In 1642 his fortunes received a double blow. Saskia died, and his corporation picture, _The Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company_, popularly but erroneously called “The Night Watch,” was received with disfavor. It proved to be a turning-point in his career. Public recognition began to wane, and financial embarrassments to increase; yet his artistic fecundity continued, marked by more frequent examples of landscape. Toward the end of the forties he enjoyed the sympathetic support of the burgomaster, Jan Six, an enthusiastic lover of books and collector of works of art, whose friendship lasted till his death in 1658. Meanwhile, about 1653, Rembrandt seems to have married the woman who had devoted herself to his care, Hendrickje Stoffels. She died in 1656 and money troubles crowded upon him. He was declared a bankrupt; his household goods were seized by his creditors and later sold at an appalling sacrifice; the house in the Jodenbreedstraat also passed under the hammer, and Rembrandt retired to a house on the Rosengracht. This was in 1658. The house, which still exists, was a comfortable one; and it seems probable that the eleven years during which Rembrandt lived in it, until his death in 1669, were a time of tranquillity, as they certainly were of continued artistic activity. This period, indeed, produced _The Six Syndics of the Cloth Hall_ (Amsterdam), a masterpiece of assured self-possession and complete achievement. It also was marked with many portraits of himself, no less than four having been painted in the last year of his life. One of them shows him blear eyed, with red and bulbous face, but laughing, and holding his maulstick like a scepter.[D] * * * * * EUGÈNE FROMENTIN, skilled alike as a man of letters and a painter, analyzes in his “Maîtres d’Autrefois” the art of Rembrandt. The argument has been so generally accepted, that it must be described here. It may be compressed as follows: Fromentin discovers contradictions in the art of Rembrandt. It is at one time so realistic, and at another so visionary. He explains this apparent contradiction by the theory that Rembrandt’s was a dual nature. On the one side he shared with his fellow-artists their practicalness, direct seeing, and love of clear and definite expression; while on the other he was a solitary dreamer, a visionary, to whom the mystery of things made [Illustration: THE SYNDICS OF THE CLOTH GUILD REMBRANDT RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM] chief appeal. Thus, by turns he was realist and idealist; occasionally, as in _The Sortie_, his pictures seem to have been the battle-ground of his two irreconcilable natures.