Until now Rembrandt has eluded his biographers. The scarcity of documentary evidence on the one hand and the enormous scale of his artistic achievement on the other have left us at once dazzled and bereft. Now, after more than twenty years of work, Simon Schama has managed to combine an absolute mastery of the painter's life and times with an unprecedented sympathy for Rembrandt's character as it found both expression and transformation in his art. The result is enthralling as biography and as history, but above all it amounts to the first reconstruction of Rembrandt's genius that does full justice to its subject.