Dutch Artist Lighting Effects

• Rembrandt's works use light and shadow contrast for dramatic effect. Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images

  Painters from the Netherlands, including Rembrandt van Rinj, Jan Vermeer and Vincent van Gogh, have historically been placed among the world's foremost artists. The heavy, low light streaming across the northern marshlands has inspired Dutch artists to use a variety of lighting effects to create drama, emphasis and emotional impact in their paintings.

Dot Techniques

• Late 19th century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh adopted the dot technique developed by French painter Georges Seurat, which since has come to characterize the art style known as impressionism. Seurat had developed his dot-painting technique based on the science of optical and color theory, according to the Art Institute of Chicago. Van Gogh transformed the science of using light and color to create more vivid visual impressions into a lighting effect designed to invoke emotion. His dot-technique self-portraits use auras of contrasting dots to disturb what would be the natural lighting of the scene and thus create a sense of tension.

Chiaroscuro

• Rembrandt van Rinj, a Dutch painting master of the early 17th century, is recognized for his use of deep, penetrating color in conjunction with the effective use of chiaroscuro, or a balance of light and shadow, according to the Encyclopedia of Irish and World Art. Rembrandt used a balance of light and shadow as well as multiple layers of glazes to create a lighting effect that differed from the theatrics of candlelight painting or the narrative impact of twilight in that it was aimed at revealing greater depths of the subject's personality. Rembrandt used chiaroscuro techniques to emphasize selected physical features or gestures to convey without words a greater sense of the people depicted in his paintings.

Tenebrism

• Tenebrism is an extreme form of chiaroscuro in which the painter employs minimal lighting, such as candlelight or moonlight, to create a primarily dark, murky scene. The Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is credited with inspiring the popularity of this style in the early 17th century, but it was quickly picked up and developed by Dutch painters of the Utrecht school who took it to more complex and delicate forms, according to a research paper published by the art history department of Truman University of Missouri.

Twilight

• Painters of the Utrecht school developed a number of distinctive lighting effects in addition to their embrace of tenebrism. A sense of both intimacy and urgency was created by painters such as Hendrick ter Brugghen by using twilight effects that the Oberlin College Allen Memorial Art museum describes as eerie and crepuscular. Ter Brugghen's 1625 painting of "Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene" places the scene at the hour of sunset in part for narrative effect, creating a sense of urgency and intimacy as well as indicating that Saint Sebastian was poised at the interface between life and death. Ter Brugghen balances the brighter colors of sunset and a woven cloth on either side of the painting, and sets the characters in a dimmer, somewhat creepy grayish light dominating the center of the painting, avoiding natural skin tones and conveying a sense of other-worldliness.