NEWS: Two thieves dressed as Boston policemen broke into
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum early Sunday morning...
..Two men wore police uniforms and fooled security guards...
..Officials said it was the largest art heist in history.
The thieves went directly for Storm On The Sea Of Galilee by Rembrandt.
And it makes sense. Rembrandt is the target of all major art thieves.
When you talk about people who are stealing art
because they think they're going to make a lot of money with it,
Rembrandt's the first name that comes to mind.
This is one people think about all the time.
It's Rembrandt's only seascape, his only known seascape.
So you can imagine what the value of this incredibly large...
..unique and moving painting would be.
At the centre of the picture,
but beneath dead centre,
you see one figure
just holding a rope
and holding his hat on his head. And it's Rembrandt.
I was so young when I painted this.
I really had no idea how true it was going to be.
Life is a storm. One minute the sea is flat calm
and then the next it's not and the doubters shout, "Abandon ship."
I never listened.
It's the art that matters, not the mess and loss and sorrow.
Here I am.
One of the great ironies, of course,
is that his works of art are so highly sought after,
not just by thieves, but by collectors of course,
and the values are astronomical.
But he died in obscurity.
When he passed away, his friends had to gather money together to bury him
and he was buried in a rented grave,
which means after a period of time his remains would be moved,
and it's a mystery as to where those remains are today.
So we don't know where these works are
and we don't know where Rembrandt's remains are either.
So it's sort of a parallel mystery.
This is Rembrandt's last self-portrait,
painted in 1669 - the year he died.
He's looking at you, of course,
and it's a picture full of the artist and of his life...
..and of his achievements and his failures...
..and of his art.
You see a certain kind of hardship that he's been through.
A certain kind of struggle.
And, of course, at the end of his life
he is financially not doing well.
But I think you still see the beauty and power and dignity of a man
who's worked his whole life on a great project,
which is to be Rembrandt.
Big nose.
He's asking us to look at him.
It's almost as if he's asking us not to forget him.
This is Rembrandt...
..shortly after he moved to Amsterdam.
He is establishing himself.
And so there's a sense of an identity still forming.
Ambitious and trying and hopeful and open.
And...
..he's trying to be someone.
Rembrandt is consumed with self-portraiture
throughout his entire career.
And we get a sense of him as a man, as an artist,
in all of these different ways.
And this is a Rembrandt who is playing with costume,
who is dressed here in something that a scholar would have worn
in the 16th century -
Wearing a beret, which is unfashionable at this point in time.
There's, for Rembrandt, this quality, too, of marketing himself,
having a business and selling yourself.
And that's also something Rembrandt was very conscious of.
Amsterdam is mine.
There's no better place for me.
It's awash with new money.
Profits from trade with every country on Earth.
It's my promised land.
There are people here who've been rich five minutes
and want to live like princes.
They want good art.
And I'm here to paint it.
My door's the only door they should knock.
Amsterdam was, at that moment, the most important art market in Europe.
I mean, if you want to buy a painting or print,
you go to Amsterdam.
Artists started to specialise as well,
to find their own niche within this market.
And people could become a specialist in portrait painting, for example,
or landscape painting, or landscapes with winter scenes,
or landscapes with winter scenes and a windmill
at the right-hand side of the composition.
I mean, it was this very...well...
..unbelievable specialisation going on.
And then it's interesting to see what Rembrandt's doing,
since he didn't specialise.
So we went to all these different genres
while he became one of the greatest masters
in every genre he touched on.
I'll paint your portrait,
if you're rich enough.
I'll paint group portraits too. 50 guilders a face.
The more, the merrier.
I'll paint Christ on the cross...
..and off it.
I'll paint scenes from the Old Testament.
I'll paint scenes from Greek mythology.
I'll paint anything, as long as someone pays.
And if you can't afford a painting, I'm not just a painter.
For most people, Rembrandt is a painter
but it's only part of the story.
Beside his paintings, he made an incredible load of etchings,
and the number of etchings that he made
is actually as high as his painting, so it's not an inferior sideline.
It's in the core of what he did.
As a printmaker, he is a genius.
Rembrandt had been making self-portraits right from the start,
which is also something that...
..you were supposed to do as an artist.
If you want to know how to draw and etch and paint a face,
start on your own.
These are the self-portraits with the faces...
..practising...
..emotions.
Laughing.
And then we have here...
..the angry face.
These are famous, and rightly so.
And in this case, where he's surprised
and he looks like he's retreating backwards,
this is a beautiful depiction of surprise.
And it's very lightly edged.
This is just right in every possible way.
This is also the period where he just couldn't get enough
of what he saw in the streets,
whether they were beggars or peddlers
or peasants or street musicians.
This is another one.
It's a beggar and he is holding out his hand.
And, again, that's something that Rembrandt in this period liked.
He is vocal.
He is shouting at us or saying something.
But the most intriguing part
of this etching, beggar,
is that the beggar has Rembrandt's face.
It's still difficult to interpret,
but he really meant something by it other than...
.."I can do this and it's fun to do."
I can make anything - portraits of the wealthy,
etchings of the poor.
Everything I see is worth some sort of picture.
I know some people keep diaries and accounts...
..but that's not what my eyes and fingers are for.
Why write things down?
I'm not here to explain myself to anyone.
Rembrandt, he didn't leave us many documents that he wrote himself.
But if you look at these archives here in Amsterdam,
we have actually hundreds of documents
where one way or another his name is mentioned...
..in a positive way, in a negative way, financially,
about his art.
And this building is full with Rembrandt.
So here I have documents...
..dated June 20, 1631.
I think it's one of the earliest,
maybe the earliest document in Amsterdam
where Rembrandt is mentioned.
Here is his first contact with Hendrick Uylenburgh,
the art dealer.
This is the moment that he...
..he comes to Amsterdam and starts his career
as a painter in Amsterdam. Yeah, absolutely.
Uylenburgh's studios were on the Breestraat, beside the canal.
He knew everybody.
He was my introduction.
He was like a ladder I could climb.
I went in through his doors and the story of my Amsterdam began.
The book was actually a commission.
It was commissioned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,
which probably has the biggest collection
in the world of Rembrandt.
I based a lot of his experience compared to mine.
And even Rembrandt's face -
I based it partially on the face of my father.
He also had a really big...
..plump nose and that sort of melancholy look.
The idea I had of him,
he was not a very outgoing person, to say the least,
almost verging on the autistic.
And the traditional image of the artist expressing himself
through his art better than in his social life...
I really embrace that idea.
I think that really goes for Rembrandt.
This is the part where he first meets Saskia,
which I believe is the love of his life.
It starts off in 1631.
Rembrandt's still a young man and not very well known.
So he comes to Amsterdam for the very first time.
He carries his own luggage through the streets of Amsterdam
and he's directed to...
..the gallery of Mr Uylenburgh.
And then he shows him around.
But Rembrandt isn't really listening
and he sees something through the door they pass.
And then we see what Rembrandt sees,
and it's a young girl doing her hair.
And she hears her uncle and Rembrandt talk.
Her uncle asks for two glass of chilled wine. "We're celebrating."
"Yes, Uncle Hendrick."
And then she comes back and her hair is all done up and pretty
and she's made up her face and wearing her best earrings.
And her uncle doesn't notice any of this, of course,
but Rembrandt only has eyes for her.
Life surprises us.
I'd come to Amsterdam to make something of myself
and suddenly there she was, my reason, someone to aim for.
But she came from a family of burgomasters,
far too upper class for me.
If I asked for her hand today, her family would laugh,
which only makes it all the more urgent
that I become the most famous and successful artist
in the entire city.
I think he was very passionate, of course, that he loved women.
Probably one of these people who walks into a room
and you feel their presence.
He was probably very demanding and very....
..busy. I mean, he must've been working all the time.
Just constantly, constantly, constantly making new things,
thinking about new things. Sketching, drawing, painting.
I think what's brilliant here is the composition.
You know, this sort of triangular
composition with these...
..the figures in very dynamic positions.
The prominence of Dr Tulp, here on the right with the hat,
and the slightly sort of cool flesh paint of the corpse
contrasted against the crisp white of the doctors.
He spent a lot of time drawing from nature,
observing people, observing emotions.
And you can actually, when you look at each of these figures,
you, in a way, recognise their humanity.
We see the signature in the background of the painting.
He signed it Rembrandt.
1632.
So it says a lot about his ambition at this point, you know.
You know, whether there are precedents from Italian painters
who are using, you know, one name...
But, obviously, I think that that's the impression you get -
that it's very much to do with his ambition as a young painter.
If one name's good enough for Michelangelo and Raphael,
it's good enough for me.
I'm Rembrandt.
This work is a masterpiece.
It's my first group portrait of one of Amsterdam's guilds.
I've captured the ways in which the guildsmen understand
or are mystified, bemused, fascinated.
Not just their faces, but their minds.
It was an opportunity for him
to really show off what he had to offer,
and not just in a technical skill
but also in this sort of grand vision
of who he was as a painter as well.
In a sense, what's happening right in the centre of the picture
is all about hands.
Not only the hand of the...
..man on the table,
the doctor pulling the arm
so to show us how the hand moves,
and also the hand of the artist.
I'm a hand surgeon here in the Netherlands.
And what we are looking at here
is a magnificent group portrait, of course.
But is this really
depicting the birth of our profession?
Because before that, let's say in the Middle Ages,
we had a guild that was consisted of barbers
that also did a little bit of medical stuff.
And that was about it.
And, so, now we are entering a new era where science is emerging.
So this guild is really something else.
They were real surgeons. They could do something.
They were looking at how the body works.
They were opening up the body.
There are some flaws in it, actually.
And first of all, there is a tendon of the pinky
which isn't there in reality.
But the biggest mistake in the picture
is that the origin of these superficial flexor tendons
is in the medial epicondyle of the elbow
and not on the lateral one.
So it's really a mistake he made...
..but, you know, I forgive him for that!
I adore this painting.
When you see the technical virtuosity...
..of the artist's hand...
..at such an early age...
..at the outset of his career,
you're amazed.
It's almost as if you could see people saying,
"Where did this young man come from?"
Where did I come from?
Leiden, a small town. A day's ride from Amsterdam.
I was the sixth of seven children.
Born in 1606.
And my father's mill served the brewery trade.
We weren't rich, we weren't poor.
We were somewhere in between.
Quite comfortable.
I wasn't interested in malting barley.
I was interested in painting.
I had a friend, younger than me,
but he'd been master of his own studio since he was 12.
Jan Lievens. I wanted to be like him, better than him.
And a sixth child doesn't really matter,
so they let me study art.
The Leiden Collection itself was named as a homage to Rembrandt,
and to his home town.
It was built out of tremendous passion for Rembrandt
and his school. And from the time that we started collecting,
my wife and I realised that
we simply could not live with these paintings,
that they were meant to be seen.
We made it known to the museums
that all of our paintings were available to be on loan.
Within the study of Rembrandt and his school,
there is a very special place to be had
by what would best be described
as the friendly rivalry
between Rembrandt and Lievens.
They had a true and genuine connection,
a true appreciation for each other.
We saw this in the Leiden period
where, within one of our paintings, for example, the Sense Of Hearing,
Rembrandt paints as a central figure Lievens.
We see within Lievens' painting of the Card Players...
..the central figure is Rembrandt.
I followed in Jan's footsteps as far as I could.
I went to train with the same master he had.
And when I got home to Leiden, we started painting together.
Or, rather, painting at each other.
Looking at this portrait of Rembrandt by young Lievens,
it's becoming clear how much they looked at each other
and how much they learnt from each other's techniques as well.
Rembrandt, when he's young and he works in Leiden,
he works on a tiny scale.
And obviously...
..one is oneself's most patient sitter.
So what does he do?
He starts to study himself.
The amazing thing is, he leaves the most important part of a face,
the eyes, in the shadow...
..which nobody does when you paint a portrait.
He creates, very convincingly, the light in his hair.
And there, he uses a technique that Lievens probably developed,
cos Lievens, although a year younger than Rembrandt,
working in the same city, had already finished his training before
and he probably developed this scratching
with the back of his brush to create light.
The way he's scratching into the wet paint,
no-one had ever done that before.
And now both Rembrandt and Lievens are showing
in these paintings, well, how they can use this...
..new technique to give more life
to their faces and to their composition.
It's like today's soccer players, if I may make that comparison.
Sometimes you need the best players in the world
to play in one soccer team,
and all of a sudden the whole team is becoming better.
And that's what's happening here as well,
so they really encourage each other to get to a higher...higher level.
That's magnificent, I think.
I learnt from Jan and I taught him things.
He retouched my paintings and told me he'd improved them,
and I did the same for him.
In this picture, I don't think I ever decided
which of us it was behind the easel.
I think in those days,
sometimes people couldn't tell which of us had painted what.
Sometimes there is the suggestion, because they were rivals,
that they were also quarrelling. But that's not the case.
I think they're just collaborating and doing things for each other.
The story of this painting is complex.
First of all, the painting was just five minutes in my studio
and then I found a date, 1627, which nobody had ever seen.
I'd put it on the easel and looked at it for a few days,
and my first conclusion was based on
looking at the coat of the old man.
What I see here...
..is not by Rembrandt, but it's by Lievens.
But how is that possible if there is not only a date at the bottom left,
but also a signature?
A reliable signature.
"RHL" - exactly in the way
Rembrandt signed in '27,
and it's good to realise that Rembrandt only signs a painting
when it's finished.
To make a very long story very short is that we found out
that the painting was entirely finished by Rembrandt...
..but it was a very dark painting.
It was sent back to the painter.
Lievens brought light in a dark painting.
So everything that is...
Almost everything that is lit very strong...
..this wall, the sky, this part,
the wall here, the wood, the wood...
..and the top of the chair...
..that's all done by Lievens.
Then Gerrit Dou painted this blue cloth.
..and this dish.
And, of course, this silk strip.
Gerrit Dou, by the way, was the first pupil of Rembrandt.
Yes, we already had pupils, both Jan and I.
We weren't nobodies any more.
I liked Gerrit.
He was a feather in my cap.
Rembrandt started it, finished it.
It was probably too dark.
Lievens brought light in it,
and Gerrit Dou...
..made a unity of the painting.
That's the basic story.
Their manners of painting were so close
that it was easily mixed up and they...
I think they took advantage of it.
We had a visitor come to Leiden in 1628.
A leading connoisseur - Constantijn Huygens.
He was impressed by us both,
commissioned Jan to make a portrait of him.
And Huygens told me
that my Judas Repentant was more truthful,
more powerful than anything the Italian masters
had ever painted.
I agreed and then he left, various promises floating in the air.
And I began to think about how small Leiden was
and about Amsterdam and money...
..and the art
that I would turn it into.
Well, we are looking at Rembrandt,
not yet 23 years old.
This is 1628,
perhaps very early in 1629.
And this is early days in his career.
But you can see he's full of ambition, you know.
If you look at him wearing
this gold chain,
which is...
..quite telling...
He certainly would have known that some famous artists
past and present, such as Titian and Rubens,
would have been given gold chains by kings and princes.
And that seems to be the message here.
The aspiration here - "I am worth a gold chain...
"..and if not now, then certainly in the future."
This is an extremely exciting moment for a collector.
This will be only the third time that I've seen this painting
in 15 years.
It will be the first time that I will have seen it cleaned.
This is, for us, the jewel in the crown.
It has been the Holy Grail for the last 15 years
and I can't wait to see it.
It really is sublime.
I can't...
..I can't really speak.
It makes my heart pound.
There's something about the signature and the date...
..the size...
the prominence relative to, of course, the size of the painting
which is, after all, his smallest.
It would've been so easy, especially in view of the size of the artwork,
to just initial it.
No.
He recognises himself that he has created a jewel.
The beholder would have looked upon this and said, "He's a genius."
He's on a trajectory the likes of which no other Dutch painter
embarked upon at that time.
He's going to be more famous than any other Dutch artist ever.
And it all goes to show that he must have hit Amsterdam...
..like a thunderclap.
At the time when Rembrandt paints these portraits,
he's made a stellar career in Leiden.
He arrives in Amsterdam and becomes, very soon, the most fashionable
and probably also the most expensive portrait painter in the city.
Usually, he paints portraits either half lengths or just bust length.
But, here, he paints Marten and Oopjen full length
as if they're royalty and not just very rich commoners.
And Rembrandt gives every detail,
every shine to the costume that one can imagine.
The part that you really want to touch, literally,
are these rosettes on the shoes
of Marten.
She also is incredibly elaborate.
Fantastic embroidery.
And you feel that she's really the boss in the household.
These portraits are a ticklish affair.
The people I paint for,
most of them have no idea what great art is.
They just want me to make them look good
and they want me to make them look rich.
They want them to hang on their walls,
show their parents, show their kids,
and their posterity.
Even unto the seventh generation,
"These were your great-great-grandparents.
"Look how rich they were."
So I pay as much attention to the lace as the face.
I give them good cuffs and collars.
He depends on these people
because they are the ones who give him commissions.
So they are the ones who then, you know, provide him with a salary.
What they wanted is the best of the best, and they could afford it.
And why could they afford it?
Because they were all merchants and traders, and they got
really, really wealthy.
So, basically, they want to flaunt it because the money's there.
We were led to believe that black was really frugal
and it meant that, you know, our ancestors in the 17th century
were really frugal people.
Well, nothing speaks of that,
even if you look at the accounts,
if you look at
the probate inventories.
No frugality whatsoever,
because black was the most difficult colour to dye.
This is one of Rembrandt's first formal self-portraits.
It was about dress and about showing that you were very successful
and can afford expensive clothes.
But he still, even here,
he continues to display himself in roles.
This is another role of his -
successful gentleman
or the successful artist role.
This is really something where he proclaims his success.
He was, in a way, saying, "Come to me."
Portraits pay the rent but they're not what I want to be famous for.
I want to be the best and most admired kind of painter there is -
a history painter.
Take scenes from the Bible or Roman times and paint them so powerfully
that viewers almost think they're there.
Better than a landscape painter, better than a portraitist,
the history painter does everything they do
and brings drama to it all.
And thanks to my patron, Constantijn Huygens,
just such an opportunity falls in my lap.
It's two pictures, part of a series
that Rembrandt was intending to make for the Stadtholder,
which was the most important, let's say,
leader of state in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century,
and this was a very prestigious commission.
It was Constantijn Huygens again, who was the most important, well,
let's say, intermediate figure between Rembrandt
and the Stadtholder.
The painting seems to include a self-portrait of Rembrandt
at the base of the cross,
so he is one of the people guilty, so to speak, of...
..of crucifying Christ,
and that insertion of his own self-portrait,
as a kind of confessional of sin
or participation in these holy events, was really extraordinary.
Every sin we commit
is another injury
inflicted on his broken body.
It's true of me as much as anyone else,
and I paint Christ's body as a ruin
because he was a man as well as God
and died for us.
This is the kind of painting I was made for...
..so I'll take my time.
The series of paintings, erm...
..were commissioned in the early 1630s,
and Rembrandt took several years before he completed them.
One might think that having such a prominent patron
on the national stage would have been Rembrandt's first priority,
but clearly it wasn't at that point in his career.
We see him acting all the time
as a kind of disruptor
and someone who exactly knows what he wants to do
and someone who does not necessarily follow the demands
of the commissioners.
So, looking at a commission like this, apparently it's not
the money that's important to him,
but it's the final result,
and it's only Rembrandt himself who decides
what's good and what's not good.
It may well have been because he was simply too busy
with other commissions right at hand.
He wanted to ingratiate himself
with clientele in the city of Amsterdam
who were paying him quite a lot of money for portraits
and buying other types of pictures as well.
He was running a large studio.
He was engaged to be married.
I'm far from penniless,
I'm doing well,
so I ask her Uncle Uylenburgh for Saskia's hand in marriage,
and I draw her on the 8th of June, 1633,
the third day after our engagement.
She's 21 years old, and she's mine.
I paint her as herself and other people.
No need to flatter if you truly love.
I'll paint her as the goddess Flora, pagan goddess of fertility,
because we want our union blessed.
I'll paint myself as the prodigal son and her as my whore
because I love her and because there's a market for morality tales.
So, we sell and we spend.
Life is good.
In the beginning of his career in Amsterdam,
Rembrandt bought things at auctions...
..and he bought a lot.
This is, of course, a time where he makes very nice paintings
for very rich people.
The drawing by Adriaen Brouwer - less than two guilders.
That's not too much.
The first documented purchases
that we have are of works of art and specifically prints.
Rembrandt collects art on a grand scale.
We know that he had an incredible collection of prints.
One of his favourite artists was Lucas van Leyden.
Lucas, like him, came from Leiden and was a predecessor
and both a very good printmaker
and a very good painter.
This is 1637, March,
and he bought for the immense amount of 637 guilders
an art book from Lucas van Leyden.
This is really an enormous amount of money.
That's the kind of thing that...
..was so outrageous that people would remember it for decades.
A couple of half-length portraits should cover it.
Anyway, it's what it's worth.
Prints by Albrecht Durer show up and he's buying those in quantity.
Seven complete sets of Durer's Life Of The Virgin - 12 guilders.
Bargain!
He's pursuing stuffed animals.
I mean, going to auctions, er, can become a habit.
He's buying
oriental exotica, such as a Japanese helmet.
He has, of course, his busts of the emperors, some of them in plaster,
but he also has Venetian glass.
And he buys and he buys and he buys...
I buy things that I might copy in a picture.
Some seashells, God's handiwork. Beautiful.
As we say, he had a hole in his hand.
He was spending all of the time
and he had no real idea of money, I think.
Of course, it adds up.
Saskia's family accuse me of squandering her dowry,
so I sue them for slander.
The judge threw the case out.
Idiot.
It wasn't my name I was defending.
It was my purpose.
Almost everything I buy ends up in one of my pictures,
like almost everything I see.
The world God made
and all the men and creatures in it.
In 1637 Rembrandt goes to the fall fair
and there is the attraction of the year, an elephant,
an Asian elephant.
She is seven years old and her name is Hansken
and she's travelling the world,
so a real must-see for an artist like Rembrandt
because he was fascinated by the creation,
by everything which was life,
and it was important for him as an artist to see animals in the flesh.
He draws her.
A year later, he uses her in an etching.
He etches Adam and Eve in paradise,
and when normally we see Adam and Eve surrounded by
a huge variety of species like a zoo,
Rembrandt chooses to depict only two creatures.
One is fantasy - a dragon -
and the other is an elephant and it's Hansken.
So the buyers of this print must have understood
that this was Hansken,
and maybe they had seen her themselves also.
God made the world...
I believe it, even though I'm no churchgoer.
It's from the Bible that I take so many of the stories that I tell,
fit subjects for etchings and for paintings, too,
the turning points of history.
The fall of man,
the fall of pagan kings.
You see his ambition here as a history painter.
He paints a biblical story,
one of the highly dramatic Old Testament stories.
Belshazzar's Feast.
You remember, it's this story of Belshazzar giving a big feast
and using the sacred vessels
his father looted from the temple in Jerusalem.
So it's a sacrilege here.
And then, at the height of the feast,
the writing appears on the wall,
which ultimately means, "You are going to die,
"and your kingdom will perish."
In a way, Belshazzar is sort of the hinge here, you know.
So it's the writing on the wall appearing,
him noticing this and reacting to it.
And then the others pick that up,
that something is happening.
They haven't realised yet what it is, it seems,
but because he reacts to it, they are also sort of reacting to him.
Other artists paint the aftermath,
but the moments I look for are the turning points.
The king startles.
The drink is spilt.
And the others know only that their great king is suddenly unmanned.
Pride goes before a fall.
Rembrandt didn't spend only money
on prints and paintings and props,
but Rembrandt also wanted to live somewhere...
..permanently.
And that's why, in 1639, he goes to a notary,
and, together with two other guys who own a house in the Breestraat,
and this is the contract.
They sell. And Rembrandt, he buys.
Rembrandt bought the house
for 13,000 guilders, difficult to translate into today's money.
But I mean, more than a million euros, probably.
A very expensive house.
And we also know that he could afford it.
He was doing very well.
Rembrandt was able to put down a down payment,
and the rest of the amount he was allowed to pay in instalments,
very much like we pay our mortgages these days.
It was a beautiful house.
There were five floors, if you include the cellars
and the attics, that were used.
So he was able to do a lot here.
Not only his own studio, but also the studio for his pupils.
He was able to receive patrons and commissioners,
and there was also space
for his beautiful collection of art and curiosities, so space enough.
And it was a house in grand style with great lighting.
What more would you want as a painter?
It is an enormous amounts of money - 13,000 guilders for a house.
But as long as Rembrandt did not pay the full amount of money,
it was not his house officially.
It's perfect.
Plenty of room for everything.
Pictures, people...
Then there's the matter of the cash.
I do have it, in a manner of speaking.
I finished the Passion paintings for the Stadtholder.
That means money.
Once he's paid, I should get in touch with Huygens and let him know.
So, Rembrandt writes to Constantijn Huygens.
The letters are cordial.
They communicate a desire to serve his patron.
But he's also looking for payment, and he wants to get paid quickly.
He would like to be paid, interestingly enough,
more than the original agreement seems to have been.
My dear sir. I have taken great pleasure
in the proper execution of the paintings of Christ's entombment
and his resurrection for His Highness the Stadtholder.
They will bring His Highness pleasure, for in these two pictures
I have observed the deepest and most natural emotion.
I'm now sending you these two pieces,
which I think are fine enough to warrant His Highness paying me
no less than 1,000 guilders for each of them.
I rely on his knowledge and discretion.
Should Rembrandt have asked for more money from Constantijn Huygens?
That's a good question.
He is following a model of princely patronage, whereby...
..in asking for more money, he is appealing to Huygens' taste.
He is saying, essentially, "If you recognise good art,
"you'll be willing to pay for it, and pay more for it."
Huygens doesn't seem to have agreed,
and wanted to stick to their original price.
The letters show some signs of strain in their relationship.
If His Highness cannot be persuaded to pay a higher price,
even if they are obviously worth it,
I shall be content with 600 guilders a piece,
provided I am reimbursed for my cash outlay of 44 guilders
for the two ebony frames and the crate.
Your obliging and affectionate servant, Rembrandt.
Remember and money, that's a complicated thing.
He was really...
..economically aware of his own value and what he could earn
and what he should ask.
But he was also aware of the value of art
and was prepared to really pay huge sums to acquire that.
I feel that, for Rembrandt,
making art or painting, making prints, drawing,
was more of a calling than an economic activity.
He just needed to do that.
People mistake me. They think I'm greedy because they think
that art is a craft, a job, a way of making a living.
No. No, no, no.
You won't understand me if that's the way you think.
Life is a means of making art.
That's the right way round.
That's why a house like this,
there's room to live, room for my own studio, room to teach.
Yes, of course pupils pay for the privilege.
We're in the space that Rembrandt called his small painting room.
This is actually his pupils' atelier.
He kept his pupils separate from his own space.
We have biographers like Joachim von Sandrart
writing fairly early about Rembrandt's studio,
where he may have had a peek when he was here in the 1630s.
We notice that these people had their own agendas.
And he sees Rembrandt as a mercenary,
and he also points to all of these pupils.
He actually calculates how much income Rembrandt would have had
from these pupils - it's over 2,000 guilders per year.
He can't believe the sum.
So it may or may not have been true, but it does tell us that
part of the criticism of Rembrandt was that he was in it for the money
and people didn't understand his aim
and why he painted and drew the way he did.
The pupils had various tasks,
and in this alcove we've reconstructed
the very important activity of creating a copy
after one of Rembrandt's paintings.
We have our own copy
of Rembrandt's The Angel Departing From Tobias And His Family,
now in the Louvre,
and we show how an artist would have started the painting.
Rembrandt could have then perhaps touched these up.
We also have stories of his pupils producing paintings
that were so close to the master style
that people couldn't distinguish
and they were actually sold as works by Rembrandt,
which was fair game.
After all, it was produced at Rembrandt's behest,
under his supervision, in his style,
and other artists worked much in the same way.
And, of course, it was all too tempting for later sellers
to fudge the part about the pupil
and to emphasise the part about the master,
and, by the 19th century,
there were scattered throughout collections in Europe,
and in other areas,
many of these paintings that came out of Rembrandt's studio,
and people no longer knew what the difference was.
If I've done my job,
it's me that lives inside their fingers.
They think and paint like I do.
But once they leave,
of course, they can go their own way, like I did.
In 1639, there were two very significant
Italian Renaissance paintings in Amsterdam.
And we know that he sold both of them.
One was a portrait of a gentleman by Titian.
And we know that he saw a painting
by an even more famous Italian Renaissance painter, Raphael,
which came up for sale in 1639.
And he combines that with the Titian to say,
"I'm a little bit like these people.
"I stand in the tradition of these great masters."
There was this rich tradition called emulation,
which meant both imitating people from the past that you admired,
but also doing one better, showing that you had a greater ambition.
So this year, 1640, was significant for many reasons,
personal, as well as professional,
and with Rembrandt, the personal and the professional
are never far apart.
This year, as happened frequently
during his marriage with Saskia,
a child died,
and so you have to imagine him holding all these conflicting....
..events and feelings in balance,
even as he continues to push his art forward.
Saskia was a very common model
through the first years of their marriage.
We think this drawing of Saskia in her bedroom
with a four-poster bed and curtains
was probably drawn about the time that she was expecting
their first daughter, Cornelia, in 1638.
And the reason we know that she's probably in bed
because she's expecting
is that it has this nursing couch in the foreground,
and that allowed either the mother or the midwife to recline
and to nurse the child sort of propped up with cushions.
Saskia looks a little bit pallid, a little bit wan.
We don't actually know whether it's just before or after the birth.
It could well have been. The poor baby was buried within three weeks,
so it could be that the nursing couch is still there,
just needing to be removed.
The infant mortality rate was staggering.
But we have so many drawings by Rembrandt of his wife Saskia
in these various phases of illness
because she also must have been ill during her pregnancies,
and during the loss, but also later on.
Drawings of women and children that are so heartfelt,
and so well observed,
that there is no other way than that he must have felt deeply
for all the children that were born,
and that he must have grieved deeply as well, together with Saskia.
And the drawings tell that story.
Every human being has the same emotions -
we all feel fear, we all feel joy, we all feel sadness.
And that is why these drawings especially so speak to us today
because we can see ourselves in them.
Three times now in the Zuiderkerk, I've watched them write
the simple facts - 15th of February, 1636.
A child of Rembrandt, painter.
Robertus.
He was two months old.
13th of August, 1638.
A child of Rembrandt, painter.
Cornelia.
Named after my mother.
Two weeks old.
Which was the same age that our third child reached,
our second Cornelia,
buried on 12th of August, 1640.
The good Lord gives, the good Lord takes away.
He takes. He takes.
He takes.
I hear other people talk of profit and loss.
Their children sleep at home.
For anyone who has even
the remotest emotional attachment to Rembrandt,
this...painting is...
..like a punch to the gut.
By all accounts, the happiest time of Rembrandt's life
was the time that he spent with his wife Saskia.
By 1641, by the time this painting was made...
..Saskia has lost three children soon after childbirth.
The poignancy
of this exchange of glances...
..is so deeply, deeply moving...
..and the flower joins them together in that bond of...
..enduring, sustained hope.
This is a church registration from the Zuiderkerk,
which is translated as the "Southern Church"...
..the Protestant church which was closest to the Breestraat
where Rembrandt lived.
And this is a baptism of the son
of Rembrandt and Saskia,
1641. Titus.
And the name of the parents, of course, are mentioned.
And the date - he was baptised on September 22, 1641.
I mean, of course, the son is born.
It must be a happy moment, but Rembrandt and his wife Saskia,
they lost already three children in infancy.
And you never know.
They never knew if Titus would survive.
Birth and death were very close in these ages.
BELL CHIMES
This book is the registration of burials
of the Old Church,
the most expensive church you could say,
the most posh church of Amsterdam at the time.
This is a burial.
Saskia van Uylenburgh was buried in the Old Church...
..19th of June, 1642.
I mean, this is all what is left at the end of your life,
one or two lines in a volume like this.
That's how history works.
So Rembrandt had no wife any more.
This is a notary again.
And this...
This is the last will of Saskia.
Saskia's will provided
for the inheritance of the goods
that she had brought into the marriage
and that Titus would have been entitled to inherit from her.
And that was, at the time of her death, half of the estate.
So what happens if Rembrandt remarries?
Under the conditions of Saskia's will,
he has to pay Titus half of the estate
as it was when Saskia died,
and this was worth 20,375 guilders.
I have a son.
But no wife.
And if I find a wife to be a mother for him...
..profit and loss.
Loss.
Captain Frans Banninck Cocq tells me he wants a likeness of him
and his militia company.
Here was a picture about the pride of my city,
and in the years after I painted it
my face and name were dragged in the mud.
Rembrandt the adulterer,
the great painter who lost all his money.