The Innovations of Rembrandt

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The Innovations of Rembrandt

by Virgil Elliott


Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is considered by many to be the greatest artist of all time. His genius was apparent as soon as he arrived on the scene, already surpassing the established Masters of the day, including his teachers, by the tender age of twenty-three.


Rembrandt had learned all that was then known about oil painting while still a student, and immediately began to add his own discoveries to the technical knowledge of his time. To this day Rembrandt's best works remain unsurpassed and serve as inspiration to the rest of us who paint.


What techniques he was taught may be discerned by studying the works of his instructors, Jacob Isaacxszoon Van Swanenburch and Pieter Lastmann. The genius of Rembrandt is immediately apparent by the extent to which he so obviously surpassed both his teachers, and in how early in his career he did so. Nonetheless, his training under them was an important factor in his artistic development and should not be minimized. Both teachers seem to have possessed a working knowledge of the painting methods in use at that time, which formed the basis of Rembrandt's early work.


This would include the Flemish Technique (painting in transparent and opaque color on wood panels primed white), the Venetian Technique (executing a neutral or monochrome underpainting on canvas, then painting over it in transparent and opaque color in stages), and the Direct Painting Technique (á la prima or premier coup, i.e., painting in one step in full color).


Various examples of his work show that he was not limited to any technique, but employed them all, the choice depending on which approach best suited the subject in question, and for what purpose the painting was intended. His facility with all three soon led him to combine aspects of one with another, and to add innovations of his own.


Some of his paintings are on wood, executed in what appears to be essentially the Flemish Technique; some small studies on wood panels were done in a variation of the Direct Painting Technique, and some on canvas in both the Venetian and Direct techniques.


The primer for the panels is white, probably glue-chalk gesso, covered with a transparent brown imprimatur of Burnt Umber mixed with varnish, which creates the golden glow characteristic of his work. His canvases are primed with a warm grey made from lootwit (lead white with chalk, ground in linseed oil) and Raw Umber, or sometimes with white lead alone, with a transparent brown imprimatur.


Rembrandt was an extremely versatile artist and did not follow an unthinking repetition of the same procedure every time. He thought his way through each painting from the genesis of the idea to the last brush stroke, never lapsing into a routine approach. He exploited to the fullest the qualities of transparency and opacity, relying on the underglow of light coming through transparent color for many special effects, with opaque lights built up more heavily for the brightly lit areas.


Colors were sometimes modified by subtle glazes, semiglazes or scumbles. Transparent darks and opaque lights were orchestrated to play against one another for maximum visual impact and depth, probably influenced by the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio.


Clues as to his choice of primer may be seen in areas where he has used a sharpened brush handle to scratch through wet paint in order to indicate bits of hair. This is evident in a very early self-portrait, now in The Hague, and in many other portraits. The primers and/or imprimaturs thus revealed show that he followed no one single procedure, but varied the choices, based on the effect he was after. Scratching with a sharpened brush handle into wet paint was one of his earlier innovations.


Not long afterward, he began building up the opaque passages in his lights more heavily, and texturing them to take on the physical convolutions of the lighted surfaces of his subjects, most notably the skin textures of male subjects, including himself. The texture was created, or at any rate can be duplicated, by applying the paint somewhat heavily with large brushes, then gently passing a large, dry, soft-hair brush over the surface of the wet paint, back and forth, until the desired texture is attained.


The consistency of the paint was modified by the addition of a medium containing a long oil (sun-thickened linseed or walnut oil or boiled oil) and sometimes a resin, to give it a long brushing quality. Paint exposed to the air for several hours begins to take on this same characteristic, as the oil begins to polymerize.


Subsequently Rembrandt began to superimpose glazes of red over these textured passages when dry, then wipe them off with a rag, leaving traces remaining in the low spots to create an even more convincing texture of rough flesh. Someone, at some point, said you could pick up a Rembrandt portrait by the nose.

As he began to expand the effect of glazing over dried impasto to other textures as well, he devised a method employing two whites; one for impasto and one for smoother passages. The impasto white was faster-drying, probably made so by the addition of egg, and possibly chalk, into the formulation. In any case, it was very lean, and consisted mostly of white lead with a minimum of binder. He began applying it more and more heavily as the first stage of a two (or more) stage operation which was finished with transparent glazes and wiping to create fantastic special effects.


The most extreme example of this is the man's glowing, golden sleeve in the painting referred to as "The Jewish Bride," in the Rijks museum in Amsterdam. The brilliance of this effect cannot be obtained in any other way. He has used the same technique on the bride's costume in the same painting, but here the underpainting contains vermillion, and is glazed with red lakes, perhaps Rose Madder. The gold chain in "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" is done in much the same way. The underpaint appears to have been troweled on with a knife or some sort of flat stick, then sculpted before it dried.

In the Lieutenant's uniform in "The Night Watch," Rembrandt used this method, but with less heavy impasto, for the ornate brocade work. The wet underlayer, which in this case included Lead-Tin Yellow, was worked with sharpened brush handles and other tools while soft, then allowed to dry before the darker glazes were applied. By wiping the glazes off while they were still wet, Rembrandt was able to create a bas-relief effect of remarkable three-dimensionality as the glaze remained in the nooks and crannies. By glazing again, this time with transparent yellows and/or browns, instead of Ivory Black, he gave the textures a rich, golden glow.


He is known to have sometimes used Asphaltum as a glaze, for the most part successfully overcoming its tendency to crack and wrinkle by keeping its percentage low in a mixture with Sandarac varnish. The reader should note that both Asphaltum and Sandarac are problematic substances, risky to use in painting, and are unnecessary now that synthetic substitutes for both have been developed, which do not share the defects of the older materials.

A full range of transparent browns may be mixed from Transparent Oxide Red and Phthalocyanine Blue, the relative warmth or coolness adjusted by varying the proportions of the two, while the Sandarac is best replaced by an alkyd painting medium.


Rembrandt had at least one life-size jointed mannequin, on which he would pose the clothes of his sitters. The mannequin, unlike a living person, would remain motionless for as long as Rembrandt needed to paint the clothing, the folds remaining undisturbed for days, or weeks, if necessary. A live sitter would have to visit the bathroom, eat, sleep, move around, etc., and the folds of the cloth would never be likely to resume their previous shape afterward. The use of the mannequin may or may not have been Rembrandt's innovation, but it was, and is, a good idea regardless.


We cannot expect to be able to rival the great genius of Rembrandt merely by following some of his procedures and using the same tools and materials he used. These are only a small part of his brilliance as an artist. At the core was his intelligence and artistic sense, his ability to constantly strive to improve upon what he had already done without losing sight of the original concept for the painting, to devise techniques on the spot, which would create the effect he was after.


We might hope to achieve the best results by adopting this same attitude towards our own work, rather than by attempting to reduce the methods of a great genius whose works we admire to a simple formula and then following it, unthinking. This is not meant to disparage technique, but to show it in its proper context. The more we know of technique, the more effects we have at our disposal, to serve our creativity and inspiration in the execution of our finest conceptions.


If there is anything remotely approaching a formula for creating Great Art, it might be stated as the combination of knowledge and intuition in a single endeavor, plus a lot of work.