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Rembrandt's answer was to become increasingly absorbed in his own art, devoting himself more and more to the Biblical scenes for which there was little market.
His portrait commissions kept dwindling as he labored for months over each painting. His heavy brushstroke and thick overpainting, plus his untidy habit of cleaning brushes on his own clothing, struck his townsmen as uncouth. At 52, Rembrandt was forced to put his house and goods up for auction.
Beset by adversity, Rembrandt retreated even farther into his Bible, using his son Titus and his Jewish friends as models. Among his favorites was Hendrickjke Stoffels, the simple peasant family maid whom Rembrandt made his mistress after the death of Saskia. His Bathsheba, for which Hendrickjke posed, is ranked as one of the greatest nudes in Western art, not because of her classic beauty (in fact, Hendrickjke was squat and dumpy), but because of the unsparing yet loving eye Rembrandt cast on her flesh, recreating it against the rich fabric background. Result: a study of the quiet inner resignation with which Bathsheba received the message that would introduce her to King David and her destiny.
It was this effort to pierce through outward appearances that brought Rembrandt to his greatest insights in works such as The Denial of St. Peter. To depict the awesome moment, Rembrandt succeeded in portraying the intense inner struggle by relentlessly focusing the servant girl's light on the proud yet suffering features of Peter. In The Bridal Couple, probably painted the year before he died at 63, Rembrandt could still return boldly to another moment of drama for every man, raise it to the level of a welling symbol of devotion, acceptance and proud communion.
Painters' Painter. Ironically, the basic elements of Rembrandt's painting—his superb brush stroke and bold handling of color, his insistence on psychological insight, his dramatic use of light and shadow—long kept him in eclipse. Though in his own day Velasquez thought nothing of borrowing a pose from Rembrandt's Negress Lying Down (he used it for his own Venus), Rembrandt's reputation became primarily the custody of painters in later generations. In their hands, Rembrandt's work has become one of the richest lodes in Western art.
In the 18th and 19th centuries his landscapes influenced a whole generation of English painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds made copies of Rembrandt's paintings, and so did Gainsborough and Turner. Goya's studio had ten Rembrandt prints, to which Goya freely admitted his debt: "I have had three masters: Velasquez, Rembrandt, and nature." As the pendulum swung from classicism to romanticism in the 19th century, Delacroix seized on Rembrandt to best his classicist rival, Ingres, and wrote: "Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael."