Finding Rembrandt? Place, History, Experience and the Individual

Abstract

This essay focuses on Rembrandt van Rijn in order to examine how the character of a historic individual can be understood through physical and imagined places, across tourist literature and academic scholarship. The materials produced for the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth in 2006, including tourist brochures, local signage and displays, exhibition notes as well as scholarly studies, provide the source texts for the analysis. Across these sources, place emerges as a significant if complex means for presenting and attaining historical insight, where the interaction of personality and/in place is crucial to both tourists' as well as scholars' interpretations of this master of the Dutch..