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When he arrived in Amsterdam, the young painter was a burly bachelor with a gay, stubborn face, a sociable manner. One of his first jobs was The Anatomy Lesson, for Dr. Tulp, an impressively theatrical work. He promptly became Amsterdam's most popular and richest painter. His portraits of that time were, comparatively, the emptiest he ever did. He spent money hand over fist, on tapes tries and brocades, on good living and on the paintings of his contemporaries. He frequently opened the bidding with a price three times what any Dutch burgher ever paid for a picture, to "raise the prices for paintings in Amsterdam." But he moved from the house of his dealer, van Uylenborch, to a canal-side warehouse where he could paint, on the side, sagging old women, ghetto characters, Biblical allegories.
In 1634 he married his dealer's cousin, Saskia van Uylenborch, a gentle, kindly girl of excellent family with a dowry of 40,000 guilders (about $16,000). He bought a fine house in the ghetto, still preserved in Amsterdam as the Rembrandt-huis, and decked Saskia in diamonds and pearls. Because Rembrandt's success as a portrait painter was enormous, the Company of Captain Cocq knew of no better man to do their group portrait.
Rembrandt, however, set out this time to paint a picture, not a portrait. He showed the company tumbling out of their clubhouse, the captain and his lieutenant in brilliant highlight, some of the others crowded into almost total shadow. The company were hopping mad. As they had already paid for the canvas, they accepted it but hung it in an anteroom of the clubhouse. From that job dated Rembrandt's decline as a fashionable portrait painter. While the company were bickering about it, Saskia, who had borne four children, sickened and died.
Not long afterward Rembrandt began to paint the young nurse for his only surviving son, Titus. The girl was named Hendrickje Stoffels, had a broad, gracious face, a handsome throat, deep breasts, coarse hips and legs. By her, her employer had two children but he never married her, possibly because his wife's will made him sole executor as long as he did not remarry. Hendrickje could not read or write but she apparently loved Rembrandt. After her first child, she was expelled from her church. Rembrandt's Biblical subjects shifted from such as Samson Menacing His Father-in-Law to Woman Taken in Adultery. He also began to produce his magnificent landscapes, notable for their mountains, although Rembrandt never left The Netherlands, never saw a mountain.
This was his greatest period of production. He did things with paint no one has done since. He developed his amazing mastery of moted light. The faces he painted expose their surfaces of flesh like faces seen in life, but they also expose their motivations, wills, characters. Anyone could decide, on the evidence of Rembrandt's pictures of this period, whether he would have lent his sitters money, married them or bet on their futures. They are for the most part resolute, weathered, resigned faces, expert at concealment, hav-ing the drama and depth of authentic human beings.