There was a time in the 1630s, even the early '40s,
when Amsterdam loved everything I did.
The richest and most fashionable burgomasters
wanted portraits from me.
I made paintings for the head of state.
I had more pupils than any other painter.
That was 20 years ago.
Now, my pupils are more popular than me.
And I'm fodder for the gossips.
"He's got a bastard child."
"He never pays his bills, he can't paint like he used to."
But they're right about that.
These days, I paint better.
And there were always some people
who knew I was catching something closer to what being a human is.
Ugly.
Damaged.
Old.
What ends up on the canvas, what ends up in your eyes...
..that's all that matters to me.
We are standing here in front of an anatomy lesson,
at least part of an anatomy lesson.
It was severely damaged by fire in the 18th century,
but there's still this moving fragment
of the middle section that survived.
And it shows us the dead body
with a brain dissection going on
and Rembrandt is emphasising the dead state of this corpse.
You can almost feel the weight of this corpse.
So it's a very realistic rendering of the scene.
There's no escape, we have urge to look on what is happening here
and to enjoy these wonderful brush strokes.
This is looking like almost Impressionist painting
and it's Rembrandt at his very best.
His name was Joris Fonteijn.
People on the street called him Black Jack, a petty thief.
And then he pulled a knife while robbing a draper's shop,
so they hung him and gave the body to the surgeons' guild.
It's my second painting of an anatomy lesson, of course.
24 years since I made The Anatomy Lesson Of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.
I've been married.
Widowed.
I have a son by my dead wife,
a daughter by the woman I live in sin with.
My Hendrickje.
I'm a different man now.
I'm a different painter.
You can see what happens between these two portraits.
I mean, there's such an evolution between 1632 and 1656,
where, first of all, just on a basic level,
the kind of brush work that Rembrandt is using
has just loosened so much,
and the kind of way he conveys meaning
is just opened up in all kinds of ways.
It has been said in art history that apparently the surgeons' guild
was so satisfied with the result of the Dr Tulp painting,
that 24 years later they approached Rembrandt yet again,
so he was still popular.
I think it could have been slightly different.
If you look at the fashionable portrait painters of those years,
like Rembrandt's pupils,
they had better things to do in the mid-50s,
making great paintings for the Town Hall,
or portraying the elite of Amsterdam.
They might have wanted to avoid the circumstances
in which you had to make your sketches for a painting like this,
in a rather smelly anatomy hall.
Rembrandt, on the contrary, he could really use the money.
I have a certain sympathy with this ruin of a man.
My pupils get the best work,
while I watch surgeons take Black Jack to pieces,
looking for his soul inside the brain.
His organ of thought, all thoughtless now.
What do I know?
I'm just a painter, desperate for the thousand guilders
that I'll get when this is finished,
but I can tell you where the soul of this city lies,
in money bags and banks
and counting houses.
I love all phases of his face to draw, because...
..it's a good story-telling face, as he shows in his self-portraits also.
And I think he is... I always have the feeling
he is not a man of many words,
so if you want to show something about his emotions,
you have do that through his expression.
And it all falls apart around his 50s,
it all starts sagging down as we all must endure at a certain point,
and, of course, there's always this big bulbous nose
that sort of holds it up.
Eyes begin to sag.
Big sort of fat lips, I hate to say it, Rembrandt.
And he wasn't so famous any more.
And he wasn't that popular any more.
The taste of the public had moved on, of the audience,
and he was really not doing very well financially.
The debts were mounting when I painted my boy Titus.
He was about 14, better-looking than I ever was,
with a hat, just like his dad's.
I love him.
But I even owe him money,
according to the will his mother wrote before she died.
Half of our estate, if I every re-marry.
Money that I haven't had for years.
So no marriage for me and Hendrickje.
Love is all we can afford.
It's this house that sunk me.
That's why I had to borrow 9,000 guilders to pay it off.
I tried to sell it last year and buy a cheaper place.
Of course, deals all fell through.
I've come to hate money.
But only slaves can live without it.
Once, I was the most successful painter in the city.
Now, I need some way to stay out of debtors' prison.
What we're looking at is a wonderful painting by Johannes Lingelbach,
a painter from Frankfurt, who ended up in the Netherlands
after a long stay in Italy, and it's a wonderful coincidence
that this painting is dated in the lower left corner 1656,
the very year that Rembrandt not only painted his second anatomy lesson,
but probably shortly afterwards he was going to this Town Hall,
going to the first floor,
to the right, to the Chamber Of Insolvency,
and declaring his insolvency in this year the painting was done, 1656.
And that's it.
I'm a self-declared bankrupt, in the hands of the city.
It's shameful, but safer.
Now, no-one can knock on my door and demand full payment.
I'm protected by the courts.
I've been a law professor for over 25 years,
I've business experience in law for over 40 years.
So, after a rather active professional life
I started, at the end of 2017,
to study more systemically and thoroughly his bankruptcy.
And why? Because it's better than playing golf
or go to the garden. Because I like it.
There are all types of stories around it.
I think the majority in the Netherlands thinks
that Rembrandt had what we call "holes in his hands",
meaning that you spent too much.
If you sell for 1,000 and you spend 2,000
and you do that over a longer period,
it's not going well with you, especially in the Netherlands
where still the attitude is you have to pay your bills.
A few days after Rembrandt got involved with the Desolate Boedels-Kamer,
the city organisation that was dealing with bankruptcies,
they wanted to know, of course,
what did he possess, this Rembrandt?
And they went to his house, and they made a whole list,
an inventory of what they found in his house.
And they went from one room to another.
It would have been the morning of the 25th July 1656,
that would have been the first of two days devoted to taking
the inventory with the notary,
assigned by the Desolate Boedels-Kamer,
and Rembrandt would have accompanied the notary every step of the way,
because we see all kinds of detailed descriptions
that a notary would not have known about.
The inventory list is for us and for me personally,
working as a curator at the Rembrandt House Museum,
it's an amazing treasure
of understanding more of the person Rembrandt,
the man, the collector, the art lover, the artist,
the way he lives in the house, the way the house was used,
and most of all,
it's important that this inventory list still exists.
If I start with the voorhuis,
which is first part of the house when you enter,
and then they make a list of the paintings first.
And what kind of paintings do we see?
The first painting we encounter is...
HE SPEAKS DUTCH
..a small painting by Adriaen Brouwer,
representing a pancake baker.
A painting from a woman with a little child
from Rembrandt himself.
A painting we don't know about,
a painter's studio of Adriaen Brouwer.
Tantalising, never been traced.
And, then, a small landscape by Hercules Segers.
Like Brouwer, an enigmatic painter from the earlier generation,
a great talent. Then we move on to the antechamber.
Here it continues and there were a lot of paintings,
again from Rembrandt himself, but also from others.
Here there was a painting of the Samaritan,
The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt.
Two Greyhounds From Life by the same.
We're baffled. We don't know anything like that.
Faces, faces from Brouwer, Porcellis.
This is interesting. Rembrandt has a lot of Porcellis too.
These are all monochromatic seascapes.
None of the artists I loved were really fashionable.
There are people I made friends with
just because we both loved Porcellis,
with his wild and stormy seas.
Or Brouwer's mad, grinning faces, his roaring peasants.
Or Hercules Segers,
and his imagined impossible, crazy landscapes.
They're my discoveries.
I love looking at these wonderful pictures...
..at the light escaping from another artist's mind.
Then they go to the art room
and there you find all kinds of materials,
no paintings but things from porcelain,
also statues from the old Greeks,
Socrates, Homer, Aristotle.
This room, he calls his "kunstkammer"...
..or the Chamber Of Wonders And Art, The Wonders Of Nature, And The Wonders Of Man.
Not only man makes things.
God makes things too.
Everything is extraordinary.
And this is the room where I keep everything extraordinary I've found.
Fragile corals from the tropic seas,
exotic animals preserved and stuffed.
Flayed limbs cast in plaster.
Weapons from distant kingdoms.
Things cast upon the shores of history.
And my collection of prints and engravings,
which I never could stop buying.
Listed separately in the inventory of the kunstkammer...
..are the art books, the kunstboeken.
This was even more important.
This was vital for Rembrandt and he may have felt more pain
at having to potentially part with these.
A book of wood cuts by Lucas Van Leyden,
a book of copper engravings by the same artist.
A book of drawings by the leading masters of the entire world.
Goodbye.
Prints by The Elder Bruegel.
He must have had a sense of assurance that he could sell these
things for something like what he paid for them,
and that would have definitely floated him
out of his financial troubles.
Was this enough to get out of it?
That's the question.
If the inventory is complete...
..does it reflect the true...
..goods in his estate?
I doubt.
Normally when people go into bankruptcy in present days,
there's always some sniff of fraudulent action
or hiding assets, which is rather common for the human being,
and I think it's rather common for the human being
350, 360 years ago.
And maybe Rembrandt has what we call black money, dirty money.
You wouldn't know.
What, am I supposed to go like a lamb to the slaughter?
I can promise you that our great burgomasters have back pockets,
and nobody knows how full of money those are.
Besides, I need to protect Titus, Hendrickje
and our little daughter Cornelia.
So, yes...
..I planned for this.
If you look at the events prior to his bankruptcy,
you can see that he's actually preparing for it.
So in 1655, and that's one year before, he applies for...
HE SPEAKS DUTCH
..which is this certain kind of insolvency procedure.
In 1655, Rembrandt has a voluntary sale of some of his good.
Rembrandt rented rooms at an inn,
in order to have a grand sale of his possessions.
We do not know what was sold,
we do not know the income that arises from it,
we don't know anything about his sale
and we don't know where the money went.
But we do know he didn't pay the debt for renting these rooms
and that's why we have a record of it.
This is 1655, right before his insolvency,
and around this time, he loses the copper plates he made so far,
which is 90% of all the prints that he ever made.
I'm sure he had to sell them, and years later,
all the major print publishers
turned out to have copper plates by Rembrandt in their stock.
Probably the ones that he had to sell around the mid-1650s.
Most of the copper plates are too worn down to print from.
What I'm really selling is my fame as a print maker,
it's greater these days than my reputation as a painter.
And then I turn to the millstone around my neck.
The thing I should never have bought.
It might be convenient not to own it any more.
The date is 17th May 1656.
This is the moment that...
..Rembrandt tries to manipulate the situation...
..that the house, which is of course all the time...
..the most valuable thing around Rembrandt in his life...
..that the house is not his...
..but his son's.
In transferring the deed to Titus,
he gave over to his son his greatest financial asset.
He also must have known that his creditors
would have wanted to get a hold of that asset as well.
This is defraud.
I mean, this was not done, and he is doing it.
This is defraud.
He was making a conscious choice to protect himself
and to protect his family
rather than fulfil his obligations to his outside creditors.
But, honestly, when I think about it and I ask myself,
"What would I have done in a similar situation?"
I'm not sure that I would have made decisions
that were different from what Rembrandt decided to do.
That's the way I feel about it.
Ever since Titus's mother died,
under the terms of her will I've owed him half the estate.
I'm simply doing my duty as a father.
Now I'm prepared, the house is set aside,
we have some money.
I declare myself insolvent.
The Chamber Of Insolvent Estates takes my inventory...
..and the auctions begin.
They squeeze my possessions.
The money dribbles out.
I have to wait while all the auctions happen.
I have to hope that things sell for good prices.
I feel as though I'm up for sale myself.
And it all takes more than two years.
We see in this volume that the Desolate Boedels-Kamer
is trying to get a solution
for Rembrandt's problems by selling his stuff.
He comes back and comes back in this book,
and there comes in some money but it's by far not enough.
The auction returns are so low that one of the men I borrowed from,
a wealthy burgomaster, insists that my house is sold.
So it is.
My last attempt to defend my boy's inheritance.
Nothing goes right.
I sent Titus to one of the auctions to buy back my own large mirror
with the ebony frame.
A useful item, if you're famed for your self-portraits.
He was successful.
And hired a workman to carry the mirror back.
So here we are,
walking over the bridge with the workman,
the mirror on his head.
Titus starts to warn people,
"Excuse us, this is a precious piece we have here",
and as the workman steps off the bridge,
clearly a step down, there is a crack, and the mirror
falls to pieces.
This must have been a crushing moment for Titus,
and also later for Rembrandt.
This was the gesture of a loyal son, a prized family possession,
likely used for some of the famous self-portraits that we know,
and it was destroyed.
Poor Titus came back with fragments, little pieces of busted luck.
I had to use another mirror to paint myself again.
I'm tired of the city courts
and under-bidders picking my pockets.
Still, can't go on forever.
And I'm as much myself as I ever was.
This is an astonishing piece of work.
What we're seeing is someone literally two years after bankruptcy
portraying himself in a manner that initially makes the viewer
believe that you are dealing with a slightly irritated monarch.
The artist's stick comes across as a sceptre.
It's telling that during this time of turmoil,
the conclusion of his bankruptcy proceedings,
that Rembrandt presents us with this image of himself,
still on top of his game,
sitting in an armchair like a throne, wearing golden robes,
his head height high in the picture looking down at us
with a deep introspective expression.
Rembrandt presents himself as the prince of painters.
Declaring to everyone who would see this self-portrait
that he is still the most prominent painter in Amsterdam.
He has wrinkles that he's not afraid to show.
He has a sombre expression but, yet, still present and lively...
..as the shadow passes across his face.
We see the build-up of paint
that is an expression of his powers at their height.
No other artist could paint in such a fashion.
In this painting, Rembrandt shows
that no matter what life has thrown at him, "I am Rembrandt still."
Where I'm sitting is not a republic.
I make the rules here.
How the life of a face is best captured,
how thickly paint should be applied.
How free an artist should be to work in any way he wishes.
When he moved into a smaller house,
and his bankruptcy proceedings had been completed,
all of the sales were done,
you would think that Rembrandt had a fresh start,
but he was not completely clear of potential creditors coming forth
and making claims upon him.
In order to protect himself, from such potential claims,
he entered into a scheme with Hendrickje and Titus.
They created an art business and hired Rembrandt as their client,
so Rembrandt could say he didn't have assets,
he was just drawing a salary.
What we see here on microfilm,
because the original is heavily burned,
is a contract. A contract dated December 15, 1660,
and this is a contract between his son Titus
and Hendrickje Stoffels.
You see obviously very clear "Titus van Rijn", his signature,
and here is "Hendrickje Stoffels", but she couldn't write,
she made this cross here.
Well, Rembrandt could.
And he was the genius behind this.
The third line is Rembrandt van Rijn, his own signature.
"Yeah, the only nasty thing is
"that I cannot directly receive money from that painting,
"but if Hendrickje and my son Titus will receive that money,
"then in the end...
HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE
"..comes into my pocket, and nobody knows."
So this is fraud, I think.
In essence Rembrandt was using this business...
..run by Hendrickje and Titus, to launder the money he had earned
during this period of his bankruptcy,
and preserve it for himself.
One of the things you can see with this business
is that it also serves as a surviving relative scheme.
What Rembrandt does here is make sure that his lover Hendrickje
and their daughter Cornelia will get money
in case he might come to pass away.
So, what Rembrandt's actually doing is protecting his family.
He was not a criminal, maybe a little crook.
Well...
That's something we like,
when people are doing things that they are not allowed
and they get away with it.
Only not if you are the victim of this guy.
Then you don't think it's funny.
I don't steal anybody's money.
I just mean to stop other people taking mine.
But the truth is,
there's no-one I trust more on Earth than Hendrickje.
12 years we've been together, married or not.
She protects me from the people that I paint for.
If I can work in peace at all, it's thanks to her.
I'm no longer fashionable,
except with those who are no longer fashionable themselves.
I find that the short queue of clients
who ask me to take their likeness are mostly as old as myself.
Or older still.
Standing on the edge of their eternal rest.
The Portrait Of Margaretha De Geer is, for me,
one of my favourite paintings of women by Rembrandt.
Rembrandt was an extremely empathetic portraitist of women.
Showing them with authority often,
that they so often didn't have in other portraits.
The portrait we have here is of a very significant woman
who was the wife of Jacob Trip
of the famous Trip family of the Netherlands.
They were a very wealthy couple, a very significant couple
and it's certainly very interesting to realise that,
even around 1661, when this was painted,
he still could command that kind of patronage.
Margaretha projects a real gravitas
but I don't think a sternness or harshness. She looks thoughtful.
And she looks both at us and perhaps a little bit internally as well.
Rembrandt really seems to have developed a speciality
in painting age and the process of ageing.
Studying what happens to faces, what happens to skin,
how eyes get more watery, how hair gets wispier,
and all these things he tracked and showed in his portraits.
As we age, we become poorer and poorer copies
of our younger selves.
Every old face carries the memory of something finer, firmer.
More foolishly hopeful.
Mine included.
So, when I'm commissioned to make a painting of the Apostle Paul,
I sit for it myself.
My face all hills and valleys, lines and blemishes.
It's perfect.
He depicts himself as St Paul.
But on the other hand, it's Rembrandt himself.
You see Rembrandt as he is.
He really only focuses on what we need as the viewer
to construct the image in our head.
We see a turban which is just a few brush strokes but we see a turban.
His hair, which is fantastically painted with this dry brush work,
only a few grey curls, but it feels as if you can touch it.
In everything, he only touches it and it becomes the real thing.
The rules of art were Italian beauty,
classical beauty,
and what does Rembrandt do? He's a rebel.
He paints us as we are...
..with all our wrinkles,
with this kind of saggy cheeks,
and we see him, but at the same time we see ourselves.
Word goes around among us artists.
The burgomasters want to decorate the Town Hall with paintings
glorifying our Dutch history.
Do they ask me?
Of course not.
They ask my pupil Govert Flinck to make all 12 paintings.
He paints as I used to.
All fineness and finish, but with added flattery.
He starts his sketches...
..but he dies.
So the burgomasters have to ask other artists
to complete this great cycle, and I'm one of them.
Hardly any of these great men have spoken to me for years.
It's a chance at last
to reclaim my place as the greatest painter in the country.
They give me the very first scene in the cycle.
The moment when our ancestors, the Batavians,
led by Claudius Civilis take an oath to rise and revolt
against their Roman overlords.
Rembrandt paints the leader, the main leader
sitting behind a table together with,
well, all of the great other chiefs of the Batavians.
And the way he uses light as a main tool is absolutely incredible.
It's as if the table cloth is illuminating
in a way that's never been seen before.
But for some reason, and we do not completely know why,
the burgomasters of Amsterdam didn't like the painting at all.
So it must have been installed...
..and hung there for a just a few months...
..and then he had to take it down again.
What we believe is that Rembrandt cut this five-and-a-half
by five-and-a-half metres painting back to two by three metres,
which is actually the painting we are seeing right now in Stockholm.
They sent it back.
They asked for changes.
They forgot who they were asking.
We do not know what happened
after the moment the painting was taken down.
So there are of course several theories
and there is a chance that it was in his house
up to the moment of his death.
I take a more practical view of this,
because if I would get a painting this large back to my studio
and I wouldn't be able to resell it anywhere,
and it's a complete waste of space,
I would take my Stanley knife out the same afternoon and...
..yeah, and cut it down to size.
But it remains to me completely incomprehensible how...
..why they refused it, because it is... If you look at it now,
it is one of the most amazing moments in the history of art.
When you look at the other paintings that are in the Town Hall still,
that are so polite in a sort of grand style
that are kind of boring,
this was just so out of whack with that.
That's almost a discordancy.
It was too much for them to handle, perhaps. All across the board.
You're absolutely right. The other ones are institutionally dull
And here you have one of the most heroic moments
of Dutch history is meant to be depicted, and you see quite a band.
A rag-tag band that looks like a sort of a, you know,
a last supper gone awry, where you have 11 figures,
and here they are, like a bunch of drunken louts.
Only Civilis looks really dead serious, you could say?
Well, maybe a few others too. They're a rag-tag bunch.
There's a laughing, smiling, drunken figure at right.
People are leaning over,
hardly anybody stands up straight as they swear this oath.
The burgomasters wanted a painting to enlarge our history,
to make our Dutch Republic seem grand and noble,
but it isn't.
The leading men of the Batavians
were as human as our burgomasters are today.
Vain. Venal. Crazy.
Drunk.
I gave them the Claudius that the Roman histories describe.
A man with one ruined eye.
He stares us down. I surrounded him with drunks and priests.
I gave them something I could actually imagine happening.
Naturally, they gave it back...
..having no imagination themselves.
Rembrandt is totally obsessed with his own search,
his own idea of what art should be...
..and I think he was convinced that others would...
..understand or should understand.
I think Rembrandt never bothers. I mean, he just...
He creates what he thinks is the only right thing to do.
He simply does not relate, I believe,
to what the commissioner thinks to be the right solution.
Yeah, I think he clearly didn't take that really into account,
and I think we've discussed a lot of things
about the decorum of this picture.
I mean, obviously he wasn't really concerned
about whether he thought it was decorous or not.
He may have given it a thought, but in the end,
I don't think he really cared.
We know from so much of his work
that when the choice was between money and prestige,
especially later in life,
and making a painting that really would make a contribution to art,
to the art of painting, he chose the latter.
I think the exciting thing is, with Rembrandt, with every painting,
he takes a step into the unknown, so he cannot think about his client.
Good art is never painted to satisfy the client,
and Rembrandt is a great artist.
Rembrandt's legacy is of course his art.
During these periods of financial distress
and personal turmoil, his art hardly suffered.
In fact, most would say it flourished,
because through all the turmoil,
Rembrandt maintained his supreme autonomy over his work.
There was a common question asked of painters in the 17th century
that still gets asked of painters today.
How do you know when a painting is finished?
Rembrandt's answer to that question was, "A painting is finished
"when the master has realised his intention in it."
This anecdote is an extraordinary declaration by Rembrandt...
..of the power that an artist has over his product.
To be misunderstood by pompous fools,
well, it's a sort of badge of honour,
But there was another commission that year that went much better.
More men at table, but this time a group portrait,
for the leading members of the drapers' guild.
I painted them as though I'd interrupted their meeting
and now they all stare out at you.
What are you doing here?
Well, this painting, I mean, The Syndics
was made exactly at the same moment
as Rembrandt painted his Claudius Civilis.
But it's completely different.
I mean, if we would not know the dates,
if the paintings would not have been dated, we could have believed
that they were made in completely different time periods,
in his later stage of his life.
I think when we talk about Rembrandt's late style,
it's about different aspects.
It's about his way of portraying, really, human beings,
of flesh and blood.
I mean, you can almost hear blood running through their veins.
And he doesn't idealise, so it's...
I mean, there's a very short distance between us as beholders
and the people that have been portrayed.
The way he involves us in the story,
he makes us part of what he wants to tell.
I mean, they look at us as if they are disturbed by us
just entering the room.
It's quite tempting to think
that we are not really welcome in this area.
I make them into actors in this little drama.
I play with where they're placed, until it all seems right to me.
I paint.
I paint out.
I repaint.
I move people around in the picture, until they say, "Leave me here."
The X-ray would have been made many decades ago.
The next image is not a full image,
essentially the majority of the painting was scanned,
and then this gave much more detailed information
about what was really going on with those changes.
And, so, for the first time you could see that there was
an earlier position here of the servant in the background.
And he seems to have been here at the lower right.
So it sort of seems he was positioned some three, four times
before he actually had his final position...
..here in the background.
I think this is probably the kind of change you see invariably
in these more complex compositions.
I think he was constantly sort of changing and experimenting.
How else could one explain
the kind of things that you encounter in these paintings?
Of course, there's no extra money for the struggle.
But I can't be satisfied with a picture
that any of my competitors could paint.
This year's been hard.
My little family mustn't starve.
So, I sell my Saskia's grave in the Ouderkerk.
She's been dead for 20 years.
There's plague in Amsterdam.
The city reeks.
So this is a very old book from the Westerkerk
and registered here on 24th of July, 1663,
is the burial of Hendrickje Stoffels.
And they had to pay 10 guilders and 30 pennies for this burial,
not much. This was the average sum for an adult.
Nothing special.
Yeah, so this is the registration of the death of Hendrickje in 1663.
The plague took her from me.
I hid behind her.
She spoke for me.
What have I lost?
Everything.
Nothing.
The world.
My wife, in all but name, a mother for Titus and Cornelia.
Ten guilders for a rented grave.
Hendrickje.
He has lost the second great love of his life - Hendrickje Stoffels.
And, so, inevitably you would have to think
that he is sinking back on this spirit of adversity.
The fact that despite all that
he sticks to what he perhaps loves best in the world,
which is to paint, and to make innovative painting...
..is to me an incredible and astonishing accomplishment,
not just of painting, but of will.
Rembrandt has created probably the best portrait of himself
that he made in a long career of making self-portraits.
Let's take the most extraordinary aspect of this.
This passage of the hand, where you see him holding,
with kind of a rough outline of his hand,
first of all a palette, a bunch of brushes like a spray,
and this long stick with a knob at the end
which is called a mahl stick,
something that painters use to steady their hand when painting.
And this hand almost disappears.
Indeed, there's almost a little violence
in how he does this painting.
When people say that Rembrandt is really a modern painter,
this is the sort of thing they think about,
where this indeed becomes an almost abstract set of forms.
It's almost all that's left of me, a painter.
But I paint him as I paint now,
a true face in a picture that fades towards the edges,
melts beyond the frame.
In my life, stupid ironies abound.
Almost ten years after my insolvency
the country's highest court decides that Titus's right
to his inheritance from his mother
precedes all the other debts that I incurred thereafter.
They force my one time creditors to repay the money,
and give it to Titus instead.
Over 10,000 guilders.
The old debt, that prevented me from marriage is discharged.
So I can marry now.
Now that my Hendrickje's dead.
And now, of course,
two newly weds commission me to paint their portraits.
But as historical figures,
as Isaac and Rebecca from the book of Genesis.
They travel in a strange land,
and for safety pretend to be brother and sister,
rather than husband and wife.
In a secret moment...
..they embrace.
This painting is not just a portrait,
and in this case a very exceptional portrait,
but it's also about the pleasure of painting.
This is in the latest decade of his life and you see,
well, how he really dares to play around with different textures
for example, and techniques.
Even using pallet knives here and there as well.
Scratching into the wet paint,
but also almost, well, sculpting in paint over here.
I think one of the greatest, let's say ten square centimetres
in art history, is this particular part.
It's abstract art.
It's Mark Rothko, 1665.
Rembrandt is always relevant and Rembrandt is always contemporary
even 350 years after he made this in his workshop in Amsterdam.
When Vincent van Gogh saw this painting for the first time,
he was totally blown away by the painting,
and he wrote to his brother Theo
that this was the most intimate painting that he had ever seen,
the most sympathetic painting he had ever seen.
It's all about touch.
Yeah, I think...
..maybe I'm exaggerating,
but I think that Rembrandt invented intimacy.
He looked and searched for the most natural gestures
to express certain emotions.
In this painting, for example,
it's how he's placed Isaac's hand on Rebecca's bosom,
and then she's gently stroking that hand,
and then there are the two other hands that frame...
..these two central hands, as it were.
That's simply marvellous.
But in a certain sense, I think this is also a portrayal
of Rembrandt's profound love for Hendrickje.
I remember what it was like to be a lover.
And Isaac was much older than Rebecca too,
as I was older than Hendrickje.
And so this picture has a ghost in it.
Or two.
Yes, two.
God wants me to be solitary.
And now it's...
..the final registration on Titus.
"Titus van Rijn, the son of Rembrandt", it's written here,
and he was buried on a Friday, on 7th September in 1668.
So five years after Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt's son Titus,
he died as a young guy.
My boy was only 26.
He leaves his pregnant wife behind.
And me, of course.
We see that in 1669...
..there was a baptism,.
A baptism of Titia, the daughter of Titus van Rijn
and Magdalena van Loo.
And who was...
..the godfather of this child?
Rembrandt van Rijn himself.
So in 1669,
Rembrandt is the godfather of his grandchild Titia van Rijn.
And, yes, maybe he's holding the child.
This is the moment in 1669 when he paints Simeon
in the temple, carrying the little Jesus.
And we know that according to the Gospel Of Luke
Simeon was promised not to die before he saw the saviour,
and this is that moment.
And we see Simeon, closed eyes, with the little baby,
and his hands in prayer.
It's quite striking to see that Simeon was allowed to die...
..at this particular moment, but so was Rembrandt.
This was the painting that was still on Rembrandt's easel
when he died, 62 years old.
A final document, also 1669.
A few months after he was the godfather of his granddaughter...
..we see the end of Rembrandt.
Rembrandt van Rijn was buried in the Westerkerk...
..for 15 guilders.
It's obvious from what we know now that this was not his own grave
which would have been also illogical,
seeing his financial situation.
So these people, they were in rented graves and after a while
they needed some more space in the church.
They removed the old graves
and the old remains were put together, and, yeah...
..disposed.
Usually, the story of Rembrandt...
..and as all romantic artists' stories should end,
the artist alone, and unknown, and unloved.
I remembered his daughter being still alive.
I thought it would be nice if she took care of him.
She faces him while he's working, of course, on another self-portrait.
And at the end, as Cornelia leaves,
she gives him a little kiss and he is there all alone
in his studio. Finally that moment has come
and he looks through the window.
He sees her leave and disappear in the snow.
In the end, there's Rembrandt in his room with all his things,
and a self-portrait on his easel.
He looks to the ceiling,
he looks outside, he looks at the moon,
and the passing clouds.
And as it gets really dark you see his fading self-portrait...
..and it all ends in darkness.
There's an incredible economy in the way he's painted this.
He does away with his sketched layer in the painting...
..he just paints directly on top of a brown ground,
in an incredibly quick, experimental fashion.
I think it was painted quite quickly,
even though there are changes that have happened in the hat.
You know, initially we see in the X-ray
that it was a white painter's cap
but there are other parts that were obviously painted very quickly,
probably a matter of hours.
The face of course is brilliant.
and of course the flesh paint is, is fabulous,
the way it's just manipulated,
and to create this sort of texture of the ageing skin.
I see somebody who is still fully in command of his skills
and still experimenting and still a searching artist.
That's what I see in the painting.
It's a picture full of the artist, and of his life...
..and of his achievements and his failures...
..and of his art.
Of course, he would not have known
that this was his last self-portrait.
But perhaps he had a faint feeling it might have been his last.
How do you know when something is finished?
Well...
..creeps up on you.
You think there's hours of work to do,
and then the brush lifts from the last stroke,
and you take two paces back...
..and there.
It's finished.
Your whole life.