Rembrandt Paintings
1606 - 1669 Painter, Etcher, Printmaker, Netherlands, Baroque
Rembrandt's Mother Reading, 1631
Oil on canvas, 59x47 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Figurative Art
Rembrandt's earliest paintings of people reading, show Peter and Paul, the Apostles of the Jews and the Gentiles, respectively, conversing over the meaning of a text (in the Melbourne Two Old Men Disputing) and an old woman, possibly the prophetess Anna, long called Rembrandt's mother, reading a Bible (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). That Rembrandt first imagined readers as Paul, instructing Peter in the true message of God, and a holy woman, perhaps also a familiar, suggests an originating context not of scholarship but of faith. Rembrandt's lifelong habit of study was based in the Protestant belief in personally attending to the Word, the Gospel of Christ, which Rembrandt, with his visual way of thinking, assumed to include pictures.
