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Updated: September 9, 2025
It is written that "from this time, while he did much remarkable work, he seemed like a man on a mountain top, looking on one side to sweet meadows filled with flowers and sunlight, and on the other to a desolate landscape over which a clouded sun is setting." With Saskia died the best of Rembrandt.
The elder woman stumbled and whimpered and needed the constant support of his arm, walking like a townswoman from the knees. But Saskia swung from the hips like a free woman, and Dickson had much ado to keep up with her. She seemed to delight in the bitter freshness of the dawn, inhaling deep breaths of it, and humming fragments of a tune.
It is not so simple as that," she said. "I dare not invoke your English law, for perhaps in the eyes of that law I am a thief." "Deary me, that's a bad business," said the startled Dickson. The two women talked together in some strange tongue, and the elder appeared to be pleading and the younger objecting. Then Saskia seemed to come to a decision.
His meals in working time were very simple, often just bread and cheese, eaten while sitting at his easel, and after Saskia died he became more and more careless of all domestic details.
Her virginal fineness and her dress, which was the tint of pale fire, gave her the air of a creature of ice and flame. "About yourself, please, Saskia," he said. "Are you happy now that you are a grown-up lady?" "Happy!" Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music. "The days are far too short. I grudge the hours when I must sleep.
He made only one more portrait of himself before this he had made many; and in it he makes himself appear a stern and fateful man. It was after Saskia's death that he painted the "Night Watch," or more properly, "The Sortie." Rembrandt's home, where he and Saskia were so happy, is still to be seen on a quay of the River Amstel. It is a house of brick and cut stone, four stories high.
To this period belong the numerous portraits of himself and Saskia, alone or together, most of which are characterized by a barbaric splendour of costume, utterly different from the profusion of Rubens, but far more intense.
It is certain, too, that he had been almost childishly reckless in expenditure on artistic and beautiful things which were unnecessary to his art and beyond his means, although those for a while had been abundant. At the time of the failure of the 'Night Watch, his wife Saskia died, leaving him their little son, Titus, a beautiful child.
Then Saskia was ever present, and if there was a holiday he painted her as the "Jewish Bride," "The Gypsy Queen," or in some other fantastic garb. We have seen that in those early years at Leyden he painted himself, but now it was only Saskia she was his other self. All those numerous pictures of himself were drawn before he knew Saskia or after she had gone.
There is a quality about his portraits of father, mother, Saskia, Titus, and Hendrickje, yes! and of himself, that speaks to us as if we were intimates. It is a personal appeal. We find it in every presentment that Rembrandt gives us of another figure which constantly inspired his brush the figure of Christ.
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