Simon Schama, an unrivaled master of popular historical narrative, combines the brilliance of a professional novelist with the meticulousness of a professional historian to create a dynamic and comprehensive portrait of the 17th-century Netherlands—the era when Leiden-born Rembrandt van Rijn, triumphantly demonstrating the heights Dutch painting could achieve, earned the title of the greatest artist for centuries to come. The few surviving documented details about the artist's life and career are masterfully woven into the varied fabric of a vast and diverse historical context. Commercial turmoil and political intrigue, the confrontation between the Spanish Habsburgs and the Dutch Republic, Catholics and Protestants, the flourishing of democratic art in the Netherlands, and the sparkling paintings of the 'painter of kings,' Rubens—a seething, whimsical world where the art of the New Age was born. The world that became the stage for the life and work of the Dutchman Rembrandt van Rijn, an artist whose painting seems to triumph over reality.