Small town boy

Published 17 April 2006

We are used to thinking of Rembrandt van Rijn as Holland's greatest painter, yet as a young man he wasn't even the top artist in the small town of Leiden. William Cook revisits the master's early struggles

In the Lakenhal Museum, in the quaint Dutch town of Leiden, there is a picture that sums up the strange allure of Rembrandt van Rijn. At first glance it doesn't look like much - an adept but humdrum history painting. Yet the face of one young man stands out from the crowd. The bright eyes look familiar, but it's the bulbous nose that gives the game away. This is Rembrandt's first self-portrait - one of many treasures tucked away in the home town of Holland's greatest painter.

From the way the press has covered his 400th anniversary, you might think that Rembrandt was born in Amsterdam. "Amsterdam's favourite son" was how the Independent described him. This misconception is nothing new. Amsterdam appropriated his tercentenary, too. If the painter had merely been born in Leiden, this would be bad enough. But Leiden wasn't just Rembrandt's birthplace: it was where he became a painter, and this unsung town provides a unique introduction to his life and art.

The first surprise about Leiden is how easy it is to get to. It's only 17 miles from Schiphol Airport - almost as close as Amsterdam. The second surprise is how much there is to see: not only works of art (there are several Rembrandt shows here this year) but the fabric of the town that made him. Many of the buildings he would have known are still standing. The street plan is the same. Leiden has a population of fewer than 120,000. It was already half that in Rembrandt's day. With its wide, peaceful waterways, lined with handsome merchant houses, the townscape is much as it would have been in the early 17th century.

Rembrandt was born in the right place at the right time. By 1606, Leiden was the second town of the new Dutch Republic, being situated midway between the commercial hub of Amsterdam and the political powerhouse of The Hague. Although the town suffered enormously in the Spanish siege of 1573-74, which wiped out a third of its population, it quickly recovered. The first university in the Netherlands was founded here in 1575, bringing printers and booksellers to town, as well as students and academics. To replenish the shrunken workforce, immigrants were welcomed, whatever their religion. This was a broad-minded, mercantile metropolis - built on freethinking and free trade. Between 1580 and 1620, its population quadrupled, prompting Rembrandt's father, a mill owner, to branch out into real estate.

Rembrandt's birthplace was demolished in 1929 (the heritage industry took a while to reach Leiden) but the Latin School where he acquired the classical education that informed his adult art is still standing. This was also where he learned to draw. He enrolled at the university at the age of 14, and though the tax-free beer and wine were probably bigger attractions than the lectures, he sketched its human and equine skeletons, and a student exemption from national service left him more time for painting. Unlike his father or his brothers, he did not have to serve in the local militia. His elder brothers had followed their father into the mill trade, but by now Harmen van Rijn was sufficiently flush to indulge his fifth son's artistic ambitions.

In 1621 Rembrandt was apprenticed to the town's leading painter, Jacob van Swanenburgh. After three years in van Swanenburgh's studio (today a trendy boutique), he left Leiden to finish his apprenticeship with Pieter Lastman, one of Am- sterdam's leading painters. Yet six months later he returned to Leiden as an independent artist. These were the years that shaped him. By the time he went back to Amsterdam, nearly seven years after that, his art was fully formed.

The Lakenhal Museum displays a compelling group of paintings that show how Lastman influenced Rembrandt, and how Rembrandt finally broke free from him and became his own man. Lastman's Baptism of the Eunuch is proficient but stilted. Rembrandt's picture of the same subject is a lot more lively. The focus is tighter, the brush strokes are more energetic, and the scene is full of human drama. He was still only 20, but all his defining attributes are already there.

"His development as a painter was spectacular," says Christiaan Vogelaar, the Lakenhal's chief curator. "His technical skill is developing from painting to painting. He's like Picasso in the 20th century, always busy with his hands and trying something new. He was a very alert, very fast artist, and that makes him very special - that you can tell from the beginning."

Leiden was the ideal place to get started as a painter. The merchants of this thriving linen town at the mouth of the Rhine were rich enough and smart enough to pay good money for decent paintings, and as Leiden had no artists' guild, Rembrandt was not beholden to a workaday cartel. Moreover, it was the home town of Jan Lievens, one of Holland's most prodigious painters, who had studied under Lastman a few years earlier. Rembrandt teamed up with him, and an exceptional partnership began.

Rembrandt's collaboration with Lievens mixed co-operation with competition. They painted many of the same subjects, and even shared a studio. Their association is one of the most intriguing episodes of Rembrandt's life. Vogelaar compares it with the relationship between Picasso and Braque, or Raphael and Michelangelo. They helped each other out. They also spurred each other on. What makes their relationship so fas-cinating is that although Rembrandt was already regarded as a promising young painter ("highly esteemed, though pre-maturely", as one contemporary critic grudgingly put it), it was Lievens who was the undisputed star.

the most successful painter in Leiden, let alone the Netherlands, and he soon found himself eclipsed by one of his own pupils, another local artist called Gerard Dou. Dou specialised in meticulous yet superficial paintings, whose chief selling point was their pedantic mastery of minute detail. Although Rembrandt's market remained largely domestic (at least during his lifetime), Dou was soon selling all over Europe.

It wasn't until the 19th century that Rembrandt became known as the Netherlands' most prestigious painter. If you had come to Leiden as a connoisseur 200 years ago, you would have come to see Dou. Rembrandt and Dou even collaborated on some paintings, but as the Lakenhal display demonstrates so eloquently, it is hard to imagine a starker contrast with Rembrandt's expressive and perceptive style.

"Rembrandt was regarded as someone who lacked the academic outlook," says Christiaan Vogelaar. "Rembrandt paints with shit," declared one of his blunter critics, yet that muddy palette and bold brushwork are a large part of what makes him so accessible today.

By 1630, Leiden's boom years were almost over. The linen trade was in recession, and beggars (rather than burghers) became prevalent in Rembrandt's art. Prosperity and religious toleration had gone together in Leiden (the Pilgrim Fathers spent 11 years here, between leaving England and sailing to America), but a theological dispute between reactionary Calvinists and progressive Remonstrants had divided the town along sectarian lines. Dissenters were prosecuted, and with religious fundamentalism on the rise, Rembrandt became dangerously isolated. In 1631 he left for Amsterdam. He never lived in Leiden again. After 25 years, his historic home town had finally become too small a canvas for his art.

"Rembrandt the Narrator: etchings from the Frits Lugt collection" is at the Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, 28-32 Oude Singel, Leiden (00 31 71 516 5360; www.lakenhal.nl) until 3 September. For more information, contact VVV Holland Rijnland (00 31 71 516 1211; www.hollandrijnland.nl)

Post this article to