Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher, born in Leiden, who became the leading portrait painter of Amsterdam. He is remembered for The Night Watch, for nearly a hundred self-portraits made across forty years, and for the rough, golden paintings of his last years, made after he went bankrupt.
He rose from a miller's house in Leiden to the richest city in Europe, then lost his house, his collection and most of the people he loved. The face he kept painting through all of it is the reason we still know his name.
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The end is the part people ask about, and it is stranger than the legend. Rembrandt died on 4 October 1669 in a small rented house on the Rozengracht in Amsterdam, aged sixty-three. No surviving document says what killed him.
He had outlived his wife Saskia, his companion Hendrickje Stoffels and his son Titus, who was buried in the Westerkerk only a year before him. The day after Rembrandt died, a notary named Gerrit Steeman walked through the house to list what was in it. He sealed three rooms full of paintings, drawings and curiosities, and kept the keys.
The inventory has fifty entries. Twenty-six of the paintings it lists were unfinished. At sixty-three, with his house sold and his collection scattered, Rembrandt still had twenty-six canvases under way.
What You'll Discover
Whose body lay on the surgeons' table.
What he wrote about his own pictures.
What was cut from the Night Watch.
What the house on Breestraat cost him.
What he painted after the crash.
Who carried him to the Westerkerk.