The Stoning of Saint Stephen

Rembrandt painted The Stoning of Saint Stephen in 1625, his earliest dated painting, produced when he was nineteen years old and recently completed his apprenticeship with the Leiden painter Jacob van Swanenburch. The ambitious multi-figure composition demonstrates that Rembrandt's aspirations to history painting — the genre that combined the largest technical demands with the highest cultural status — were present from the very beginning of his career. The painting draws on engravings after Italian Renaissance and Mannerist masters rather than on direct contact with Italian painting; Rembrandt never travelled to Italy, and his knowledge of the Italian tradition came through prints, drawings, and the Italianate Dutch painters of the Utrecht school. The crowded composition and the theatrical lighting already show the distinctive Rembrandt qualities, though in less refined form than his mature work. The Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon holds the canvas as part of the French provincial museum system's significant accumulation of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings.

The densely packed composition with its crowd of executioners and witnesses reveals the influence of Lastman's narrative paintings, though Rembrandt's instinct for dramatic lighting is already evident in the illuminated figure of Stephen.