Throughout his career Rembrandt looked primarily at the themes of portraiture, landscape and narrative painting. In terms of narrative painting, he was especially praised by his contemporaries, naming him as a masterful interpreter of biblical stories for his skill in representing emotions and attention to detail. Stylistically, his paintings progressed from a smooth style early in his career, characterized by fine technique, to a rough treatment of richly varied paint surfaces im his later years, which allowed for an illusion of form suggested by the tactile quality of the paint itself to appear.
He went through periods of painting small, highly detailed portraits of people, to sweeping biblical scenes.
In the decade following "The Night Watch" (picture left) the previous tendency to create dramatic effects by mainly strong contrasts of light and shadow gave way to the use of frontal lighting and larger and more saturated areas of color
In the 1650s, Rembrandt's style changed again. Colors became richer and brush strokes more pronounced. He still painted biblical themes, but they were no longer sweeping epics, but more intimate, portrait-like.
