Rembrandt and workshop
Dutch Republic · Dutch Golden Age painting
The story
The German painter and writer Joachim von Sandrart, who knew Amsterdam in the 1630s, remembered Rembrandt's house as full of young pupils from good families. Each of them paid Rembrandt 100 guilders a year, and on top of that, Sandrart wrote, he made 2,000 or 2,500 guilders from selling what they painted and printed. A surviving contract with one pupil's guardians confirms the fee.
Rembrandt and workshop is the credit for a picture in which both sides of that arrangement are visible. The design is Rembrandt's and so are some passages, or a reworking over the top, while pupils or assistants in his studio painted the rest. It claims more of his own hand than a work given to his studio alone.
In Munich, the Alte Pinakothek uses this credit for a Sacrifice of Isaac whose own inscription, dated 1636, says that Rembrandt altered and overpainted it.
