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.

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 that 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 Harmanszoon 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 Prosperus II, 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.

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 Svannenberg.

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 Austria,

to Amsterdam for six months to train with the highly regarded Peter 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.

Still only a teenager, Rembrandt returned to Leiden

intent on becoming an independent painter.

It was time to paint history.

And this is his first signed work,

The Stoning of St. 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,

Constantine 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' 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 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 the prominent art dealer Hendrik Ullenberg.

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 artists.

The artist was also known as the

The Sampling Officials of the Drapers 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 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 enough

in 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,

Volker Dielenzon,

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 von Hochstraten,

he later wrote a treatise

on painting.

One of the things he discusses

is the concept of Kenlichkeit,

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,

living flesh and blood.

In the case of Rembrandt,

it's probably got very much more than a decade

of pressure behind it, that's 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?

Then the Rijksmuseum seemed the perfect partner.

Not so very far away, but far enough away

that, you know, 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 works is the one thing,

but arrange all the works

on the wall.

To make the display is like a composer

or like a conductor playing music.

Closing this is, I don't think, possible.

And then you could place this group

somewhere else.

You're rewarded here with many pieces.

Yes.

And also very special pieces.

And then you go with two more

with two contentious things,

and then you go with more hard-hitting things.

With the final shot, yes.

So that you really have it like,

so, yeah.

If the public is entering this exhibition,

they shall meet Rembrandt himself

with three self-portraits.

So Rembrandt himself are greeting us

and 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, 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,

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,

these 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 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 canvas

and put 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.

Rembrandt's palette was quite basic.

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, 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 underpainting at the moment,

just establishing tonal values.

Rembrandt would have spent probably quite a long time

establishing tonal value.

By 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

that sense of light and shade,

the chiaroscuro, the light and shade in the painting.

Here, I want just much thinner glazes.

A 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,

you know, where he's being quite sort of free,

I think, with the materials.

Say this was properly dry,

there's no sense really of the fabric here,

but he would just put in beautiful sort of powerful smears

of this great, rich cadmium red,

and you can tell, I mean,

I think there's two kinds of painter.

There's those who know precisely where they're going to 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 going to reflect physically the light coming off it.

Before, I think, most artists would have just used palette knives to mix.

Rembrandt's really experimenting and putting on paint with the palette knife.

Really enjoying the kind of ridges that 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, that someone sort of 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 sort of,

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 kind of playing with all of that.

And 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 realized.

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 Olympe,

the cousin of his art dealer, Hendrik.

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.

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.

I think Rembrandt had a little bit of difficulties 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 St. Anthony Bracestrat, 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 Jans Olers 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 2, under the command of Captain Franz Baninck Koch.

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 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've 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 going to grab them into his world and he was going to make them a part of it.

1640.

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, 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,

Gietje Dirks.

She soon became his mistress.

Cohabitation was not unheard of, but certainly wasn't respectable in a Christian society.

The matters were further complicated when in 1647,

Rembrandt engaged the even younger Hendrika Stoffels as a live-in housekeeper

who quickly replaced Gietje 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.

Turned into small, biblical pictures and local landscapes, with a growing interest in experimental techniques and printmaking,

his work of this period suggests a new-found 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, Hendrika, 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 in 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 finished 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 Hendrikje 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 Hendrikje

was pregnant with their daughter, Cornelia,

and she was called before the church by the church elders.

And the church elders accused Hendrikje 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, as depicted here,

sees on that and the elders, except 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.

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?

What had happened?

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,

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, Boll 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 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, Hendrika, 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 Tripps,

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.

This is his first painting.

We don't know the reasons

why Rembrandt had to rework the painting

and why it came back to a 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 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,

so this is not a delicate paint.

And to show the one-eyed Claudius Civilis

is not appropriate to the rules of classicism.

So all 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 Hendrika 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 of 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's 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.