QI The Book of the Dead

financial manager and the couple were soon able to move into an expensive house in the Jewish quarter, which Rembrandt filled with the artworks and exotic bric-a-brac he loved to collect. As well as the amazing torrent of his own work – there are over 2,300 paintings, sketches and etchings that we know about – Rembrandt was also a gifted teacher; at least fifty of his pupils went on to establish themselves as working artists.
    The van Rijns’ apparently unbeatable marriage of art and commerce was not to last long. Saskia gave birth to four children in as many years, but only one, Titus, survived beyond a few weeks. She herself succumbed to tuberculosis shortly afterwards. Without his wife’s business acumen, Rembrandt’s mania for collecting meant that his debts begin to pile up. He didn’t appear to care, working even harder, producing a string of masterpieces: portraits, biblical scenes, self-portraits and large commissions, the grandest of which was The Night Watch (1642). The painting should really be called The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh . It was a group commission from eighteen merchants who were also a part-time civic guard. The payment terms were simple: the more money each man put in, the more prominently Rembrandt would paint him. Unfortunately, like many of Rembrandt’s best works, it suffered from poor attempts at conservation, with thick layers of varnish being ladled all over it, darkening the scene to such an extent that, when Sir Joshua Reynolds saw it a century and a half later, he referred to it as ‘The Night Watch’ and the name stuck. As modern restoration has shown, it’s actually set in broad daylight.
    Stories about Rembrandt always seem to come back tomoney. His greed was legendary: his students would paint coins on the floor and see how long it took before he stooped to pick them up. Others described how his clothes resembled filthy rags: he used them to wipe his brushes and ‘other things of a similar nature’. If he didn’t waste money on clothes, Saskia’s relatives were painfully conscious of his other extravagances. They made sure that, if he remarried, he would inherit none of her estate. So, though he became the lover of Titus’s nursemaid, the malodorous Geertje Dircx, he refused to marry her. When, seven years later, he turned his amorous attentions to his buxom young housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels, Geertje sued him for breach of promise. He won the case but Geertje was awarded a lifetime annuity of 200 guilders a year, a sum the near-bankrupt Rembrandt couldn’t afford. He responded by getting her committed to a workhouse for moral delinquency and promiscuity.
    Financially, things went from bad to worse. In the early 1650s, the Dutch economy, weakened by the Anglo-Dutch war, suffered a severe credit crunch. A Rembrandt portrait was expensive in both time and money: a subject might have to sit for three months and the artist refused to court fashion by using the cheaper, gaudy colours pioneered by the Flemish school of Anthony Van Dyck. The commissions dried up.
    In a last-ditch attempt to save his home, Rembrandt transferred the deeds to his fifteen-year-old son. As soon as his creditors learned of this, they panicked and called in his debts. In July 1656 he was forced to apply for a cessio bonorum . This spared him the shame of bankruptcy, but required that all his possessions be sold to pay his debts. Years of collecting fell under the hammer –a giant’s helmet, a plaster cast of a negro’s head, crossbows, thirteen bamboo wind instruments, a sculpture of a childurinating, the skins of a lion and lioness and scores of paintings. His art collection was so huge that the Artists’ Guild worried that the market would be swamped. They used their influence to speed up the sale; Rembrandt only raised a paltry 600 guilders and was forced to move to a small rented house in a poor part of the city.
    Virtually bankrupt, Rembrandt’s housekeeper/lover and his son concocted a scheme to keep him solvent. They started an art business, buying and selling paintings under their own names, but employing Rembrandt as an ‘assistant’. The man who was once Amsterdam’s most popular artist was now an employee of his own staff. More tragedy followed. Plague claimed Hendrickje in 1662 and Titus in 1668. Rembrandt died the following year, ‘without a friend or a guilder, or even a good piece of herring’. He was buried in an