Rembrandt's Shadow 

Leiden, around 1620. A miller's son is pulled out of Latin school and apprenticed to a painter, which at the time was closer to joining a trade guild than entering an art world. Within a decade Rembrandt van Rijn has moved to Amsterdam, the richest city in Europe, at the exact moment a merchant class discovers it wants its face on a wall.

What he sells them is not likeness. Other painters could do likeness. Rembrandt sells the moment just before or just after something happens: the surgeon's hand mid-demonstration, the militia company caught stepping out of the shadow, the sitter who has clearly just been asked a difficult question. He lights it the way a theatre lights a stage, throwing most of the canvas away so that the small lit part becomes unavoidable.

The money follows, and so does the spending. He buys a grand house on the Jodenbreestraat he cannot really afford, and fills it with shells, armour, prints and curiosities. His wife Saskia dies in 1642. The commissions thin. In 1656 he files for a form of insolvency and an inventory is taken of everything he owns, room by room, which is why we know more about his possessions than about almost any other painter of the century.

Then the strange part. Broke, unfashionable, painting for a smaller and rougher market, he gets better. The late self-portraits are loose to the point of looking unfinished up close, and from three steps back they are the most honest faces in European art. That arc, ambition to ruin to clarity, is the spine of this collection, and every chapter teaches one skill you can use in a gallery the same afternoon.