Rembrandt was here

Abstract

Abstract In 1911 visitors to the Amsterdam house where Rembrandt lived between 1639 and 1658 were disappointed to find no working studio, bedroom or personal collections. In his design for the Rembrandthuis museum, the architect K.P.C. de Bazel had chosen not to create a period interior, but instead combined domestically scaled rooms with a museum displaying Rembrandt’s prints. The project registered early twentieth-century perceptions of Rembrandt as a modern, and contemporary debates about the restoration of historic buildings. Unlike many nineteenth-century house museums, it was designed to focus attention on the work rather than the life of the occupant. However, in 1998, the museum was reconfigured as a simulacrum of a seventeenth-century house, with a new annex for displaying prints and drawings and for exhibitions. The history of the Rembrandthuis illuminates changing approaches to the artist over time and their implications for architecture and museology in the age of modernism.