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Concept
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
Summary
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 oil painting on canvas by Rembrandt housed in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, the Netherlands. It was originally created to be displayed by the Surgeons Guild in their meeting room. The painting is regarded as one of Rembrandt's early masterpieces.
In the work, Nicolaes Tulp is pictured explaining the musculature of the arm to a group of doctors. Some of the spectators are various doctors who paid commissions to be included in the painting. The painting is signed in the top-left hand corner Rembrandt. f[ecit] 1632. This may be the first instance of Rembrandt signing a painting with his forename (in its original form) as opposed to the monogram RHL (Rembrandt Harmenszoon of Leiden), and is thus a sign of his growing artistic confidence.
The event can be dated to 31 January 1632: the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, of which Tulp was official City Anatomist, permitted only one public dissection a year, and the body would have to be that of an executed criminal.
Anatomy lessons were a social event in the 17th century, taking place in lecture rooms that were actual theatres, with students, colleagues and the general public being permitted to attend on payment of an entrance fee. The spectators are appropriately dressed for this social occasion. It is thought that the uppermost (not holding the paper) and farthest left figures were added to the picture later.
Every five to ten years, the Surgeon's Guild would commission a portrait by a leading portraitist of the period; Rembrandt was commissioned for this task when he was 25 years old, and newly arrived in Amsterdam. It was his first major commission in Amsterdam. Each of the men included in the portrait would have paid a certain amount of money to be included in the work, and the more central figures (in this case, Tulp) probably paid more, even twice as much. Rembrandt's anatomical portrait radically altered the conventions of the genre, by including a full-length corpse in the center of the image (using Christ-like iconography) and creating not just a portrait but a dramatic mise-en-scène.
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