A large painting laid flat on a padded examination table with a lamp raking across its surface from one side

Raking light

Set a lamp almost level with the paint and the surface stops being a picture for a moment: the lead white stands up in ridges high enough to cast a shadow of its own.

Baroque painting of civic guardsmen in dark clothing gathered with muskets and pikes — The picture as it survives: trimmed on all four sides in 1715, and known at full size only from an earlier copy.Photo: La ronda de noche, por Rembrandt van Rijn · Wikimedia Commons

The Pictures

The Night Watch was cut down to fit a wall

Painted in 1642 and cut down in 1715 to fit a wall in the town hall; the missing figures survive only in an earlier copy. The strip lost from the left edge held two figures; the cut edges are still readable on the canvas itself.

Read the entry

Keeping Rembrandt scholarship alive.

Organisations examining the same paintings, plates and papers we write about.

Founders of the free edition

Section supporters

Reading-room supporters

One plate, three pictures

He reworked plates rather than replacing them. Drypoint raises a burr that holds ink richly and wears away after a few dozen impressions, so two impressions of one state are already different objects.

Etching depicts three crucified figures on a hill surrounded by crowds and horsemen under rays of light

The Three Crosses

He reworked the plate so heavily between states that the later impressions are effectively a different composition.

Plates & States

A copper plate on a bench with an engraving needle and a magnifier beside it, raking light on the scratched surface

Drypoint burr

The ridge thrown up by the needle holds ink and prints velvety black, and it wears away after a few dozen impressions.

Plates & States

Etching depicts Christ presented to a crowd from an elevated stone platform amid ornate architecture

Christ Presented to the People

Another plate radically altered between states, with figures removed rather than added.

Plates & States

Two readings taken before the picture is discussed

The back of a support and a radiograph both describe the object rather than the image. Each answers one narrow question and declines the rest.

The reverse of an old wooden panel painting showing its grain, joins and a cradle, even light — Support & Ground A panel is a dated object before it is a picture. Baltic oak boards carry growth rings that can be matched against measured sequences, which fixes the earliest year the wood could have been used — and the cradle glued to the back is a later intervention with a history of its own. Dendrochronology

A greyscale radiograph mounted on a backlit viewing panel in a darkened conservation studio — Examination A radiograph reads density, so the lead white arrives first: a hand moved, a hat made smaller, the weave of the canvas, the nails along the stretcher edge. It says what happened to the paint, never who applied it. X-radiography

The house on the Jodenbreestraat, listed room by room

When he was declared insolvent in 1656 the court ordered an inventory of the contents. The clerk walked the house and wrote down what was in each room.

VoorhuisPictures hung close together, his own and other painters’

SijdelcaemerMore pictures, with furniture

AchtercaemerBeds, linen, household goods

KunstcaemerArmour, shells, busts, casts, portfolios of prints

SchilderscaemerThe painting room

Kleijn schildercaemerA smaller working room beside it

KitchenPots, pewter, a bed for staff

PassagesWhere the overflow was kept

The 1656 inventory

A binocular microscope positioned over a paint surface with an adult conservator looking through it — The microscope narrows the question to a single point on the surface: what is the order of the layers, and what is in each of them.

Examination

The instruments answer narrow questions

A cross-section gives the order of the layers. Infrared can show a line drawn under thin paint. Weave mapping can tell whether two canvases were cut from one bolt. None of them return a name.

01X-radiographyDensity first: the lead white, and the composition painted out beneath it
02Infrared reflectographyReaches the underdrawing wherever the upper paint is thin enough
03Paint cross-sectionsA sample the size of a pinhead, mounted and polished, gives the layer order
04Raking lightA lamp almost parallel to the surface turns texture into shadow
05Canvas weave mappingThread counting can match one picture’s canvas to another’s

The Examination section

Hofstede de Groot’s catalogue of 1915 accepted a large body of work; Bredius reduced it in 1935 and Gerson’s revision cut it further in 1969. From 1968 the Rembrandt Research Project published A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, concluding in 2011. This site reports those arguments and names who made them.

Eight sections

The PicturesThe paintings themselves.Support & GroundWhat the picture is painted on.Paint & HandlingWhat it is painted with.Plates & StatesThe etchings, and how they changed.Workshop & PupilsThe other hands in the room.The PaperworkThe documents that survive.ExaminationHow a picture is looked into.ScholarshipHow the corpus was argued over.

All thirty-seven entries