Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on July 15, 1606, in Leiden, then part of the Dutch Republic.  He is regularly regarded as one of the greatest visual artists in history. But in one of his final works, Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c.1669), we do not see a man posing for legacy. We see a face marked by sorrow and candor. His expression is steady, weary, and unapologetically human. There is no pretense. No performance. Just presence. And in that rawness, there is something almost sacred. As we look into the eyes of Rembrandt, we see a man who tasted wealth and luxury, and still knew deep abiding sorrow and loss.

The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians: ‘I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound…’ (Philippians 4:12).” Rembrandt knew “low” and “abounding” but he handled neither well. “Unlike the archetype of the starving artist who suffers for his work, Rembrandt was neither born in poverty nor lacking success. He also married into a wealthy family, which allowed him to focus on his art and live in relative extravagance. “Rock bottom” was not Rembrandt’s primary address, and yet in him we meet a man who knew the bottom intimately. 

By age 20 Rembrandt had buried his mother, by 32 he had buried three of his children and at 36, only a year after the birth of his surviving son Titus, he buried his beloved wife, Saskia. This is a man who knew despair.

After Saskia’s death, Rembrandt entered a complicated and scandalous relationship with a woman he never intended to marry, whom he later had institutionalized to avoid having to pay alimony. Financial ruin followed. He had a child out of wedlock with his former maid, he declared bankruptcy, was blacklisted, and prohibited from selling work under his own name. In 1669, Rembrandt died in obscurity, buried in an unmarked grave. 

Rembrandt’s story reminds us that even those who reach worldly heights can find themselves in the valley of shadows. His life was a mixture of brilliance and brokenness, of artistic mastery and personal failure. His story is unremarkably human, despite his success he was never truly in control. I see this most clearly in the naming of his three daughters (all ‘Cornelia’). 

Rembrandt and Saskia’s first daughter, Cornelia, was born and died in 1638. Another daughter, also named Cornelia, died in infancy in 1640. Years later, with another woman, Rembrandt had a third daughter—again named Cornelia. After losing two Cornelias with Saskia, Rembrandt named this third daughter by the same name perhaps as a memorial, a hope for life where there had been loss, or maybe as a refusal to let go of the name tied to so much longing. 

As I think of him naming a second and third daughter ‘Cornelia’, I’m reminded of Lamech naming his son Noah in Genesis 5:29—hoping, perhaps, that ‘this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands. Lamech’s hope was that Noah would be the fulfillment of the promise to Eve that one of her descendants would restore order and beauty to the world by crushing the head of the serpent, but Noah would not be that son. In Rembrandt’s naming, I hear, perhaps this one, perhaps a third Cornelia. It’s not a resolution, but a kind of defiance against despair. I will have Cornelia.

There is hope in his serial-naming choice, a clinging hope that I see in the sons of Korah as they sing “Hope in God, for I will again praise Him, my Salvation and my God” (Psalm 42:5,11). The sons of Korah pronounce with certain hope that the day they praise God will come, even if they are unable to do so at the moment. 

Rembrandt’s third Cornelia was his only child to outlive him (Titus died shortly before the birth of his own daughter, and Rembrandt died only seven months after that granddaughter’s baptism). Interestingly though, we have no paintings of Cornelia. This fact might seem trivial, but Pablo Picasso regularly painted portraits of his daughter Maya. Claude Monet’s son Jean appears in several of his landscapes. Normal Rockwell regularly used all three of his sons (Jarvis, Thomas, and Peter) as models. We have many paintings by Rembrandt of his son Titus, and even plenty of Cornelia’s mother (Hendrickje Stoffels). Why would he not paint her? 

Painting a portrait is an intimate act of making a memory visible. It may be that for Rembrandt, with all the pain embedded in that name and what it symbolized, it was too emotionally charged to render Cornelia in paint. Her image might have represented not just a person, but the cumulative grief and longing that he experienced throughout his life—something so raw and complex that it resists being captured in a single image. Perhaps in his own processing of grief Rembrandt used absence where others used presence—a negative space charged with meaning

His extensive portraits of Titus and Hendrickje shows that he was engaging with those who he felt could be directly immortalized. Cornelia, however, was a fragile hope, her presence in his life was imbued with ambiguity. The idea of “Cornelia” held more weight than a likeness. She was a recurring motif that spoke to his own desires for life amid overwhelming loss. The lack of a portrait of his third Cornelia may signal that he preferred to let the hope and pain intertwined in that name remain a private, internal narrative rather than being distilled into an image meant for public consumption. We may never see her face, but we feel her presence—haunting, fragile, and full of hope

Navigating loss is complicated. In a world where curated social media profiles often mask our inner complexities, the process of grieving—and the hope of another ‘Cornelia’—reminds us that no filter can capture the raw interplay of loss and hope. All we can do is keep our faith and, like the sons of Korah, trust that the day will come when we again praise Him.