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 here are 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 the most sensitive,

the most technically exciting works.

In the 1630s and 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 notion that it's 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, in France, 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 Netherlandish countries so that in that

surrounding an artist like Rembrandt and all the others could grow to make important art.

It was into this world on the 15th of July 1606 that Rembrandt Harman's own 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 Rijn,

from where the family had acquired its surname of Derijn.

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 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 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.

It wasn't only Italian, the great Italian Renaissance masters that influenced Rembrandt, but one of his major

influences was Lucas von Leiden, 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 von Leiden.

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 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 Ullemberg,

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 Nicholas 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 boardroom. 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 look 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 recognise 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 Drapers Guild. It's a certain

type of group portrait known as a corporate group portrait or a governor's portrait and 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 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, Volker Djansson,

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 Hoogstraaten, 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 liners 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.

When we have exhibition meetings here at the National Gallery, the curator is always asked, well, you know,

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 going to 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 going to be amazing. Yeah, I think that works.

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 discoloured 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 wholly 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 the 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, you know, 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 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 modern equivalents, stable equivalents, to achieve some of the optical effects that are necessary.

The Rijksponsum 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 that arranged all these works

on the wall. To make the display is like a composer or like a conductor playing music.

This set is, I think, not possible. And then you could place this group somewhere else.

And then you could place them. You could be given a lot of vivid painting and some unique parts.

Yes. And you could get with two traditional pieces and then you could build more portraits,

so you could say something about you could get in the line.

Yes.

We can see that from these parts here.

If the public is entering this exhibition, they shall meet Rembrandt himself with three self-portraits.

So Remmel is himself 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 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 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.

In his late work, Rembrandt totally reinvents himself, basically,

and starts experimenting with technique in a way that he had never done before.

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 paint surface.

In one painting, he won't use it at all, and then in the next painting, he will use it.

So he's constantly experimenting, it seems.

You know, he doesn't have this set method of, okay, here, a bit of scratching, and here's all applies.

The paint with the palette knife, and every painting seems to be a new experiment.

He always tries to be better than before, so he changed his style, as Picasso also did, with all these periods.

And all his pupils 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. He used lots of earth colours.

To give the paint lots of body for that kind of thick, really textured paint that he would put on the surfaces,

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 straight away.

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 reflective light around the jaw.

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 them, 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 an 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 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 Ollemberg,

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 fiancée when she was 21 years old.

Saskia's late father had been mayor of Leovaden,

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 tried 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 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 Braystrat,

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 Ohlers

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 France Baninck-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 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.

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 Dirks.

She soon became his mistress.

Co-habitation 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 Endrika 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 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, Endrika, 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 Hendrikja 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 Hendrikja was pregnant with their daughter Cornelia and she was called before the church by the church elders.

And the church elders accused Hendrikja 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 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 and 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 and 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 in 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,

something like hatching, hatching, hatching and then cross hatching, cross hatching, 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 gradually add areas of dry point 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 dry points.

For the finer details, he used dry points, which is basically etching, but you don't draw in 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 darker 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 that one of the side products of dry point could be used in another way.

One of the things that dry point does is if you scratch in a copper plate, the copper you scratch away ends up causing a rim, what we call the burr.

And if you ink the copper plate, this burr will keep some of the ink on the copper plate, which causes a fluffy velvet-like effect.

So these dry point lines, they are not sharp and clean, but they are velvety and 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.

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 dry point 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 printmakers, 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 want to do,

or what better way can I find for 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 the 17th century anywhere.

Rembrandt made this print in 1653, and one of the unusual characteristics of it is that it's executed completely in dry point.

There is no etching at all.

You can see the velvety lines of the dry point, and completely tonal shadows to the sides.

There is no line in this etching that is completely crisp and sharp.

It's all blurred, but you envision completely what happens on Mount Kolkata when you see this image.

It's a very large print, because usually an etching would be like that, or even smaller, 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 he 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 is doing, and they are not like actors participating in a scene, but they are there.

They are 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 you have to make an effort to see who is there and what they are doing.

It's almost like a drawing. It's either in 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 works it into another composition,

and it's very recognisable still, but it's not a composition, because 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, that he reworks the wear 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 one third of light, which dazzles the eye thrown upon some favourite point,

but where his judgement 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 it's 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, you know, 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, Hendrik Justoffels.

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 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 Dijk.

Paintings were based on blended brushstrokes, bright colours and classical poses.

Artists like Flink, 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 placed 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 Trips.

The Syndics of the Cloth Makers Guild.

Frederick Riehl.

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 change.

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 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, Endrika, 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 Vesterkirk.

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.

It's technically fantastic in his composition, in his use of colour, 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 and perfecting the portraits.

The brush strokes are interesting in this, in that they're very loose.

You can't really tell the detail.

So if you look at his golden fur collar, to the paint brushes, 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 off 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 shoulder's more of an angle.

And he's in the act of painting.

So Rembrandt's obviously made a decision to change hands with them all sticking 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.

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

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 Vassari'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 on flesh tones, 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.

When you think about Rembrandt's self-portraits, it's 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 around about 1629, 1630.

They both have the same patron, Constantin and 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 going to 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 faces, the 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, you know, had a lot of sorrow in it, a lot of tragedy,

and a lot of difficulty, a lot of struggles.

And here 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, 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, even tragic realization that one is,

and that this is the center of the universe.

You know, 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 animals of art,

because who else has given us such an autobiography in all else 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 obstinate belief in his own vision meant that he was 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.

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