He challenged the artistic standards in all genres, including that of painting landscapes. Rembrandt was an exceptional seventeenth-century painter in that he did not limit himself to one genre. In his studio he combined landscape elements from various sources, completely from his imagination. Rembrandt s earliest landscapes were not so much realistic depictions of the world around him, which was a typical characteristic of his drawings, but representations of maginary surroundings. To mark the Rembrandt Year, all of his landscapes will be exhibited together for the first time in Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal. In other landscapes Rembrandt stayed closer to home: these paintings show more local features, probably inspired by the realistic motifs he sketched during his strolls in the surroundings of Amsterdam.