Moses Smashing the Tablets of the Law, 1659 van Rijn Rembrandt (1606-1669)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of van Rijn Rembrandt also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Moses Smashing the Tablets of the Law is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

The prophet stands at the very lip of the pictorial space, his billowing robe almost brushing ours, the stone tablets lifted like a dark gate between divine ordinance and human frailty. Rembrandt fixes the moment in a breath‑held suspension: poised either to unleash righteous destruction or to unveil renewed covenant. The granular surface of the rock behind him echoes the rough hewn slate of the commandments; against this obdurate backdrop the illuminated face, framed by a corona of greying curls that rise into horn‑like tufts, becomes the painting’s glowing fulcrum.

Although time and varnish have subdued the original pigmentation, the chromatic strategy remains intelligible. Earthy umbers and siennas gather in the rocky setting, while the robe, once reputedly a deep Tyrian purple, now registers as muted ash. Into this restrained register Rembrandt releases a shaft of ochre light that grazes forehead, beard and the underside of the tablets, fostering an interior radiance rather than theatrical glare. The colour economy, austere yet warm, steeps the scene in moral gravitas, inviting contemplation rather than spectacle.

Brushwork is deployed with discriminating variety. The linen sleeve is handled in swift, opaque strokes that suggest both the weight of fabric and the impulsive torsion of the gesture, whereas the tablets receive a slower, denser application, their Hebrew inscriptions incised with scholarly precision. Across the weathered rocks the pigment is scrubbed and dragged, leaving exposed ground to sparkle like mica—an optical counterpart to the narrative chafing between sacred law and earthly disobedience.

Compositionally, the arms describe an emphatic V that directs the gaze upward to the tablets, yet the downward tilt of Moses’ head, heavy with apprehension, reinscribes the drama as inward as much as public. The viewpoint from below magnifies the prophet to monumental scale while trapping him within the picture plane, a solitary mediator pressed between fury and compassion. Light emanating from the upper left locks the figure into a diagonal that counterbalances the vertical thrust of the tablets, knitting the design into a taut, expressive scaffold.

Painted in the late 1650s, this work belongs to Rembrandt’s final, introspective decade, when financial ruin and personal loss sharpened his preoccupation with the limits of human agency. His close contact with Amsterdam’s Jewish community is palpable in the near‑faultless Hebrew script. Yet the ultimate gravity of the scene lies not in philological accuracy but in the painter’s capacity to translate scriptural narrative into a meditation on the solitary burden of conscience.