The story
In a house at Amstel 218, on the river in central Amsterdam, a family still keeps the portrait Rembrandt painted of their ancestor in 1654. Jan Six, a wealthy patron and poet who became burgomaster late in life, sat for his friend in a grey coat with a red cloak over one shoulder, pulling on a glove. The painting has passed down the direct line ever since, and it is what most visitors come for on the small guided visits the house offers on weekday mornings, by request.
The collection grew through marriages. Six married Margaretha Tulp, daughter of the surgeon Nicolaes Tulp from Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, and later generations brought in pictures from the Hop, Van Winter and Teding van Berkhout families. The family also owns a Rembrandt portrait believed to show Six's mother, Anna Wijmer, and a portrait of a man by Frans Hals, the Haarlem portrait painter.
Some pictures left. Vermeer's The Little Street belonged to the Six family until it was sold in 1921, and it later reached the Rijksmuseum. In 2016 a younger Jan Six, an art dealer, bought a portrait catalogued at Christie's as by Rembrandt's circle and argued it was by the master himself, from about 1634. The Rembrandt scholar Ernst van de Wetering agreed, while other sources still list it under his circle.
