of income.
During the leisure he reserved, he painted biblical subjects, ever his
delight, and made etchings and drawings, today the most prized
treasures in the world's great galleries. As in Leyden, he drew about
him students; a few, notably Ferdinand Bol and Christophe Paudiss,
destined, in their turn, to gain name and fame. Indifferent to social
claims and honors--an indifference the burghers, his patrons, found it
hard to forgive, his one amusement was in collecting pictures and
engravings, old stuffs and jewels, and every kind of _bric-a-brac_,
until his house in Amsterdam was a veritable museum. This amusement
later was to cost him dear.

Four years after the "Lesson in Anatomy" was painted, when he was at
the height of prosperity, in 1634, he married Saskia van Uylenborch,
the Saskia of so many an etching and picture. She was of a good
Frisian family, and brought with her a dowry of no mean proportions.
Rembrandt's marriage made small changes in his way of living. Into the
society, so ready to receive him, he never went, not even now that he
had a wife to introduce. It bored him, and he was no toady to waste
his time fawning upon possible patrons. "When I desire to rest my
spirit, I do not seek honors, but liberty," was his explanation. The
companionship of artists he always welcomed; sometimes he visited the
humbler burghers, whose ways were as simple as his own; sometimes he
sought the humblest classes of all, because of their picturesqueness,
and his contemporaries took him to task for his perverted taste for
low company. The truth is that always he devoted himself solely and
wholly to his art; the only difference, once he was married, was that,
when he sat at his easel all day or over his copperplate, and
sketchbook all evening, Saskia was with him. She shared all his
interests, all his ambitions; she had no will but his. During his
working hours, she was his model, obedient to his call. She never
tired of posing for him, nor he of painting her now simply as Saskia,
now as Delilah feasting with Samson, as Susanna surprised by the
Elders, as the Jewish Betrothed at her toilet. Sometimes he
represented her alone, sometimes with himself at her side; once, in
the famous Dresden portrait, on his knee, as if to proclaim the love
they bore for one another. And he, who could render faithfully the
ways of the beggar, the austere black of the burgher, for himself and
Saskia found no masquerading too gay or extravagan