He looked at life through his eyes and through his imagination, and related his adventures.

One day it was a flayed ox hanging outside a butcher's shop, which he saw through his eyes; another day it was Christ healing the sick, which he saw through his imagination.

You can imagine the healthy, full-blooded Rembrandt of this portrait painting the _Carcase of a Bullock_ at the Louvre, or that prank called _The Rape of Ganymede_, or that delightful, laughing picture of his wife sitting upon his knee at Dresden, which Ruskin disliked.
The other portrait of Rembrandt by himself at the National Gallery shows that he was not a vain man, and that he was just as honest with himself as with his other sitters.

It was painted when he was old and ailing and time-marked, five years before his death.

His hands are clasped, and he seems to be saying--"Look at me! That is what I am like now, an old, much bothered man, bankrupt, without a home, but happy enough so long as I have some sort of a roof above me under which I can paint.