Painting the Word ④ Rembrandt — The Return of the Prodigal Son and a Forgiveness Not Yet Finished

The father’s two hands come to rest on his kneeling son’s back — and looking closely, they don’t match. The left is large, sinewy, and grips with visible pressure; the right is slender and smooth, resting more than gripping. If the Caravaggio sub-series spoke through light and touch, this painting — completed near the very end of Rembrandt’s life — tries to put the whole of a forgiving God into the difference between those two hands. The series now turns to Rembrandt van Rijn’s own three-part sub-series.

Who Was Rembrandt

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) was born in Leiden and moved to Amsterdam in his twenties, becoming the defining painter of the Dutch Golden Age. He achieved early fame and wealth as a portraitist, but his later decades brought repeated loss — the death of his wife Saskia in 1642, formal bankruptcy in 1656, and the deaths of several children and his later partner — leaving him materially and personally diminished by the end of his life.

Where Caravaggio pushed light and dark toward stark, theatrical contrast, Rembrandt’s late style favors softer, layered light that seems to emerge slowly out of darkness — a mature use of chiaroscuro turned toward interior states rather than dramatic staging. He is also famous for leaving behind roughly eighty self-portraits across paintings, etchings, and drawings, a habit of self-scrutiny the third installment of this sub-series will take up directly. The Return of the Prodigal Son is generally dated to around 1668, likely completed within about a year of his death.

The Text — Luke 15:11–32

The parable of the prodigal son is the last of three “lost and found” parables Jesus tells in a row — the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. A younger son demands his inheritance early, squanders it in a distant country, and is reduced to feeding pigs before finally coming to his senses and heading home.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” (Luke 15:20)

Before the son can even finish the confession he had rehearsed, the father calls for the best robe, a ring, sandals, and orders the fattened calf killed for a celebration. But the parable doesn’t end there. The older son, returning from the fields, hears the celebration and refuses to go in; the father comes out to plead with him — and the text simply ends without ever telling us whether the older son relents.

Reading the Painting — Two Hands, and a Watcher

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c. 1668, oil on canvas, 262 × 205 cm — Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons, PD-Art / CC0).

Rembrandt chose the parable’s climax — the instant the son kneels and the father draws him in. The son faces away from the viewer, barefoot but for one worn-out shoe, his head shaved, his face buried in his father’s robe; his ragged clothes and battered feet carry, on the body itself, everything he has been through. The father, his face rendered as though half-blind, looks down and lays both hands on his son’s back.

The detail most discussed is exactly that asymmetry between the two hands. The father’s left hand is large and muscular, fingers spread wide, gripping the son’s shoulder with visible strength; his right hand is far more slender and smooth, fingers drawn together, resting gently against his son’s back. A devotional reading popularized by Henri Nouwen sees the contrast as holding a father’s strength and a mother’s tenderness together in one image of God as parent. No surviving document establishes that symbolism as Rembrandt’s intention, however, so it is best presented as a theological reading the painting permits rather than as an art-historical consensus.

But what completes the painting is the half-shadowed figure standing at the right edge, dressed in red and leaning on a staff — usually identified as the older brother — arms folded, watching the embrace with visible coldness. Rembrandt doesn’t push this figure out of the frame; he leaves him standing there to the very end. Just as the parable itself never tells us what the older son finally does, the painting freezes before telling us either.

Theological Reading — A Forgiveness Not Yet Finished

What this painting does theologically is treat forgiveness not as a completed event but as something still in progress. The embrace between father and younger son has already happened — but the right half of the canvas shows that this reconciliation hasn’t yet become a reconciliation of the whole family. Whether the older brother will finally walk in and embrace his brother, or remain standing at the threshold forever, is a question Rembrandt hands to the viewer exactly as the parable does.

In his well-known meditation on this painting, Henri Nouwen writes that he first identified with the kneeling younger son, then gradually recognized the resentful older brother in himself, and only eventually understood that the place the painting actually calls its viewer toward is neither son’s — it is the father’s, the one whose hands reach out. Becoming someone who forgives, not merely someone forgiven, is the painting’s final claim on whoever stands in front of it. That an aging Rembrandt — a man who had lived through repeated bankruptcy and loss — painted this scene without erasing the older brother’s coldness makes the painting read less like a snapshot of reconciliation and more like a lifetime’s reflection on what it actually means to live inside forgiveness.

Coming Next

Part two of the Rembrandt sub-series turns to Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph. Through the dying Jacob’s crossed hands laid on his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh in Genesis 48, it examines Rembrandt’s relationships with his Jewish neighbors in Amsterdam and his distinctive approach to Hebrew Bible iconography.

Works Cited

English-language

• Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)
• Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (Viking, 1985)
• Christopher White, Rembrandt (Thames & Hudson, 1984)

Rembrandt Research Project (Netherlands)

• Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Amsterdam University Press, 2000) — by the scholar who led the Rembrandt Research Project

Korean-language

• Henri Nouwen, trans. Choi Jong-hoon (최종훈), The Return of the Prodigal Son [탕자의 귀향] (Poiema, 2009) — a full-length meditation devoted entirely to this one painting

The image above is a 1280px reduction of a public-domain (PD-Art) scan hosted on Wikimedia Commons. All works listed above are real, standard scholarly and devotional studies.

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