Palette of Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history.

The range of colors Rembrandt employed falls firmly within the mainstream of painting practice in Holland in the seventeenth century. His palette is entirely made up of widely available pigments and, by that time, well understood in their qualities and drawbacks. Seventeenth-century Holland was a center for manufacturing artists' pigments on an industrial scale. The technologies required had evolved enough to remove the uncertainties in preparing standard products. Large-scale processes for producing lead white, vermilion, smalt, and lead-tin yellow, all of which are found frequently in Rembrandt's paintings, had reached an advanced degree of refinement, and these pigments were available in both domestic and foreign markets. Imported pigments from Italy and elsewhere made up for local deficiencies in naturally occurring mineral and earth pigments and some of the raw materials for preparing specific manufactured colors.

Rembrandt's paintings are dominated by a limited selection of lead white, bone black, and natural earth pigments, such as ochers, siennas, and umbers; other pigments are regularly used, but these are his staples. His palette consisted of the following pigments:

In the table, we have listed the pigment used by Rembrandt on his palette and the equivalent available today from Natural Pigments.

References

David Bomford, Art in the Making: Rembrandt, Yale University Press, p. 35–46.

Waldemar Januszczak, Techniques of the World’s Great Painters, Chartwell, 1980.

Ernst Van De Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter At Work, Amsterdam University Press, 1997, p. 149–152.