In many respects Rembrandt was an unusual figure in the art world of his time. One of the most striking features is the extraordinary diversity of his oeuvre. Whereas most of his Dutch colleagues chose to specialize in one or perhaps two genres, Rembrandt's artistic range of action seems to have widened year after year. This applies to both the chosen subjects and the different techniques: in painting and etching as well as in drawing he created a more or less independent oeuvre of its own, each of which offers a surprising degree of thematic variety. Moreover, throughout his life he continued to experiment with different stylistic and technical ways of expression within the different media.

In his choice of subjects, too, we see a gradual extension. During his Leiden years Rembrandt concentrates on history painting, but after his move to Amsterdam he develops portraiture and, a few years later, also landscape as new fields of action. Both portrait and landscape seem to grow, as it were, out of history painting into separate and richly varied specialties in their own right. Within the portrait genre Rembrandt explores all the available options and applications, from the loosely sketched study and the tronie (character head) to the portrait historié and the private commission, and from the official and the group portrait to the self-portrait as a completely separate field of artistic research with versions in all shapes and sizes.