Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. He completed the oil painting in 1632, early in his Amsterdam career, when he was only about 25 years old.
The scene shows Dr. Nicolaes Tulp explaining the musculature of a dissected left arm to members of Amsterdam’s surgeons’ guild. The work was commissioned as a group portrait for the guild’s meeting room, but Rembrandt transformed the conventional format into a dramatic lesson centered on a full-length corpse.
The depicted dissection is not a literal step-by-step record of an anatomy class. In actual seventeenth-century practice, the chest and abdominal organs were generally opened early because they decomposed quickly. The painting instead emphasizes the arm and Tulp’s demonstration, creating a theatrical and intellectually focused composition.
The picture is also notable for its signature: Rembrandt signed it “Rembrant” in the upper-left corner, with the date 1632. It is often confused with The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman, another Rembrandt anatomy painting, made in 1656 and now surviving only as a fragment.