Rembrandt bought this brick house on the Jodenbreestraat in 1639, when he was the most sought-after portrait painter in Amsterdam, and he paid far more than he could afford. He lived and worked here for nineteen years, ran a busy studio with pupils, and filled the rooms with an enormous collection of art, weapons, shells, casts and curiosities bought largely on credit. He never cleared the mortgage. In 1656 he was declared insolvent, and over the next two years the house and everything in it were sold at auction.
That bankruptcy is why the museum can be this precise. The court ordered an inventory, room by room, listing every object in the building, and the restoration follows it: the reception room hung as a showroom, the box beds, the kitchen, the cabinet of curiosities he kept as props, and the studio with its high north window. The etchings are the other reason to come — a near-complete set of them, shown in rotation, printed small and worked over obsessively, the private half of a painter the world knows through enormous oils.