His artistic predecessors, including Brueghel the Elder, had painted the familiar scene of a woman making pancakes before Lent. But whereas they had portrayed her in a kitchen, Rembrandt's picture (now in the Rijksmuseum) shows her outdoors, a hag at a street stall, stirring batter for excitable children. He also drew a woman looking out of a shuttered window while another crouched on the street with her young child, who was at once fascinated and terrified by an inquisitive dog.
It was small consolation, but the fact that Rembrandt had found something warming in the camaraderie of street life would stand him in good stead for when his own riches began to dwindle. He knew that his house on the Breestraat was steadily sinking into the marshy ground. Unable to afford the bills for the necessary repairs, he was also forced to pay those of the neighbour with whom he shared a party wall.
Rembrandt was using Amsterdam's houses as windows onto the world outside well into the 1640s. His life indoors was fraught. In 1642, Saskia died from tuberculosis. Only one of their children, Titus, had survived. Father and son were still living on the Breestraat with a nurse for the child, Geertje Dircks, whom Rembrandt promptly made his lover. In time, refusing to marry her, he would leave her hungry for money and revenge, as he gradually diverted his affections towards a new housemaid, Hendrickje Stoffels.
Rembrandt's first biographers were less than enthusiastic about his avowed plebeian tastes. Responding to his studies of female nudes, a poet, Andries Pels, wondered at Rembrandt's habit of choosing as his models washerwomen or peat-treaders, marred with blemishes and creases from their clothes.
Not only did these pictures fail to satisfy his critics' lust for classical beauty or female virtue but they also revealed a troubling kinship with a world beneath the one he belonged to.
Occasionally, Rembrandt felt the pressure to conform to these ideals, including in the commissions he received in his later life. In the early 1650s, the Dutch Republic went to war with England. The market value of art plummeted, making it difficult for Rembrandt to sell his masterpieces and pay the sums demanded on his house.
Shortly before he was declared insolvent, he painted the Biblical scene of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, probably for a wealthy merchant. In this dark and brooding painting, the wife gesticulates before her husband, making the nefarious claim that Joseph had attempted to rape her, while he raises his hands skyward, pledging his innocence. Despite being in the bedchamber, all three figures are dressed, the men particularly elegantly; only Joseph's coat lies discarded in the foreground, a witness to his attempt at escaping the woman's embrace.
It was small consolation, but the fact that Rembrandt had found something warming in the camaraderie of street life would stand him in good stead for when his own riches began to dwindle. He knew that his house on the Breestraat was steadily sinking into the marshy ground. Unable to afford the bills for the necessary repairs, he was also forced to pay those of the neighbour with whom he shared a party wall.
Rembrandt was using Amsterdam's houses as windows onto the world outside well into the 1640s. His life indoors was fraught. In 1642, Saskia died from tuberculosis. Only one of their children, Titus, had survived. Father and son were still living on the Breestraat with a nurse for the child, Geertje Dircks, whom Rembrandt promptly made his lover. In time, refusing to marry her, he would leave her hungry for money and revenge, as he gradually diverted his affections towards a new housemaid, Hendrickje Stoffels.
Rembrandt's first biographers were less than enthusiastic about his avowed plebeian tastes. Responding to his studies of female nudes, a poet, Andries Pels, wondered at Rembrandt's habit of choosing as his models washerwomen or peat-treaders, marred with blemishes and creases from their clothes.
Not only did these pictures fail to satisfy his critics' lust for classical beauty or female virtue but they also revealed a troubling kinship with a world beneath the one he belonged to.
Occasionally, Rembrandt felt the pressure to conform to these ideals, including in the commissions he received in his later life. In the early 1650s, the Dutch Republic went to war with England. The market value of art plummeted, making it difficult for Rembrandt to sell his masterpieces and pay the sums demanded on his house.
Shortly before he was declared insolvent, he painted the Biblical scene of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, probably for a wealthy merchant. In this dark and brooding painting, the wife gesticulates before her husband, making the nefarious claim that Joseph had attempted to rape her, while he raises his hands skyward, pledging his innocence. Despite being in the bedchamber, all three figures are dressed, the men particularly elegantly; only Joseph's coat lies discarded in the foreground, a witness to his attempt at escaping the woman's embrace.
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