Rembrandt was a Dutch painter and etcher. Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, his later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship. Yet his work was popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist stayed strong for twenty years, and he taught nearly every important Dutch painter. Rembrandt's greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his portraits and illustrations of biblical scenes.Man with a Golden Helmet is a combination of keen psychological analysis with a subtle, powerful music of lights and shadows. Rembrandt's faces are always full of meaning and of character, strongly individualized through emphasis on a few distinctive contours. They are never bland, impersonal, regular masks, but bear the marks of experience, thought and feeling, which tempt us to wonder what reserves of personality lie behind them.
Rembrandt is akin to Leonardo da Vinci in this psychological interest, as well as in his reliance on soft shadows for form. There is little range or brilliance of color in either. But Rembrandt had profited by sixteenth century Venetian painting, and knew how to blend his colors with light in a way that da Vinci did not, and so to make the most of what he used.
