Rembrandt van Rijn died in Amsterdam on 4 October 1669, aged 63, in his last home on the Rozengracht. No document names the cause of death or describes an illness, so any diagnosis is a guess.
The date rests on a note by a relative, Nicolaes Vinck, who recorded that his cousin Rembrant van Rhijn, painter, died on 4 October 1669. Nobody wrote down how.
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The silence invites a story: a bankrupt old man, with his wife, his companion and his son all in the ground before him, and nobody left. The paperwork of the following days tells a different one. On 8 October 1669, the clerk of the Chamber of Orphans entered Rembrandt's name beside a note of two children, without naming them.
The two were most likely Cornelia, his daughter with Hendrickje Stoffels, and Titia, the daughter of his son Titus. Titus had married Magdalena van Loo in February 1668 and died in September of that year. Titia was born about six months later, so Rembrandt died with a granddaughter only a few months old.
I don't believe in the man who died with nobody left. He left a daughter, a granddaughter and a widowed daughter-in-law, and within four days the paperwork counted children, a widow and a guardian around him.
What You'll Discover
What a notary sealed the next day.
What he painted in his last year.
Whether the funeral was a pauper's.
Where his grave really is.