When he did not pursue his passion for art collection, he tried to solve artistic problems which he believed were most successfully achieved with the etching needle. The greatest problem that he attempted to solve was in the representation of light by the simple contrast of black and white. This becomes clear in two engravings: the sheet of Christ healing the Sick (1650), the most famous of the “Hundred guilder Sheets”, whose name derives from the fact that Rembrandt had set a price of one hundred guilders for a reprint, and also the sheet in Dr. Faust (1652-1653).
Beginning in 1656, Rembrandt was often overcome by a dull moodiness which frequently influenced his artwork. Rembrandt’s artistic spirit was stronger than his physical strength. It was only in 1660 that he was able to mobilize his abilities for great tasks. How much he suffered under the limitations of his present conditions was not hidden in his self-portraits of this time. His eyes became muddier, his face more bloated and the happy exuberance of the young Rembrandt disappeared behind an unspeakably sorrowful, melancholy face. These portraits speak of the tragedy of human life. Despite all this, his ambition to take on the best of his time was so great that in the last years of his life a large gamble paid off. This is the Regent piece The Steel Masters (1662); it is the officers of the Amsterdam Cloth Hall gathered around a table. Rembrandt had learned to acquiesce to the desires and wishes of his clients and within their requirements of the portrait-trueness he showed his knowledge of colour with full enthusiasm. Despite the light-darkness and despite the predominance of neutral colours (brown, black, white with little red), he achieved a glow that cannot be surpassed within this colour scale.
After the last tragic blow, the death of his son Titus in 1668, Rembrandt was sapped of his physical strength. He was buried on the 8th of October 1669.
Despite the changes in Rembrandt’s lifestyle, he gathered a large number of pupils about him. Among the inner circle of his pupils was Govaert Flinck, who painted mostly guild and Regent pieces and only occasionally competed with Rembrandt in the genre of biblical pictures, with works such as The Dismissal of Hagar (1640-1642).
Among other pupils were Ferdinand Bol from Dordrecht, who was particularly similar to Rembrandt as a portraitist, and Gerbrand van den Eeckhout from Amsterdam who closely followed Rembrandt’s biblical depictions in small formats and created such works as The Presentation in the Temple (1671).
In addition, two of Rembrandt’s contemporaries must be included among his pupils: the painter, graphic artist and etcher Jan Lievensz, son of a mercer (manufacturer of braids and tresses), and Salomon Koninck, the son of a goldsmith. Lievensz’s main work in the field of religious painting, The Sacrifice of Isaac, can even be compared with similar masterworks of Rembrandt in which a full ray of light is concentrated on a naked body.
One of Rembrandt’s best pupils is doubtless the genre portraitist Nicolaes Maes, who came to Rembrandt at about 16 years of age, and learned his style of painting with a glowing light-dark tone. Maes painted colourful, attractive rooms with women, girls and children in domestic surroundings. Among his main works are the Seated Woman scraping a Carrot (1655) and the Girl at a Window (late seventeenth century).