In 1633 a miller's son from the Dutch Republic stopped signing with a monogram and began signing his first name with a silent d, placing himself alongside Michelangelo and Raphael. This episode follows Rembrandt from a religiously divided household in Leiden in 1606, through a university enrollment he abandoned at fourteen, to Amsterdam in 1631, where a booming merchant class wanted portraits that made them look like royalty. Marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh in 1634 launched him into high society and a 13,000-guilder mortgage on a fashionable house he could not truly afford.

We examine the paradox of 1642, when he completed The Night Watch, transforming a static militia group portrait into a theatrical narrative, in the same year Saskia died of tuberculosis after three infant children had already been lost. We then confront the messy middl ...