Rembrandt House Museum

Museum · JodenbuurtAmsterdam,Netherlands

The Amsterdam house Rembrandt bought at his peak and lost to bankruptcy, refurnished from the court inventory that listed everything auctioned off.

The Rembrandt House is the brick house on the Jodenbreestraat that Rembrandt bought in 1639, at the top of his career, for far more than he could afford. He lived and worked here for nineteen years, ran a busy studio with pupils, and filled the rooms with art, weapons, shells, casts and curiosities. You walk through it room by room: the reception room hung as a showroom, the box beds, the kitchen, the cabinet of props, and the studio with its high north window. The rooms can be this precise because of the bankruptcy. He never cleared the mortgage, was declared insolvent in 1656, and over the next two years the house and everything in it were auctioned. The court ordered an inventory first, room by room, and the restoration follows that list. The etchings are the other reason to come. A near-complete set is shown in rotation — printed small, worked over obsessively, the private half of a painter the world knows through enormous oils.

Worth knowing

Good to know

North light does not move — that is the whole reason the studio faces the way it does: the light in the room barely changes between morning and evening, which is what a working painter needed.
The clutter is documented, not decorated — every object is placed according to the inventory taken when he went bankrupt, which listed the contents room by room.
The etchings repay slow looking — they are small and dense, and he reworked the same plate repeatedly, so successive states of one print sit side by side.
A house, not a gallery — the rooms are domestic and there are not many of them, and it works best paired with the big Rembrandts across town rather than instead of them.

Things to do

1
Stand where the easel stands
The studio takes up the best room in the house with the highest window, facing north. Put yourself at the easel position and look at the light on the wall — flat, cool, unchanging through the day. Every decision about how his portraits are lit starts in this room.
2
Watch a plate being printed
A free demonstration runs daily in the studio, alternating between paint-making and etching. On an etching day you watch ink worked into the lines, the surface wiped back, damp paper laid on and rolled through a press under real pressure. It takes a few minutes and explains the prints better than any label.
3
Go into the room he kept his props in
One upper room is filled the way the court's list says it was: plaster casts of antique heads, coins, helmets and armour on stands, stuffed animals, minerals in trays. He drew from these, dressed sitters in them and paid for them with money he did not have. All of it went under the hammer with the house.