Rembrandt was born in 1606 at Leyden, in the small Calvinist republic of the United Netherlands, which covered approximately the territory of present-day Holland and numbered barely two million inhabitants. For twenty-five years the country had preserved its independence from absolutist and Catholic Spain in a precarious struggle demanding heavy sacrifices. The Twelve Years' Truce, concluded in 1609, changed the situation entirely. Within a few years the United Netherlands, with Amsterdam its focal point, has won a leading position in textile manufacture and international trade and, in fact, is virtually the vital center of European economic life.

Rembrandt's father owns a windmill. The son is determined to become a painter. His earliest dated paintings show that at the age of twenty he has formed independent views about art in general and about his own professional aims as well. he is twenty-five when he moves to Amsterdam where, as the result of rapidly growing prosperity, people make and spend money easily. The young artist at once becomes popular as a portraitist and soon obtains the high distinction of a commission from the political head of the country, Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, to paint a cycle of religious paintings for his private chapel.

So Rembrandt, reared in the quiet, provincial town of Leyden, is drawn into the maelstrom of the great metropolis. he, too, makes and spends money easily. he marries a well-to-do girl, Saskia, in 1634. he frequents public sales of works of art and starts a collection; contracting a heavy mortgage, he goes beyond his means and acquires a stately house in the center of the city. people begin to gossip and to accuse him of squandering the inheritance of his wife through extravagance and display. In 1642 Saskia dies. Rembrandt and his infant son, Titus, are left alone. A few years later Rembrandt takes Hendrickje Stoffels into his house, outraging the Calvinist righteousness of his fellow citizens. many doubtless think that it serves him right when, after his clumsy attempts to proclaim his social status as an independent artist in the midst of prosperous businessmen, his financial difficulties multiply, while his popularity as a portraitist rapid declines and the occasional sale of a painting or etching remains his only, and very insecure, source of subsistence. Long, hard years of struggle with adversity follow. The end is financial collapse and bankruptcy - which means that, in the eyes of Amsterdam mercantile society, he is stigmatized as a sort of outcast.

Now the ambitious dreams of youth have definitely foundered. In the summer of 1656 the authorities are busy making an inventory of Rembrandt's possessions, including his house, his collections, and his household goods, which are subsequently sold in lots by public auction. The aging artist - penniless, his creditors watching out for any income they can lay hands upon - must submit to being appointed an employee of the firm of Titus and Hendrickje, dealers in art; and in 1660 he moves out to the poorest quarter of the city.

Two great commissions come his way during these last years: for the Clothmakers' Guild he paints a group portrait of their governing board, famous as The Syndics or Staalmeesters, and for a wall of the new City Hall, the pride of wealthy Amsterdam, now in the heyday of its prosperity after the close of the Thirty Years' War, he paints a huge canvas representing a legendary event in the ancient history of Holland, the Conspiracy of the Batavians. This painting was installed in 1661, but for unknown reasons it was returned to Rembrandt in the following year and replaced by the thoroughly insignificant work of a second-rate artist. We can only guess how deeply Rembrandt must have felt this humiliation after all his previous trials and disappointments. Was it not more than a human being could be expected to bear? But Fate had still other blows in sore for him. The same year that the authorities of the city rejected one of his greatest works, only a fragment of which was saved for posterity, his faithful helper, Hendrickje Stoffels, passed away, and in 1668 his son died at the age of twenty-seven.

As his popularity declined and his financial difficulties increased Rembrandt secluded himself more and more from the robust and busy world around him. Few people seem to have stayed by him in the tribulations of his last years. he must have been a very lonely man, all but forgotten by his fellow citizens, when he closed his eyes forever in 1669, a year after the death of his son.

This is the sad story of Rembrandt's life. Who will venture to say what part of this misery was his own fault, what part was the result of adversity from without? To us, today, he speaks through his work alone, and it is a powerful and clear voice that speaks.

If a distinction may be made between the physical and the spiritual in man, Rembrandt in his Leyden years tends to concentrate one-sidedly on the spiritual. In the first ten years in Amsterdam, interest in the physical predominates. Then follows a gradual integration of the two elements, until at last the artist has at his command a visual language which enables him to proclaim the spiritual in man with a power and intensity never before attained in painting.

Almost ny group of Rembrandt's works, however much chosen at random, offers proof of the eloquence with which he conveyed the expressive content of his theme. in a brief study such as this it is through examining the content, rather than through attempting to analyze the formal and technical devices which he employed, that we shall arrive most directly at the response the artist hoped we would have to what he is trying to say.