[Rembrandt by Mortimer Menpes]@TWC D-Link bookRembrandt CHAPTER IV 5/14
Those four pictures are _The Anatomy Lesson_, painted in 1632, when he was twenty-six; the _Sortie of a Company of Amsterdam Musketeers_, known as _The Night Watch_, painted in 1642, when he was thirty-six; _The Syndics of the Cloth Hall_, painted in 1662, when he was fifty-six; and his own portrait, painted in 1667, two years before his death.
"His _Anatomy Lesson_," says M.Michel, "was the glorification of Science itself; in his _Sortie of a Company of Amsterdam Musketeers_ he embodied that civic heroism which had lately compassed Dutch independence; and in a group of five cloth merchants seated round a table, discussing the affairs of their guild, he summed up, as it were, in a few immortal types, the noble sincerity of Dutch portraiture." _The Anatomy Lesson_ was the picture that gave Rembrandt his opportunity, and proclaimed his preeminence among the painters in Amsterdam.
It was the custom in those days for corporations, civic bodies, and associations of various kinds, to commemorate their period of office by commissioning portrait groups which should hand down their worthy faces to posterity.
The desire of the less prominent members of the associations thus painted was that each head should be a likeness, plainly recognisable,--that one burgher should not be treated with more importance than another.
This desire for present and posthumous commemoration extended to medical circles.
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