For example, I tend to remember the sitter in his portrait of the ebony worker Herman Doomer (1640) as a young man, though he’s not. With his smiling eyes and wide-brimmed hat, he has a youthful look, but he was in his mid to late 40s when the likeness was painted. In later portraits Rembrandt seems to age his sitters prematurely. But in this one, done when his life and career were still flying high, no.

Image Smug and seductive: The Toilet of Bathsheba (1643) is Rembrandts take on a story of betrayal. Credit... The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Seeing the picture called “The Toilet of Bathsheba” (1643) also took me by surprise, maybe because a later Bathsheba picture, the one in the Louvre dated 1654, stays so firmly in mind. Both related to the same biblical story: a beautiful young wife is preparing for a liaison with her lover, King David, which will lead to the death of the husband she is betraying.

In the Louvre painting the nude woman is lost in sad reverie, as if already filled with regret for what she is about do. The mood of the Met picture is almost the opposite. Here, while getting a pedicure and a comb-out, she fondles one of her breasts and gives us a smug, seductive glance. The waiting David is faintly visible in a distant tower. The peacock of pride broods in a corner of her room.

Some people consider Rembrandt a sentimentalist, but he can be as tough as nails, as he is in this picture. By the time he painted it, fortune had already delivered some shocks: his wife, Saskia, had died a year earlier, and he was immersed in a protracted fight with her family over the inheritance she had left for their son Titus. Still, his career was solid and his life was afloat.

Then it wasn’t. In 1649 his servant and lover Geertge Dircx sued him for the equivalent of palimony. His new mistress, also a servant, Hendrickje Stoffels, testified on his behalf, and Dircx was jailed, but the whole business was badly destabilizing. He was borrowing large chunks of cash to pay off extravagant loans, and brokering iffy art deals.