Rembrandt used the achievements of his teachers, predecessors and contemporaries to develop and realise his own artistic aims and abilities, and it was to these too that he owed his basic artistic impulses. His urge to achieve unmistakable originality led him to overturn aesthetic and thematic conventions; he expanded technique and experimented with the use of colour and forms of etching. Although the art of the past always served him as a starting point, he sought to surpass it by staging works that were both unexpectedly daring and apposite to their subject.