in nowise
restricted when he undertook the work for Banning Cock, and so,
instead of the stupid, hackneyed arrangement, he made of the portrait
of the company a picture of armed men marching forth to beating of
drums and waving of banners, "The Night Watch," as it must ever be
known--more accurately, "The Sortie of the Company of Banning
Cock"--now in the Ryks Museum of Amsterdam. With the men for whom it
was painted, it proved a failure. The grouping, the arrangement
displeased them. Many of the company were left in deep shadow, which
was not the privilege for which they had agreed to pay good money.
Rembrandt was not the man to compromise. After this many burghers, who
cared much for themselves and their own faces, and not in the least
for art, were afraid to entrust their portraits to him lest their
importance might be sacrificed to the painter's effects. Certain it is
that six years later, in 1648, when the independence of Holland was
formally recognized at the Congress of Westphalia, though Terburg and
Van der Heist celebrated the event on canvas, Rembrandt's services
were not secured. Good friends were left to him--men of intelligence
who appreciated his strong individuality and the great originality of
his work. Banning Cock himself was not among the discontented. A few
leading citizens, like Dr. Tulp and the Burgomeister Six, were ever
his devoted patrons. Artists still gathered about him; pupils still
crowded to his studio; Nicolas Maes, De Gelder, Kneller among them.
Many of his finest portraits--those of Hendrickje Stoffels, of his
son, of himself in his old age, of the Burgomeister Six, above all,
his masterpiece, "The Syndics of the Guild of Clothmakers," now in
Amsterdam; many of his finest etchings, the little landscapes, the
famous "Hundred Guilder Print," "Christ Healing the Sick," belong to
this later period. There was no falling off, but rather an increase,
in his powers, despite the clouds that darkened his years of middle
age.

Of these clouds, the darkest was due to his financial troubles.
Rembrandt had made large sums of money; Saskia's dowry had been by no
means small. But he also spent lavishly. He had absolutely no business
capacity. Once he was accused of miserliness; that he would at times
lunch on dry bread and a herring served as reproach against him; there
was a story current that his pupils would drop bits of paper painted
to look like money in order to see him stoop to pick them up. Bot