Ernst van de Wetering (9 March 1938 – 11 August 2021) was a Dutch art historian and an expert on Rembrandt and his work. Background Ernst van de Wetering was born in Hengelo. He was first trained as an artist at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. He received his doctorate in art history from the University of Amsterdam in 1986. Between 1964 and 1968, he worked as a scientific illustrator of microscopic preparations at the Zoological Museum in Amsterdam. From 1968, he was a member and later became chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project. He was art historian on the staff of Amsterdam's Central Research Laboratory for Restoration from 1969 to 1987 and, from 1987, was full professor of history of art at the University of Amsterdam. He published extensively on historic painting techniques, as well as in the field of theory and ethics of conservation and restoration. In 1990, he succeeded Josua Bruyn as chair of the Rembrandt Research Project, the team of scholars that is charged with tracking down Rembrandt's works, authenticating them and, when needed, conserving the paintings. As of 2015, the project had published six volumes on Rembrandt's work, the known Rembrandts, and the techniques used by the painter. Van de Wetering was from his time at the Hague Academy active as a practicing artist. He made primarily portraits and landscape paintings. Assessment of Rembrandt In most of his writing and lectures, van de Wetering portrays Rembrandt as a painter who struggled to create as many marketable paintings as possible, and whose studio turned out a large number of paintings with varying amounts of work by Rembrandt and his apprentices. Van de Wetering was also able to discover a number of Rembrandt's works which had been repainted by the artist to make them more commercially acceptable. In 2006, in celebration of Rembrandt's 400th birthday, van de Wetering was quoted by the Associated Press saying: "My hope for the Rembrandt year would be that somehow we would become free of images, that we look with fresh eyes. So much research has been done, and so little of this research has come to the knowledge of the general public." Studies of artists' use of light Van de Wetering was the voice of dissent when it came to the significance of light in Dutch 17th-century painting. He doubted that it was a factor at all