David Schwinghammer’s Reviews > Rembrandt: A Life > Status Update

The next chapter is entitled "The Plague". I didn't know there was one that recent. Maybe it's a metaphor.

"Today his paintings are scattered all over the world, less than fifty in the Netherlands, thirty in London, Berlin, New York and St. Petersburg two dozen each." As he aged young artists viewed him as hopelessly old-fashioned. Sure, try to buy one these days. Who do you think of when you think of an artist? Leonardo and Rembrandt!

Shockingly Rembrandt had his paramour Geertje sent off to an insane asylum for twelve years. She wanted him to marry her. He couldn't without losing all of his dead wife Saskia's property.

Saskia, Rembrandt's wife, dies. He had an affair with his son's nurse Geertje
Dirckx, which gets him in trouble with the powers that be. He is reclusive and paints little for ten years after her death.

Charles L. Mee Jr. tells who the people were in Rembrandt's "Night Watch".

Rembrandt bought a big house he couldn't afford and it affected his painting. He had to return to portrait painting which he wasn't all that fond of.

Rembrandt was sometimes criticized for adding inappropriate sidelines to his paintings. In one there's a dog defecating in a corner. The picture is of a saint preaching the word of God.

Rembrandt did several paintings of his wife, Danae. Sounds like he was teasing her: "She is a dairy-fed Dutch woman, smooth and round, not skinny; Her breasts are not large, but she has a nice, round fertile belly, the size almost of a basketball."

I guess one of Rembrandt's first great works was "The Anatomy Lesson".
There's a lot of sympathy for the poor guy (who was hanged for stealing a cloak) mainly the indignity of being poured over by a bunch of ghouls.

Rembrandt gets an assignment painting a portrait of a master shipbuilder of the Dutch East India Co., his first big commission.