Rembrandt

In the 1630s Rembrandt was the most sought-after portraitist in Amsterdam, a city then swelling with money from Dutch ships that reached as far as Japan. He married well, to Saskia, the daughter of a well-connected family, bought a large house on a fashionable street, and filled it with things, paintings, weapons, exotic shells, suits of armour, whatever he thought he might one day paint. He bought at auction the way other men drank.

Then the tide went out. Saskia died young, in 1642, the same year he finished the enormous militia portrait now called The Night Watch. Fashion in portraiture was moving toward something smoother and brighter than his deep browns and heavy shadow. Commissions thinned. His spending did not. By 1656 he was insolvent, and rather than face debtors' prison he surrendered his goods to the city to be sold for his creditors. The inventory drawn up that year lists the shells and the armour and more than 60 of his own paintings. Within two years the grand house was gone too, sold at auction, and he moved with what remained of his household to plainer rooms across town.

None of this dimmed the work; if anything it did the opposite. Freed of the polished society portrait, he painted with a rougher, thicker hand, loading the light onto a forehead or a sleeve and letting the rest sink into dark. He kept turning the mirror on himself, and across his life he left around 80 self-portraits, the late ones unsparing, the face of a man who had lost nearly everything and was still looking hard at it. He died in 1669, and in one of his very last self-portraits he painted himself laughing, in the guise of an ancient Greek painter, brush in hand, at a joke the picture never explains.