The bankruptcy sale of 1656 

In 1639 Rembrandt bought a large house on the Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam, in a prosperous street, on terms that assumed his income would keep rising. He paid in instalments and he fell behind on them. This is the ordinary beginning of most financial ruin: not a catastrophe, but a payment schedule built on an optimistic decade.

The house was also a collection. Rembrandt bought constantly and at auction: prints by Italian and German masters, plaster casts, weapons and armour, shells, coral, stuffed animals, costumes from other countries, glassware, busts of Roman emperors. Some of it was studio stock, the props that appear again and again in his paintings. Some of it was simply the appetite of a man who liked owning strange things and who had grown up without them.

By the mid 1650s the portrait commissions had thinned, his tastes had not, and the debts on the house were long overdue. In 1656 he petitioned for cessio bonorum, a form of insolvency that allowed a debtor to surrender his assets to his creditors and avoid outright disgrace, on the grounds that his losses stemmed from trade and misfortune. A commissioner went through the house and wrote down what was in it, room by room, item by item.

That document is one of the most valuable pieces of paper in art history. It lets us walk his rooms: the entrance hall, the room behind it where he painted, the art cabinet with its shelves of curiosities, the small chamber where the pupils worked. It names painters he owned and admired. It shows a working studio surrounded by a museum.

The sales that followed, in 1657 and 1658, were badly timed and raised disappointing sums. The house itself was sold. Rembrandt moved with Titus and with Hendrickje Stoffels, his companion since the later 1640s, to a rented house in the Rozengracht, in a cheaper district of the city. To keep working without his earnings being seized, the household set up an arrangement in which Titus and Hendrickje traded as art dealers and Rembrandt was, on paper, their employee, paid in board and lodging.

It is a humiliating structure and it worked. He kept painting. He kept teaching. The commissions that came were fewer and often from outside the fashionable centre, and the pictures got larger in feeling and looser in handling.

The strangest fact of his career is that the work made after he lost almost everything is the work people now cross cities to see, and the clearest evidence is his own face.