EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
Risk, Return and Rembrandt: The Painting
By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper
Rembrandt had an uncanny ability to capture stories from the Bible at the moment of peak intensity. He made the old, well-known stories come to life in a way that piques our interest, drawing us into the scene.
For instance, The Blinding of Samson( 1636) depicts Delilah’ s betrayal of Samson. A Philistine soldier stabs a dagger into Samson’ s right eye, while Delilah, shears in one hand and Samson’ s shorn lock of hair in the other, flees the scene. Abraham’ s Sacrifice( 1635) captures the moment when Abraham, having bound his son, grabs Isaac’ s face, stretching out his neck in order to prepare it for the knife thrust that will soon end his life. As Abraham raises his right hand to plunge the knife into his son, an angel intercedes and grabs his wrist, causing the startled Abraham to drop the knife.
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee presents us with a seemingly hopeless situation. If the boat isn’ t dashed to pieces, it may well capsize or be swamped with water and sink to the bottom of the sea. All is chaos and confusion. The disciples in the bow of the boat are struggling with the sails and the mast. One of them makes a desperate attempt to grab a gaff hook and use it to push the vessel away from a nearby rock.
In the aft, two men have just succeeded in waking Jesus from his slumber, while the helmsman pulls against the rudder in a vain attempt to control the boat. Others are simply frozen in horror as they await what appears to be certain death. A seasick disciple leans over the ship railing retching while behind him two frightened souls bow their heads in prayer.
Between the two praying disciples stands Rembrandt himself, clutching onto the rigging with one hand and holding his cap on his head with the other as he stares out from the painting. He painted himself into the biblical scene, a custom that he repeated many times throughout his long career. One of Rembrandt’ s favorite subjects was Rembrandt.
“ And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea,‘ Peace! Be still!’ And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them,‘ Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great fear and said to one another,‘ Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’”
This detail from Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee shows Rembrandt himself, clutching onto the rigging with one hand and holding his cap on his head with the other as he stares out from the painting.
According to Bible scholar John I. Durham,“ Across the years of his career, from 1625 to his death in 1669, Rembrandt painted, etched and drew more than 70 self-portraits.” He makes a cameo appearance in his 1625 painting of The Stoning of Saint Stephen, and is front and center with his wife Saskia in his 1635 work The Prodigal Son in the Brothel. In his 1633 The Raising of the Cross, Rembrandt highlights
— Mark 4:39 – 41 ESV
himself as he helps Roman soldiers lift the cross into an upright position. In the same year, Rembrandt painted The Descent from the Cross, where he pictures himself bearing the full brunt of Christ’ s dead body as it is removed from the cross. Durham posits that,“ The events of the biblical story were for [ Rembrandt ] real events, so real that he frequently imagined himself as part of them.”
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee appeared on the front cover of Peter Berstein’ s classic book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, 363 years after it was painted. This remarkable work of art, stolen six years before the publication of Against the Gods, came to represent something far more than what Rembrandt originally intended. 1 Risk— wild and untamed for millennia— could now be managed and controlled by mere mortals.
The history of risk and the development of risk management is brilliantly chronicled in the pages of Against the Gods. Yet Bernstein never mentions this painting in the book. A black and white reproduction of Christ in the Storm appears on page 95, along with a quote from Shakespeare’ s The Merchant of Venice:
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate Upon the fortune of this present year; Therefore, my merchandise makes me not sad.
Bernstein writes,“ Quite aside from financial forms of risk management, merchants learned early on to employ
6 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Winter 2026 | www. MoAF. org