A miller's son who became Amsterdam's most sought-after portraitist, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) painted biblical drama and ordinary faces with equal conviction, lifting figures from deep shadow into warm light until the paint seemed to glow from within. He painted himself across four decades in roughly eighty self-portraits — the most sustained record any artist has left of a single aging face. The Night Watch is his most famous work; his etchings place him among the greatest printmakers in history. Bankruptcy, bereavement, and church censure marked his later years; the work grew only deeper.
Rembrandt painted his own face for almost his whole life, and he never flattered it. The earliest pictures show a cocky young man playing dress-up in feathers and gold. The last ones show an old man, jowled and tired, his collar worn, his eyes steady and unillusioned. In between lie around eighty self-portraits, one of the most sustained looks any artist has ever taken at a single human face. He used the same gift on everyone else. Out of deep brown shadow he would lift a forehead, a hand, a thinking face into warm light, until the paint itself seemed to glow and the sitter seemed caught in the act of feeling something. He cared nothing for ideal beauty. He painted wrinkles, doubt, and grief, and made them more moving than perfection. In a small, rich, Protestant republic that bought paintings as no society had before, he became its greatest artist and, in the end, its most honest witness to what a human being looks like from the inside.