Rembrandt’s Death Marked

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31981, 7 May 1969, Page 23

Rembrandt’s Death Marked

(N-Z-P-A.-Reuter) AMSTERDAM. This year marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Rembrandt van Rijn, one of the greatest artists of all time. It might be a time of mourning for some who think they hold his paintings.

There are 650 paintings attributed to Rembrandt in the collections of museums, institutions and individuals. Some experts believe this figure is too high and that the gifted son of a Dutch miller painted not more than 450 canvasses.

The famous Bredius catalogue, published in 1936, listed 600 paintings. But the new edition, due later this year, is expected to show a smaller number.

Even the great Rijks museum is not exempt from worry. Professor Horst Gerson, a Rembrandt expert, claims the museum's 1965 purchase "The Holy Family in the Evening” was not by Rembrandt and says he will reveal his reasons in a book due for publication soon. But this aside, the Netherlands is preparing further honours tor one of its most illustrious sons. The tricentenary of his death on October 4,1609, is being commemorated by exhibitions of his works in many cities on both sides of the Atlantic Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis and New York among them—the publication of new books about him and his works and the erection of a statute near the Amstel River In Amsterdam.

The most important of the exhibitions is being organised

in Amsterdam, where he lived from 1631 until his death.

Rembrandt’s earliest known work, “Jesus Casting the Money - Changers from the Temple” dates from 1625. About the same time he became the acknowledged master of etching,' a technique not previously brought to such perfection. With the death of his father in 1631, Rembrandt left his native Leyden for Amsterdam and was commissioned to do what became one of his most celebrated canvasses, “Prof. Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson,” in which he used a method of picturing muscles developed earlier by Leonardo da Vinci. This painting hangs in the Mauritshuis Gallery in The Hague. Already famous, Rembrandt in 1634 married Saskia Van Yulenburgh, daughter of the former Mayor of Leeuwarden.

His “Portrait of Saskia” is now in the Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. He then made the financial mistake of his life—he bought the imposing house in the Breestraat which is now a museum containing an almost complete collection of his etchings.

He managed the down payment but the instalments were too much for cn artist who liked to live well and he had years of financial hardship ahead of him. Saskia died in 1642, two . ears after giving birth to her fourth child. Titus, the only one of her children to survive her.

In the same year Rembrandt completed his masterpiece, “The Night Watch,” a break with artistic tradition in its use of light and dark. Because some of the faces were in twilight there were complaints from the sitters —the

military company of Captain Frans Banning Cicq and Lieutenant Willem Van Ruytenbzurch—and abuse from critics of a later generation. But since the early days of the nineteenth century it has been recognised as .a work of genius. For their 1600 guilders the grumbling Dutch burghers bought themselves immortality. “The Night Watch” has been in the Rijksmuseum since 1885. It drew 880,000 visitors last year.

In 1657 Rembrandt suffered the humiliation of having part of his assets publicly auctioned and the next year his house and the rest of his possessions were put on the block. He found a place in the Rozengracht, a lower class dis. trict, and there at 63 he died. He was buried in or near the Westerkerk in Amsterdam.