Rembrandt’s House Revitalized

Johannes Vermeer’s name is on nearly everyone’s lips these days, but what about his great contemporary, Rembrandt van Rijn? He’s in the news, too, owing to the newly reopened and revamped Rembrandt House Museum, where he lived and worked for close to 20 years.

The stately three-story red-brick building was erected in 1606, the year Rembrandt was born. By the time he bought the upscale property 33 years later, he had become one of the most successful painters, art teachers and art dealers in the country. Here, over the next 19 years, his life unfolded, charted by the creation of masterpieces like “The Night Watch” but also marked by personal tragedy. His wife, Saskia, died here in 1642, just nine months after the birth of their son Titus, the only one of their four children to reach adulthood. In 1658, bankruptcy forced him to sell the house. He lived elsewhere until his death in 1669.

When the house opened as a museum in 1911, the interior had been redesigned primarily as galleries to display the artist’s prints and etchings. Nearly the only period touch was the exterior, which had been restored to its appearance in Rembrandt’s time.

It remained largely unchanged until 1998. Using as a guide the lengthy room-by-room inventory that Rembrandt’s creditors had recorded when he went bankrupt, the museum was then recast as what current museum director Milou Halbesma calls “an honest reconstruction” of the home’s interior when Rembrandt lived there. At the same time, a modern wing was added next door, affording exhibition space, a gift shop and lobby entry to the restored house itself.

The most recent renovation, completed during the museum’s closing from November 2022 until last month, moved staff offices next door from the original building, and refit those areas as new exhibition and teaching spaces as well as a dedicated “etching attic” featuring daily printmaking demonstrations.

But the main attraction remains the rooms that have been refurbished to resemble as accurately as possible Rembrandt’s living quarters and studio space. The goal here, as in other artists’ home or studio museums, is to make a vivid connection with the sensibility and aesthetic of the artist.

“Everything you see is authentic 17th century” in style and origin, Ms. Halbesma says. That includes the sorts of elegant furnishings Rembrandt favored in the entry hall and its adjoining first-floor rooms: the marble floors and fireplace columns; elaborately carved wooden cabinets; colorfully patterned tile work and translucent blue-and-white Chinese Export porcelain. On the walls are numerous paintings by Rembrandt and such contemporaries as his teacher Pieter Lastman and Jan Lievens, a childhood friend who himself became a noted painter.

The expensive décor spoke to Rembrandt’s financial success, while the gallery-like display of paintings advertised the range of work for sale and provided a setting where the artist could meet potential clients.

Most of the objects on display here did not actually belong to Rembrandt or his household, but some did. One of the most notable is his metal token of membership in the professional artists’ Guild of Saint Luke, stamped with his name on one side and the year 1634 on the other.

In the first-floor salon, the family’s main living space, is a box bed. “You can imagine Saskia giving birth there and also dying there,” Ms. Halbesma says. Nearby hangs a copy of Rembrandt’s portrait of her by his pupil Abraham van Dijck.

Up one more flight, and you reach the artist’s studio, where light flows in through four large north-facing windows, a vivid reminder of how central the depiction of light and its power to reveal people and objects was to his painting. An easel with a canvas sits at the ready on one side of the room, and on the other a paint-pot-filled table. There you can watch someone produce paint as Rembrandt’s students did, by grinding mineral pigments and mixing them with linseed oil.

In the adjacent cabinet of curiosities-like prop room you’ll spot everything from shells and minerals to ancient Greek and Roman busts, armor, helmets and decorative feathers. The vast miscellany evokes Rembrandt’s pride as a collector as well as any number of Rembrandt works where such items serve as backdrops or costumes.

Two temporary exhibitions are also on view. “The Art of Drawing: 74 Drawings by Rembrandt, Bol, Maes and Others” from the Peck Collection of the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is on through June 11. Among the highlights are sketches of scenes and figures Rembrandt encountered in and around Amsterdam, capturing their essential nature with quick strokes. A close view of “Seated Man Warming His Hands by a Fire” reveals how Rembrandt corrected and readjusted his depiction of his subject’s hands.

The second exhibit, “Titus Is Back Home: A Son, a Father, a Masterpiece,” consists of one painting only, Rembrandt’s tender portrait “Titus at His Desk,” painted here in 1655 and on loan from Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. As the light falls on the dreamy face of the young boy, staring into space rather than the pile of papers in front of him, he holds his inkwell and pen case, as if wondering what to write, or perhaps sketch, next. Gazing at it, I felt as if Rembrandt himself had invited me to step inside not only his home but his world, adding yet another dimension to my appreciation of his enduring art.