clients as elegant and idealised.

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 way 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 place to 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 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,

set 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 Clothmakers' 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.'

We don't know the reasons why Rembrandt had to rework the painting

and why it came back to his studio,

but we can understand it a little bit

if we 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 the things had to be done very fine and very idealised.

He depicted people not as Roman heroes or Batavian heroes,

and not appropriate to the burgher-masters of the city,

not identifiable for the people of his time.

He had a very rough manner to paint,

and also this is not a 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.

Eleven months later, shortly after his 63rd birthday,

Rembrandt also died,

and was buried here in the Westerkerk, in an unknown grave.'

Rembrandt isn't just a painter of his era,

he was a magnificent painter for his era.

He broke new ground. His obstinate belief in his own vision

meant 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 banded around idly.

And yet what makes him lasting, what makes him important to us now,

is that he touches upon an 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 his own time

and this makes 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.

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