On July 15, 1945, Rembrandt’s 339th birthday, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam re-opened with the most emotionally charged exhibition in its history. Called “Weerzien der Meesters,” or “Reunion with the Masters,” the show gathered one hundred and seventy-five paintings that had spent the five years of the Occupation hidden in bunkers. During those five years, private collections were looted and museums stripped of their greatest works. For all the average person knew, these treasures, like so many others, had been stolen or destroyed in the Nazi terror. Now they were making a triumphant return to the center of Amsterdam. From The Hague came Fabritius’s little goldfinch, Potter’s big bull, Vermeer’s pearl earring. From Haarlem came the great Hals group portraits, which were displayed alongside the Rijksmuseum’s own collection — including, of course, the nation’s famous Rembrandts. In 1939, with war looming, the huge Night Watch, eleven by fourteen feet, had been taken to a castle in North Holland, where it was stored in a vault of reinforced concrete. The location proved too dangerous. In 1940, when the Germans invaded, the masterpiece was covered with a canvas borrowed from a local farmer and hastily removed to a bunker in Castricum, closer to Amsterdam: a journey of fifty kilometers that took twelve hours. At one point, when an enemy plane appeared overhead, its escorts took refuge in neighboring fields, leaving the great painting alone in the middle of the road. When it finally reached its destination, its caretakers discovered that it was too large for the entrance, and they had to roll it up. Finally, in 1942, it was taken to a special storage site near Maastricht, where it was kept in a limestone quarry, thirty-three meters underground. The director of the Frans Hals Museum, Henk Baard, recalled the scene: “Through the slow progress of the silent bearers the remarkable spectacle, under its ghostly lighting, recalled a princely funeral.” Now it was back. One hundred and sixty-five thousand people eventually visited the show. In a country that still lacked basic provisions, many of these visitors came on an empty stomach. All understood its promise: that past glory would bring future resurrection. “A people that can display such a parade of greatness shall reclaim its special place,” a journalist wrote. At the opening, a minister declared that the Canadians who liberated Holland “have also liberated Rembrandt and Frans Hals.” More than Hals, Rembrandt needed that liberation. He needed it more, in fact, than any other Dutch artist. Hitler himself had declared him “a true Aryan and German,” and under the quisling regime he had become the focus of a bizarre cult, his birthday even replacing the exiled Queen Wilhelmina’s as the national holiday. Now this unwitting German hero could become, once again, the symbol of the dignity of a free people. Light had chased out darkness. It was precisely the kind of cosmic struggle that Rembrandt had illustrated in his works, though that struggle rarely had such a clean outcome. History was recapitulating the trajectory of Rembrandt’s own evolution. If Vermeer was a painter of light, Rembrandt was a painter of dark, or more precisely, of dark commingled with light; and in his work the question of evil recurs more than in any other Dutch artist’s — so insistently that looking at his pictures is sometimes unbearable. There are more scenes of murder, cruelty, torture, rape, betrayal, malediction, and death in Rembrandt than in any other Dutch painter’s work — by far. Vermeer painted no such scenes. Neither did Hals. Neither did any of the blither spirits, Avercamp or De Hooch or Jan Steen. At the very most, the landscapists and the still-life painters will allude, with a graceful symbol, to mortality, to the passing of time. Most Dutch paintings were made for the wealthy middle-classes, and they show things that those people liked to see. Who among them would have wanted a picture such as The Blinding of Samson, in which a silver dagger is plunged into the protagonist’s eye? The painting is so gigantic, two by three meters, that it is hard to look away from it. It is just as hard to look at it: even Delilah can hardly contemplate her victim without a shiver. 
Rembrandt was so prolific that even the most ambitious museum survey will never capture more than a slice of his work. Books aren’t much use, either: the images end up crammed onto the page, and that monumental quality of Rembrandt’s paintings — their patina, their glow, the sense that they give of something physical, like an extraordinary geological phenomenon — goes missing too, flattened onto smooth paper, removing the tactility, the brazenness, of his surfaces. The etchings and drawings, originally made on paper, fare better in reproduction. But there are hundreds of them, and even the most avid eye can only absorb so much. To try to see more than a few at a time is to be reminded that, as with Dante and Shakespeare and Bach, you cannot rush an acquaintance with Rembrandt. His work took a long time to make, after all: nearly half a century between his earliest productions and the works he made in the days before his death at sixty-three. Add, to the quantity of works and media, the quantity of genres. In England, writers were comedians or tragedians or poets, but only Shakespeare was acknowledged as the greatest in every field. In Holland, Rembrandt, who was ten when Shakespeare died, worked in nearly every specialty known to Dutch art, each of which absorbed the energies — the entire lives — of his most talented contemporaries. And then there is the profusion of his styles. What makes it even harder to form a coherent image of Rembrandt is that he painted in so many different styles. Many Rembrandts do not look anything like the popular idea of a Rembrandt. His early work looks so different from his later work that the early works were not even recognized as such until
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