The house in which Rembrandt spend the happiest and most succesful years of his life was in the Jodenbreestraat. He paid 13,000 guilders for it in the year 1639. Rembrandt's expenses and life style were too high to pay the installments, in 1659 Rembrandt was declared insolvent. He lost his collection and his house. It is now a museum and shows how Rembrandt lived and worked, and it also displays etchings made by the master.
The house in the Breestraat where the painter Rembrandt had lived since May, 1639, was pleasantly situated, within an easy distance both of the harbour and the outlying country, in the heart of the Jewish quarter. It is still in existence, and its open to the public, as it houses the Rembrandt museum today. The exterior of the house remained unchanged and is almost the same as in the 17th century.
It is a building of the Dutch-Italian Renaissance, faced with alternate courses of brick and freestone, and ornamented with small sculptured heads. The facade is crowned with a pediment, on the tympanum of which is carved a wreath and scrolls. The ground floor is raised above the street by the height of some five or six steps. Above it are a first and second storey surmounted by attics. It was therefore a fairly spacious dwelling.
At the entrance was a vestibule leading into an ante-room, on either side of which was a large room. Rembrandt probably slept in one of these, and worked there in the evenings, preparing his plates, or printing his etchings, for among the articles of furniture noted in the inventory are tables, presses of oak and foreign woods, a copper boiler, and screens.
Another ante-room on the first floor gave access to the saloon, or Museum (Kunstcaemer), in which the most valuable articles of the art Rembrandt himself collected were exhibited. The painting studios were probably on the second floor, where the light was best, and were doubtless so arranged as to get the full benefit of the sun, and facilitate those experiments in illumination affected by the master.
One of these studios, that used by Rembrandt himself, communicated with a small lumber-room, where he kept his furs; the other, of the same dimensions, was
reserved for his pupils, and divided into five compartments. In all probability, one of these compartments, the largest of the five, was also occupied by Rembrandt himself; it contained, in addition to the trophies of foreign curiosities, weapons, and musical instruments with which all five were decorated, plaster casts of statues, models of arms and legs, and a quantity of antique fabrics, of various colours and textures.
Lastly, we come to a small office, and a little kitchen, furnished with a scanty supply of pots and crockery. Plain living was the rule in Rembrandt's household, and all his biographers are agreed as to the frugality of his habits. Of table and body linen, the pride of the Dutch housewife, he seems to have possessed but a very meagre store.
