As a great artist who brooked no compromise, Rembrandt van Rijn experienced fame and fortune, bankruptcy and personal tragedy. Famous by the time he was thirty, he married the beautiful Saskia and, within ten years, lost her, just as his fortunes were beginning to decline. The fashion of the day was all bright colours and a light touch. Rembrandt pursued a different vein, working heavy shadows into thick whorls of oil. Indifferent to propriety, he took his women from among his servants and found his friends outside polite society. Until one day, the great and the good of Amsterdam set out to punish the man whose genius they had once so loudly proclaimed.