"Like the people he painted, Rembrandt lived in the shadows. He lived through the darkness of Dutch winters and in the shadows of sickness and death, losses both personal and public. Few diseases were curable in the seventeenth century. Infants died routinely; women died in childbirth; plague lurked in living memory. Though this was what historians call Holland's 'Golden Age,' for many life was as Hobbes described it: 'nasty, brutish and short.' Many of Rembrandt's contemporaries in the art world nevertheless gloried in the things of this world, perhaps took comfort in them — the rich trove of material goods made available by the wide reach of Dutch mercantile ships and new navigational technology. Most of us have paused somewhere to admire the technical precision of a perfectly rendered lemon peel hanging from a laden table, or a figured carpet whose folds look strikingly three-dimensional, or a silver pitcher gleaming with metallic sheen that transforms the canvas behind it. But in Rembrandt's paintings the things of this world are subordinated to something more worth seeing. The material environment is alluded to in layers of period clothing, the jewels in a bride's hair, the lace on a young man's collar. But it is the liveliness of human presence — and something beyond that — which subordinates all objects to its ambiance. The best of the paintings show us life, manifest and mysterious, shadowed and radiant.

"Much of that sense of life made manifest emerges, of course, in the portraits. Especially in the faces of old people — for instance, those of his mother in various guises and, later, his aging self — we see a quality of attention, reflection, awareness, and even amusement that reminds me of Adrienne Rich's wonderful phrase, 'hard-won lucidity.' They glow with the power of distilled experience. They comfort me in my own midlife: age is not something simply to be dreaded but a season that, of it is granted to us, may be a time of recollection in the deepest sense, of gathering and going inward, dwelling on quiet light, having learned to accept and integrate the shadow."