There are several ways of making these furrows in a metal plate, but the chief are two.  The first is to plough into the metal with a sharp steel instrument called a burin.  The second is to bite them out with an acid.  This is the process of etching with which Rembrandt did his matchless work.  He varnished a copper plate with black varnish.  With a needle he scratched upon it his design, which looked light where the needle had revealed the copper.  Then the whole plate was put into a bath of acid, which ate away the metal, and so bit into the lines, but had no effect upon the varnish.  When he wanted the lines to be blacker in certain places, he had to varnish the whole rest of the plate again, and put it back into the bath of acid.  The lines that had been subjected to the second biting were deeper than those that had been bitten only once.

The number of plates etched by Rembrandt was great, at least two hundred; some say four hundred.  Their subjects are very various—­momentary impressions of picturesque figures, Scriptural scenes, portraits, groups of common people, landscapes, and whatever happened to engage the artist’s fancy, for an etching can be very quickly done, and is well suited to record a fleeting impression.  Thousands of the prints still exist, and even some of the original plates in a very worn-down condition.

In spite of the quantity and quality of Rembrandt’s work, he was unable to recover his prosperity.  He had moved into a fine house when he married Saskia, and was never able to pay off the debts contracted at that time.  Things went from bad to worse, until at last, in 1656, when Rembrandt was fifty, he was declared bankrupt, and everything he possessed in the world was sold.  We have an inventory of the gorgeous pictures, the armour, the sculptures, and the jewels and dresses that had belonged to Saskia.  His son Titus retained a little of his mother’s money, and set up as an art dealer in order to help his father.

It is a truly dreary scene, yet Rembrandt still continued to paint, because painting was to him the very breath of life.  He painted Titus over and over again looking like a young prince.  In these later years the portraits of himself increase in number, as if because of the lack of other models.  When we see him old, haggard, and poor in his worn brown painting-clothes, it hardly seems possible that he can be the same Rembrandt as the gay, frolicking man in a plumed hat, holding out the pearls for Saskia.

In his old age he received one more large order from a group of six drapers of Amsterdam for their portraits.  It has been said that the lesson of the miscalled ‘Night Watch’ had been branded into his soul by misfortune.  What is certain is that, while in this picture he purposely returned to the triumphs of portraiture of his youth, he did not give up the artistic ideals of his middle life.  He gave his sitters an equal importance in position and lighting, and at the same time painted a picture artistically