Who were Rembrandt's contemporaries?
Rembrandt van Rijn lived from 1606 to 1669, in the Dutch Golden Age. He shared those years with painters, thinkers and scientists.
Rembrandt's lifespan is highlighted, the other bars show a few notable contemporaries.
Meanwhile, in the same years.
The Golden Age
Rembrandt and the younger Johannes Vermeer painted in the same years in the Dutch Republic. Both made light the real subject of their pictures.
I think, therefore I am
When Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631, René Descartes was living in the same city for a while. Six years later his “Discourse on the Method” appeared in nearby Leiden, with the sentence “I think, therefore I am.” There is no record that the two ever met.
A tomb of marble
In 1632 Rembrandt painted “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp,” the picture that made his name in Amsterdam. That same year, work began on the Taj Mahal in India. Emperor Shah Jahan built it for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who had died shortly before giving birth to their fourteenth child.
The year 1642
In 1642 Rembrandt finished “The Night Watch” in Amsterdam. That same year Galileo Galilei died in Italy, nearly blind and after nine years under house arrest, for teaching that the earth moves around the sun.
War and independence
Rembrandt was twelve when the Thirty Years’ War began in 1618, and 42 when it ended in 1648. In the Peace of Münster, part of the Peace of Westphalia, Spain recognized the independence of the Netherlands after eighty years of war. The republic in which Rembrandt painted was now a state of its own.
An end and a beginning
Rembrandt died in Amsterdam in 1669, largely impoverished, years after losing his house and his art collection. In the same year the 26-year-old Isaac Newton became professor of mathematics in Cambridge.
This is one slice. Parallel shows the rest.
Parallel shows you contemporaries at a glance, across art, music, science and politics. For anyone you are curious about, you can see who lived at the same time.
