You don’t need to be an art expert to appreciate Rembrandt as an artistic genius, whose work has given pleasure to millions.
Rembrandt Van Rijn was born 400 years ago on July 15 1606 in Leyden in the Netherlands. His parents were not wealthy. His father was a miller and his mother a baker’s daughter.
His parents, though, were Calvinistic and strict in their religion. Rembrandt was the only one of their six children who survived infancy. He left school at the age of 14 to go briefly to Leiden University and then to become apprenticed to Jacob van Swanenburgh, a local artist, for three years. Rembrandt didn’t follow his style of painting, but developed his own, using light and shadow and human activity and emotion, to great effect. The backdrop to all his art is the Protestant ethos of 17th-century Netherlands, yet his art has a universal appeal, as the greatest Dutch artist of his century.
