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 to live with him, for we find her claiming a chest as her property at his sale in 1658. Doubtless she is the peasant girl of Rasdorf to whom Houbraken says Rembrandt was married. Sad as the story is, Hendrickje has an interest for us. Bode asserts that in his art there was always a woman in close relationship to Rembrandt and appearing in his work—his mother, his sister and then Saskia.

He also suggests that the beautiful portrait of the “Lady” in the Salon Carré of the Louvre and the “Venus and Cupid” of the same gallery may represent Hendrickje and her child. Both pictures belong to this date, and by their treatment are removed from the category of Rembrandt’s usual portraits. But if this is conjecture, we get nearer to fact when we look at the picture exhibited at Burlington House in 1883 to which tradition has attached the name of “Rembrandt’s Mistress,” now in the Edinburgh National Gallery. At a glance one can see that it is not the mere head of a model, as she lies in bed raising herself to put aside a curtain as if she heard a well-known footstep. It is clearly a woman in whom Rembrandt had a personal interest. The date is clearly 165— the fourth figure being illegible; but the brilliant carnations and masterly touch connect it with the “Potiphar’s Wife” of 1654 and the jaghers period. In 1656 Rembrandt’s financial affairs became more involved, and the Orphans’ Chamber transferred the house and ground to Titus, though Rembrandt was still allowed to take charge of Saskia’s estate. Nothing, however, could avert the ruin of the painter, who was declared bankrupt in July 1656, an inventory of all his property being ordered by the Insolvency Chamber. The first sale took place in 1657 in the Keizerskroon hotel; and the second in 1658, when the larger part of the etchings and drawings were disposed of—“collected by Rembrandt himself with much love and care,” says the catalogue. The sum realized, under 5000 guilders, was but a fraction of their value. The time was unfavourable over the whole of Europe for such sales, the renowned collection of Charles I. of England having brought but a comparatively small sum in 1653. Driven thus from his house, stripped of everything he possessed, even to his table linen, Rembrandt took a modest lodging in the same Keizerskroon hostelry (the amounts of his bills are on record), apparently without friends and thrown entirely on himself.

In his old age Rembrandt continued to paint his own portrait as assiduously as in his youthful and happy days. About twenty of these portraits are known; a typical one is to be found in the National Gallery. All show the same self-reliant expression, though broken down indeed by age and the cares of a hard life.

About the year 1663 Rembrandt painted the (so-called) “Jewish Bride” of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam, and the “Family Group” of Brunswick, the last and perhaps the most brilliant works of his life, bold and rapid in execution and marvellous in the subtle 'mixture and play of colours in which he seems to revel. The woman and children are painted with such love that the impression is conveyed that they represent a fancy family group of the painter in his old age. This idea received some confirmation from the supposed discovery that he left a widow Catherine Van Wyck and two children, but this theory falls to the ground, for de Roever has shown (Oud Holland, 1883) that Catherine was the widow of a marine painter Theunisz Blanckerhoff, who died about the same time as Rembrandt. The mistake arose from a miscopying of the register. The subject of these pictures is thus more mysterious than ever.

In 1668 Titus, the only son of Rembrandt, died, leaving one child, and on the 8th of October 1669 the great painter himself passed away, leaving two children, and was buried in the Wester Kerk. He had outlived his popularity, for his manner of painting, as we know from contemporaries, was no longer in favour with a people who preferred the smooth trivialities of Van der Werff and the younger Mieris, the leaders of an expiring school.

We must give but a short notice of Rembrandt’s achievements in etching. Here he stands out by universal confession as first, excelling by his unrivalled technical skill, his mastery of expression and the lofty conceptions of many of his great pieces, as in the “Death of the Virgin,” the “Christ Preaching,” the “Christ Healing the Sick” (the “Hundred Guilder Print”), the “Presentation to the People,” the “Crucifixion” and others. So great is his skill simply as an etcher that one is apt to overlook the nobleness of the etcher’s ideas and the depth of his nature, and this tendency has been doubtless confirmed by the enormous difference in money value between “states” of the same plate, rarity giving in many cases a factitious worth in the eyes of collectors. A single impression of one of his etchings—“Rembrandt with a Sabre”—realized £2000 at the Holford sale in 1893, when “Ephraim Bonus, with black ring” fetched £1950, and the “Hundred Guilder Print,” £1750. The points of difference between these states arise from the additions and changes made by Rembrandt on the plate; and the prints taken off by him have been subjected to the closest inspection by Bartsch, Gersaint, Wilson, Daulby, De Claussin, C. Blanc, Willshire, Seymour Haden, Middleton and others, who have described them at great length, and to whom the reader is referred. The classification of Rembrandt’s etchings adopted till lately was according to the subject, as Biblical, portrait, landscape, and so on; until Vosmaer attempted the more scientific and interesting line of chronology. This method has been developed by Sir F. Seymour Haden and Middleton. But even in 1873 C. Blanc, in his fine work L’Œuvre complet de Rembrandt, still adheres to the older and less intelligent arrangement, resting his preference on the frequent absence of dates on the etchings and more strangely still on the equality of the work. Sir Seymour Haden’s reply is “that the more important etchings which may be taken as types are dated, and that, the style of the etchings at different periods of Rembrandt’s career being fully as marked as that of his paintings, no more