An unsurpassed master of popular historical storytelling, Simon Schama, with the brilliance of a professional novelist and the scrupulousness of a professional historian, creates a dynamic and voluminous image of the Netherlands of the 17th century - those times when the Leiden-born Rembrandt van Rijn, triumphantly demonstrated the heights that Dutch painting can achieve, for many centuries won the title of the greatest of painters. The few documented information about the artist’s life and professional activities that have survived to this day are masterfully woven into the motley fabric of a vast and varied 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 painting of the “painter of kings” Rubens - a seething, bizarre world where the art of the New Age was born. A 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.