Art by Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt painted nearly a hundred self-portraits across his lifetime, an unusually large and continuous body of self-examination that tracks him from a confident young painter into an old man who'd lost most of his wealth and status, giving art historians an almost unbroken visual diary few other artists from any period have left behind. His 1642 group portrait The Night Watch, far more dynamic and theatrical than the static militia portraits typical of the genre, remains one of the most technically ambitious paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Despite his fame, he was declared bankrupt in 1656 after years of overspending on art and curiosities, and spent his later years working through serious financial hardship, his mastery of light and shadow, and his prolific etching practice, never really diminishing even as his fortune did.