Rembrandt van Rijn

Known for: the self-portrait series; Night Watch (1642)

Rembrandt van Rijn produced more than 300 paintings, 300 etchings, and 2,000 drawings across a career that moved from commercial success to financial ruin, and documented his own aging across a series of approximately 100 self-portraits that constitute the most sustained and technically accomplished self-examination in the history of Western art. His ability to render the physical texture of paint as a carrier of light and psychological interiority has influenced every subsequent generation of painters. He is the most widely owned and reproduced painter in Western art history.