When Amsterdam’s first city playhouse opened in 1638, an inscription over the entrance quoted Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage”.

Rembrandt’s Light
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

When Amsterdam’s first city playhouse opened in 1638, an inscription over the entrance quoted Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage”. Seventeenth-century Holland was known for its painters, not its playwrights, and it was from painting that theatre took its cue. “A play is like a speaking painting,” said the new theatre’s director, Jan Vos.

We know that Rembrandt saw the theatre’s inaugural play because he left drawings to prove it. He was clearly a theatre-lover: as a young artist he perfected the art of dramatic expression by pulling faces in the mirror for his etched self-portraits, and as a teacher he got his students to act out scenarios before painting them. But theatre depends on more than gesture and expression: it relies on lighting. And while the means at the disposal of the seventeenth-century stage-lighting technician was limited, the possibilities for the artist were endless.

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