In 1631, Rembrandt became a resident on the same street, in the house of an art dealer. He married the dealer's cousin, Saskia van Uylenburgh, the daughter of a burgomeister, resident in the same house, and they relocated temporarily to a business district of Amsterdam. Eight years later, they were back on the Breestraat, living in the house next door to the building in which they had met. Their life here was the picture of extravagance. Visitors climbed the stairs to their porch and walked across the smart black and white tiles of the entrance hall. There was a grand art room in which Rembrandt received his patrons, and comfortable living quarters with vast fireplaces which his assistants had to pass each day to reach the floor above.

Here lay a small studio, a larger studio, and a storage room. The shelves were cluttered with ornaments: busts of Roman emperors, collections of armour, fabrics, assorted knives. Rembrandt had developed a habit of gathering bits and pieces from all over the city, not just its markets and auctions, but its bridges and dusty corners, too.

Here, among his miscellanea, Rembrandt's early biographers puzzled at the artist's interest in objects with little material value. One wrote mockingly of him buying clothes that were "outdated and shabby". Another critic scoffed that Rembrandt deemed his old weaponry and scarves "antiquities", as if they rivalled the classical or classicising sculptures which flooded the art market. These peculiar objects seemed to jar unforgivably with Rembrandt's otherwise elegant surroundings.

But Rembrandt's rags, which he reimagined in his paintings, were part of a much deeper fascination with life outside his gilded walls. Long before he faced the prospect of bankruptcy, he engaged heartily with what it meant to live a rustic, simple life. In 1631, the year he first came to the Breestraat, he made a pair of etchings that shocked genteel society. In one, a man in baggy breeches, laden with travelling gear, was urinating carelessly on the ground. In the other, a country lass was squatting by a tree and lifting her skirts to do the same — and more.

Those loyal to Rembrandt could defend him from criticism by suggesting that these were merely amateur exercises inspired by the art of earlier printmakers, such as Jacques Callot. But the truth was that Rembrandt was eager to continue in the same earthy vein.

Although he fast established himself as a skilled portraitist, open to commissions from Amsterdam's private citizens and wealthy guilds, including the surgeons' guild, he could not turn his back on the other side of city life. Not once did he paint a burgomeister. Passing the wealthy merchants who, smug with revenue piped in from foreign trade ventures, clogged the canals with their elegant barges, Rembrandt sought the have-nots.