Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Kostverloren Castle in Decay
Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)
c. 1652
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash, heightened with touches of opaque white watercolor, on cream laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 10.9 × 17.5 cm (4 5/16 × 6 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- Holland
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Rembrandt and his contemporaries shared a fascination with the Kostverloren estate, in part because of the successive misfortunes that its owners seemed to endure. Already by Rembrandt’s time it had taken on its name, which translates as “lost expenses” or, more colloquially, “money pit.” The site faced another setback when much of the castle was destroyed in a fire. After this damage—and before its eventual repair—Rembrandt entered the grounds of the castle and recorded its diminished state. His emphasis on decay is made clear by the felled tree in foreground; its strident horizontality sets off the faded majesty of the castle’s once-grand structures.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
