Maggi Hambling on Rembrandt

Panel, 22.6cm x 18.7cm

This was painted when Rembrandt was 22. At the time it was a very radical portrait and it foreshadows what was to come in his very grand and meaningful use of light and dark.

The mystery is already there – the face is more than half veiled in shadow as if he is still a mystery to himself. A portrait is a conversation and a confrontation.

You can go back to a Rembrandt throughout your life and let it talk to you whereas a lot of art nowadays you only need to see for a few seconds.

Oil on oak, 61.8 x 47 cm

This is generally reckoned to be Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt's mistress. It's a very sexy painting - the marvellously loosely-painted shift she is wearing just covers the top of her thighs.

Women were women then - they weren’t sticks - and she's pretty voluptuous. The contrasts in the handling of the paint are terrific: the legs, the arms, the hands and the beginning of the breasts are very sensual and fleshy, and the cover up is merely strokes of paint.

The viewer becomes Rembrandt himself, feasting his eyes on his mistress paddling in a pool. He gives you the feeling that the painting is being made in front of your very eyes.

One of the great things about Rembrandt is that the subject flowed through him and out through his hands and the paint. Everything there has been dictated by the subject. That's a crucial point about great art; when something bigger than the artist – and outside of the artist - is in charge of things.

Oil on canvas, 100 x 134 cm

There's an extraordinary foreshortening in this painting, which makes you feel that the body is being cut up right in front of you.

It's completely real - the big feet come right at you. It's painted with such empathy and there's such calm about the operation that's going on, even though it's obviously very bloody.

Again the use of light and dark is crucial – the huge light falling on the body surrounded by comparative darkness. By this time in Rembrandt's life the paint is flowing and dissolving in the most amazing way.

Oil on canvas, 82.5 x 65 cm

If I could have one painting in the world it would be this one. The paint is going at 100mph and it's completely fluid and totally compelling.

Here is Rembrandt as a much older man having lived a dramatic life - being rich, being poor, being broken-hearted - but he's still laughing at himself and laughing with us.

It's a heroic painting. I have a rather ropey old postcard of this painting that I bought years ago in Cologne and which is always on my studio wall next to me.

Oil on canvas, 262 × 206 cm

I first saw this painting in reality last year when I had a show at the Hermitage and stood in front of it over and over again. Every painting is about one moment but here, because that one moment is painted so magically, time is eradicated.

The prodigal son has his back to us, one filthy foot showing, and the diamond shape of his father's arms enclose him and hold him safe. The use of light and dark is eloquent.

It's as if the prodigal son's father is God the Father and you feel as though you're being forgiven yourself. It was painted in the last couple of years of Rembrandt's life and there's the whole of time in that one moment of forgiveness and compassion.