Where is Rembrandt buried?

In the Westerkerk, somewhere

Rembrandt spent his last years in a rented house on the Rozengracht, in the Jordaan, a few streets from the Westerkerk. When he died in 1669 he was buried in that church, in a grave that belonged to the church and was let for a time, not one that a family owned.

That is why there is nothing to find. Rented graves were emptied after some years so that they could be used again. Nobody marked the place, and his remains were lost.

How the most sought-after painter in the city came to that

Thirty years earlier it would have seemed impossible. In 1639 Rembrandt bought a large house on the Jodenbreestraat for 13,000 guilders, to be paid in instalments. He never finished paying. Commissions slowed, he kept buying for his collection, and in 1656 he was declared insolvent. The contents of the house were listed and auctioned, and two years later the house itself was sold.

Saskia and the children

His family lies in other churches. His wife Saskia died in 1642, the year he finished The Night Watch, and was buried under the floor of the Oude Kerk, the same church where the two of them had registered their intention to marry. Three of his children, who all died as infants, were buried in the Zuiderkerk, round the corner from the house.

Where to find him instead

The house on the Jodenbreestraat is a museum, with its rooms put back the way he had them, using the inventory the clerks made when he went bankrupt. And on the Rembrandtplein stands the statue the city put up to him in 1852, almost two hundred years after it buried him without a stone.