Balaam and the Ass

A miller’s son from Leiden who left university after a few months to train as a painter. By his mid-twenties he was in Amsterdam, running a busy studio and charging well for portraits of merchants who wanted to look substantial. The Night Watch was finished in 1642, the same year his wife Saskia died. The old story that the painting ruined him is not true: it was admired, and he was paid. What followed was messier than a single failure. He spent beyond his means, collected obsessively, and was declared insolvent in 1656. His house and collection were auctioned. He worked the rest of his life under an arrangement that kept his earnings out of creditors’ hands, and outlived both his partner Hendrickje and his son Titus. He painted himself roughly forty times across four decades. Put them in order and you get something no other painter of the period left behind: an unflattering record of a face ageing, and of a man who kept looking.