Word: rembrandt
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
...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...
...Rembrandt kept spending money at top speed though he was no longer getting portrait commissions. This procedure came to its inevitable finish when in 1657, at the age of 51, he was officially declared bankrupt. Saskia's kinsmen had got in time's nick a second mortgage on the house, to safeguard Titus' depleted legacy. At the forced sale of Rembrandt's collections, the prices bid were under what Dutchmen were accustomed to bid for paintings. He saved his etching plates, however, and got a little money for himself from the sale of prints...
Paying less & less attention to his material condition, Rembrandt worked faster & faster. When his son died, he wore his best to the grave, a ragged, fur-lined coat daubed with paint. A year later, a puff-eyed, firm-jawed 63-year-oldster. deserted except by a few kinswomen and the neighborhood Jews, he died. His fame as a painter had long since vanished into the attics of Amsterdam, apparently forever...
...countless so-called Rembrandt paintings now extant, most authorities agree that no less than 400, no more than 700, are genuine...