This is us with our best souvenir of this trip, a copy of one of Rembrandt’s etchings, printed while we watched in the room where Rembrandt made his prints. Thanks Eric!

Today we visited the house were Rembrandt lived and worked for almost twenty years, until his bankruptcy in 1658. Luckily for antiquarians, the bankruptcy proceedings required a complete inventory of the contents of the house, and that record has allowed it to be restored to pretty much the state it was in when Rembrandt left.

Here’s the front room, where he welcomed guests and sold his own paintings and those of his students and other artists…

… the corner of his big studio…

… making paints from pigments…

…and his collection of art books and curiosities.

Sorry, you don’t get any wide angle shots of whole rooms as the place was packed with other tourists. However, we did manage to squeeze into the room Rembrandt used as a print shop, to see a talk on his etchings, and a demonstration of printing from a copper plate. The copper plate had been copied from one of Rembrandt’s engravings by a company that made banknotes. After the demo we stayed talking to the presenter, Eric, and he turned out to be a former San Franciscan. He made us a present of the print he had just made.

Our second museum of the day was a secret Catholic Church, hidden on the top floors of three adjacent houses.

It was not a very big secret. Everyone noticed all the Catholics sidling into an alley and though a side door on a Sunday morning, but while the English Protestants were burning Catholics at the stake, the more tolerant Dutch just asked that they please not wake everyone up by ringing bells.

The floors below have also been restored with period furniture and paintings.

In the 17th century the Dutch slept in closets sealed off by doors or curtains.

The beds were very short as they slept with the upper part of the body propped up. They were probably worried about flooding.

My favorite item was the cabinet featuring the story of the prodigal son.

The costumes and characters were from Holland rather than the Holy Land. Here is the prodigal son unable to pay his bar bill.

Here he is surreptitiously groping his date’s boob while the violinist and the serving wench pretend not to notice.

I found another tightrope walker, on a 17th century kitchen tile.

Finally for today, outside a yarn shop there is a lovingly crocheted bicycle cosy.