The years wore on with our saddened artist. Public taste turned more and more to the Italians, and, more and more, native artists were neglected. Rembrandt suffered with the others. Moreover there were ugly rumors that the splendid house in which the artist lived was not paid for and that much of the money used in purchasing his art treasures had been borrowed and not repaid. The clouds thickened about our artist until 1658 when there was a sheriff's sale of all his belongings, studio effects and all. The house he loved so much, every room of which spoke to him of Saskia and her children, was bought by a shoemaker. The coveted etchings, prints, and paintings went to the highest bidders, and the master of all, Rembrandt, the world-famous artist, was led away to apartments in an inn.

That auction must have been a stormy place, when, one by one his treasures were sold before his very eyes. We can imagine him offering a spirited protest when one picture by Palma Vecchio, and another by Raphael, were put up. How his heart must have ached as the heartless auctioneer put up some oriental drapery, some jewels with which, in those happy days now long gone by, he had decked Saskia and painted her.

The many who had hailed the painter of "The  Anat-", "tomy", "Anatomy") ?> Lesson"  as a new found genius, who had curiously eyed the mysteries of "The Night Watch"  had by this time forgotten the bankrupt painter. There were a few friends, however, who stood by, and some of them of no mean degree, as Burgomaster Six, whose home was as open to the painter as if he had been a near relative. And one there was of humble station, Hendrickie Stoffels, the peasant maid who had long lived in his family, that stood beside her master in those gloomy years and helped to make his life less dark. Later on the artist, loving her for the sacrifices she had made for his sake, for the light she had brought to his declining years, married her. Even Hendrickie, young and robust as she was, was not spared for long to comfort the painter; she died seven years before him. Meantime Rembrandt had left the inn and settled in a little house on the Rozengracht. It was an humble abode compared with the home he had lost, but Hendrickie managed to make it restful and homelike.

Titus, the son of Rembrandt and Saskia, was about nineteen when his father married. He too loved Hendrickie for what she had done to make his father happy, and he welcomed her to their home, such as it was. So well did she and Titus agree that they entered into a partnership as print-sellers and persuaded Rembrandt to allow them to have the exclusive sale of his pictures. They did this hoping to wholly relieve the artist from all concern in money matters in which he had proved himself such a child. At first he was not pleased with the plan, but he gradually came to see its excellence and the freedom it gave him to pursue his art unmolested. For years the little business prospered, Hendrickie and Titus agreeing perfectly.

It seemed that peace had at last returned to crown the painter's closing years. But suddenly Hendrickie died and shortly after, Titus. The old artist, still loving his art, though sight and health were failing, stood alone in Amsterdam at the last end of his career as he had stood at the beginning. And what a solitary figure he made as he towered above those who had noted him not, rapt in the great thoughts that made his pictures so wonderful.

Death came to him, we know not how, in 1669, for only a line in the parish register tells of his burial and the thirteen florins it cost. It was a strange and sad fate that the man destined to be the best known, the most honored of all the artists of Holland, should thus die like the day or the leaves of summer and "none take note of his departure"!

The sumptuous house in the Breedstraat where Rembrandt lived still stands. The little cottage where Hendrickie and Titus made a home for the artist has disappeared. Even his grave, where we might hope for rest for the burdened man, when opened not long ago, was found to contain no body. As so, were it not for his works made up of drawings, etchings and paintings, a body of work which for power is above comparison with the work of any other artist, we might almost feel, as some say of Shakespeare, that he never existed. The great master's work, however, in each case is indisputable, and so we know our race has been blessed by a Rembrandt and a Shakespeare.

It is pleasant for us to know that late in life, in 1661, Rembrandt received one more important commission. By the beauty, repose and balance of this work, excelling all his other great pictures, it shows that though the outward life of the man had been disturbed and sad beyond expression, yet there was inward repose and faith and power. I speak of that wonderfully simple but very powerful and beautiful picture, "The Cloth Makers,"  that now hangs in the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam.

Five men, the chosen of their guild, sit about a table casting up the accounts of the guild for the year to find the gains and losses. There is little in the subject to call out the powers of an artist, but so wonderfully has Rembrandt treated it that those five buyers and the one servant represented in the picture tell us things never dreamed of in "The Anatomy Lesson"  or "The Night Watch." 

Rembrandt is often called the Shakespeare of painters and I think with good reason. As we think over the work of each it seems that painter and dramatist are wonderfully alike in their treatment of life. "The Anatomy Lesson"  is like those early plays of Shakespeare, where everything is plain. There is in them the self-satisfied air of gifted youth. In the middle of the poet's career, when family losses were pressing hard, came "Hamlet,"  beautiful, overflowing with meaning, but confused in its own richness—not clear. It was like "The Night Watch"  of Rembrandt's career. And then, when age softened the soul and mellowed the intellect, see what lovely romances Shakespeare wrote—"Winter's Tale"  and "The Tempest,"  where forgiveness rules and the end is crowned with sweet concord. Poet and painter agree in so representing life—Rembrandt and Shakespeare, the greatest in their lines of work, using different arts and a different language, read alike the secrets of life!

Perhaps the most difficult thing to account for in Rembrandt's life was his complete ignorance of money matters, of practical life, while in his art he was a hero and the very acme of provident care. In practical matters he knew not persistency, in his art he could and did persist even though all patrons turned from him to the idols of Italy. In the list of years his art has triumphed, even though the artist died without creating a stir. Such was the man and artist, vacillating on the one hand, heroic on the other; a bankrupt from one point of view, the unique artist from the other.

What a host of pictures stand among the world's great work to crown the hero artist—old women, with caps and crossed hands, who by their dear faces tell us that there is much left in the last days—still "The best is yet to be"; old men and young men; beggars in every conceivable attitude; portraits of himself from youth to age so that we know him at every stage as we would an old friend; scenes from the Bible that drive the truth home to us as never before did painter or preacher; calm landscapes where the lazy windmill drones in the sunshine; doctors, soldiers and cloth merchants doing the business of the world. What variety of subject! What unity of treatment, done, as no other could do them, by the concentration of light, by the deepening of shadows which at their blackest have a certain transparency.