Rembrandt van Rijn

What failed

He was successful early. The surgeons' guild commissioned The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp from him at twenty-six, he was paid 1,600 guilders for The Night Watch, and in January 1639 he bought a house on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat for thirteen thousand guilders. Then the portrait commissions stopped: across the nine years from 1643 to 1652 there is not one uncontested portrait painted by him on commission, though other work continued — the stadholder paid him some 2,300 guilders for two Passion pictures in 1646. In February 1654 a notary and two witnesses called on him on behalf of a Portuguese merchant over a picture. On 14 July 1656, the day before his fiftieth birthday, he applied to the High Court in The Hague for cessio bonorum, a voluntary surrender of his assets. The petition blames losses in business and losses at sea, but the record does not settle what that meant. Bredius in 1913 and Haak in 1969 both took it that he had speculated in shipping, and neither produced evidence; Bosman, reviewing 231 Amsterdam applications from 1654 to 1659, found in 2019 that his lawyer's text was copied word for word from a Portuguese merchant's application three months earlier, on which reading the wording is a legal formula rather than a diagnosis. Eleven days later the secretary of the Chamber of Abandoned and Insolvent Estates spent two days listing what was in the house, thirteen rooms across nineteen pages. His paintings, etching plates and drawings were auctioned in November 1657. The house was sold at foreclosure by February 1658 and the family moved to rented rooms on the Rozengracht. In December 1660 his partner Hendrickje Stoffels and his son Titus, then nineteen, set up an art-dealing company backdated to 1658; he was formally a third party to the agreement. In July 1662 The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis was delivered to Amsterdam's new town hall, hung for a short period, and came back to him. He cut it down to roughly a quarter of its size.

What happened next

The money never came back. He carried on working from the Rozengracht, attached as a third party to the company his partner and his son had set up: the Syndics of the Drapers' Guild in 1662, further pictures for the Sicilian collector Antonio Ruffo, the late self-portraits, The Jewish Bride. Hendrickje was buried in the Westerkerk on 24 July 1663. Titus died on 4 September 1668, seven months after marrying. Rembrandt died on 4 October 1669 and was buried four days later in a rented grave in the same church. He was a famous painter for most of his adult life and remained one throughout the insolvency; what ended in 1656 was his solvency, and it did not return.

The point

The record is not of a genius ignored. He was given the surgeons' guild commission at twenty-six, was paid 1,600 guilders for The Night Watch, and taught pupils who became well-known painters themselves. The popular version — that The Night Watch was rejected by its sitters and finished him — is not what the record says: the picture that came back to him is The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, twenty years later, and the insolvency was fourteen years after The Night Watch. What the archives show instead is a nine-year run with no uncontested commissioned portrait in it, an application to the High Court filed the day before his fiftieth birthday to give up everything he owned, a two-day inventory of his rooms, three years of forced sales, and an arrangement from December 1660 under which the most celebrated painter in Amsterdam was formally a third party to a company run by his partner and his teenage son. He worked another nine years in that position, and was buried in a rented grave in the Westerkerk rather than the pauper's grave of the legend. Fame and solvency turned out to be separate things; he kept one and lost the other.