was painted, it proved a failure. The grouping, the arrangement displeased them. Many of the company were left in deep shadow, which was not the privilege for which they had agreed to pay good money. Rembrandt was not the man to compromise. After this many burghers, who cared much for themselves and their own faces, and not in the least for art, were afraid to entrust their portraits to him lest their importance might be sacrificed to the painter's effects. Certain it is that six years later, in 1648, when the independence of Holland was formally recognized at the Congress of Westphalia, though Terburg and Van der Heist celebrated the event on canvas, Rembrandt's services were not secured. Good friends were left to him--men of intelligence who appreciated his strong individuality and the great originality of his work. Banning Cock himself was not among the discontented. A few leading citizens, like Dr. Tulp and the Burgomeister Six, were ever his devoted patrons. Artists still gathered about him; pupils still crowded to his studio; Nicolas Maes, De Gelder, Kneller among them. Many of his finest portraits--those of Hendrickje Stoffels, of his son, of himself in his old age, of the Burgomeister Six, above all, his masterpiece, "The Syndics of the Guild of Clothmakers," now in Amsterdam; many of his finest etchings, the little landscapes, the famous "Hundred Guilder Print," "Christ Healing the Sick," belong to this later period. There was no falling off, but rather an increase, in his powers, despite the clouds that darkened his years of middle age.