In 1668, Titus, now twenty-seven years old,—he studied painting, but became a merchant,—was married to his cousin Magdalena van Loo, one of the Frisian families, and died in September of the same year. The next March, his widow bore a daughter who received the name of Titia, for her dead father. Magdalena died in the same year in which her child was born. Thus frequently did sorrow shadow the path of the great master of shadows.
This year, Rembrandt painted several portraits of himself. "In that of the Pitti Palace, we see him wrapped in fur, a medal is hung about his neck, and he is wearing a close-fitting cap, from which his ample white hair escapes. His face is furrowed with age, but the brightness of the eye is not diminished....
"In the splendid portrait in the Double Collection at Rouen, he again stands before us, with bending attitude and slightly inclined head, in theatrical costume, with his maulstick in his hand, laughing heartily. And this is Rembrandt's farewell! His face is wrinkled across and across by time and care, but it is no gloomy misanthrope crushed by evil fortune whom we see, but the man who opposed to all fortunes the talisman of Labor, and thus paints the secret of his life in his final portrait of himself, in the midst of his work, scorning destiny."
A year after Titus died, death came to Rembrandt, at sixty-two. He was buried simply in the West Church, so simply that the registered expense of his burial is fifteen florins!
His power of work was marvellous. He painted over six hundred and twenty pictures, executed three hundred and sixty-five etchings, besides two hundred and thirty-seven variations of these, with hundreds of drawings and sketches scattered over Europe. Among the best known etchings are "Rembrandt's Portrait with the Sword," "Lazarus rising from the Dead," the "Hundred-Florin Plate," "Annunciation," "Ecce Homo," "The Good Samaritan," "The Great Descent from the Cross," the landscape with the mill, and that with the three trees.
That he was a man of great depth of feeling is shown by his love of his mother, his worship of Saskia, and his tenderness to his brothers and sisters after they had lost their fortunes. He was also passionately fond of nature and of animals. Sweetser tells this incident: "One day he was making a portrait group of a notable family, when he was informed that his favorite monkey had died. The grieving artist caused the body to be brought to the studio, and made its portrait on the same canvas on which he was engaged. The family, aforesaid, was naturally incensed at such an interpolation, and demanded that it should be effaced; but Rembrandt preferred to keep the whole work himself, and let his patrons seek a more accommodating artist."
Taine pays Rembrandt this glowing tribute in his "Art in the Netherlands:" "Rembrandt, constantly collecting his materials, living in solitude and borne along by the growth of an extraordinary faculty, lived, like our Balzac, a magician and a visionary in a world fashioned by his own hand, and of which he alone possessed the key. Superior to all painters in the native delicacy and keenness of his optical perceptions, he comprehended this truth and adhered to it in all its consequence,—that, to the eye, the essence of a visible object consists of the spot (tache), that the simplest color is infinitely complex, that every visual sensation is the product of its elements coupled with its surroundings, that each object on the field of sight is but a single spot modified by others, and that in this wise the principal feature of a picture is the ever-present, tremulous, colored atmosphere into which figures are plunged like fishes in the sea....
"Free of all trammels and guided by the keen sensibility of his organs, he has succeeded in portraying in man not merely the general structure and the abstract type which answers for classic art, but again that which is peculiar and profound in the individual, the infinite and indefinable complications of the moral being, the whole of that changeable imprint which concentrates instantaneously on a face the entire history of a soul, and which Shakespeare alone saw with an equally prodigious lucidity.
"In this respect he is the most original of modern artists, and forges one end of the chain of which the Greeks forged the other; the rest of the masters, Florentine, Venetian, and Flemish, stand between them; and when, nowadays, our over-excited sensibility, our extravagant curiosity in the pursuit of subtleties, our unsparing search of the true, our divination of the remote and the obscure in human nature, seeks for predecessors and masters, it is in him and in Shakespeare that Balzac and Delacroix are able to find them."