The world’s first instagrammer

A landmark exhibition featuring nearly 400 of Rembrandt’s paintings, drawings and sketches aims to show how the Golden Age master’s compulsive self-portraits and renderings of the world around him prefigure our modern world.

Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits told “Rembrandt was the first artist in history – the first ‘Instagrammer’, one could even say – to really capture the world around him.

“No artist made as many self-portraits. He painted his family, he drew his friends, he went out into the streets, the countryside and he even let us enter his own bedroom where his sick wife was stretched out.”

The exhibition will be a final chance to glimpse his masterpiece The Night Watch before the huge tableau is obscured by months of restoration work from July. But it is also a rare opportunity to see lesser works by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669).

“For the first time, the Rijksmuseum is showing every Rembrandt that we own: 22 paintings, 300 sketches, 60 drawings,” said Dibbits.

Many are kept from the public because they are so fragile, three centuries after their creation.

“Light makes [them] fade, so we almost never show them. An exhibition like this only happens once in a generation.”

Many visitors will relish the chance to admire the collection , but curators also hope it will make them reflect on the social media-obsessed age.

“If I use words like ‘selfie’ and ‘Instagram’, it’s because Rembrandt fashioned the way ... we take photographs,” the director of the museum added.

“What he did was to make these extraordinary stories ordinary – and make our ordinary lives extraordinary.” – Citizen reporter