Rembrandt: the most exciting artist of the 17th century.

In 1632 Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (the man in the black hat) asked Rembrandt to paint a group portrait of the Amsterdam surgeon’s guild. Every winter, Tulp taught the guild about the workings of the human body by dissecting a corpse. Normally, group portraits are pretty stiff affairs, with a row of people staring straight ahead. But not this one. Rembrandt painted the surgeons in action. He introduced movement to the painting by having them all look in different directions: at the corpse, at the book, at you. Just like you’ve opened the door of the dissecting room and walked right into this scene. But is it actually correct, what we see?

The bible tells us that Susanna was the god-fearing wife of a rich man from Babylon. She would regularly bathe in the pond in her garden. One day, two old men hide so they can watch her bathe. You can see them (just) on the right in the bushes. They try to force her to have sex with them by threatening to spread rumours about her. Rembrandt paints the moment when the men first speak to Susanna. She cannot see them, and she looks anxiously at us. Suddenly, we are involved in the scene. She tries desperately to cover her naked body. By making the men almost invisible and focusing all the attention on Susanna, Rembrandt makes the situation even more dramatic.

Lots of things are idealised in 17th-century art. Things were made to look better than they really were. Rembrandt did not do this. He was interested in real life, and he wanted to show how things really were. He painted people just as they were, with wrinkles, rotten teeth and genuine emotions.

He studied people very well, especially their personality and their facial expressions. He did the same with these two men, too. He might have met them on the street in Amsterdam. There was a black community living not far from his house. How did these men feel? Writer Reggie Baay has a few ideas:

No other 17th-century artist painted themselves as often as Rembrandt did. There are about 80 self-portraits of Rembrandt, when he was young, when he was old (like this one), and in various roles. There are portraits of Rembrandt as a beggar, an artist, a figure from the bible and a soldier. He rarely wore clothes from his time in his portraits. He usually wore historical costumes, clothes that had been out of fashion for a hundred years. As if he wanted to place himself outside his own time. The beret he is wearing here was no longer worn in the 17th century, which is quite surprising for an artist who liked to paint life as it really was.