Rembrandt was the first artist to practice self-portraiture as a speciality. In doing so, he created a medium for self-fashioning that has since inspired many artists. In 1968 a committee of Dutch art historians known as the Rembrandt Research Project took upon itself to distinguish between real Rembrandt paintings and all others. The project has met with less acceptance than anticipated.

An excerpt from Rembrandt's Women by Julia lloyd Williams:
In 1660, after all his possessions had been sold off, Rembrandt entered into a contract for a new art business with Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels, with him as their employee. It made him a dependent painter once again. In contrast to his time in Uylenburgh's shop, however, he would be protected from his creditors. It would have been a way of safeguarding the money earned from the Town Hall project.

Rembrandt may have become a social outcast but there were still people who admired his art and came to visit him. His late work was as expressive as ever. His Syndics of the Cloth-Makers' Guild, completed in 1662, is perhaps the best-known group portrait of an Amsterdam municipal body after the Treaty of Munster put an end to the painting of civic guard pieces. The only sitters known by name in portraits from his late period are Frederick Rihel (1621- 1681), in a large equestrian piece; the parents of the Trip brothers, who built a canal side palace; and a neighbour in Rozengracht, the art dealer Lodewijck van Ludick (1607-1669), Rembrandt's almost exact contemporary who shared his inability to manage money. The commission from the Trip family seems to have been sizable, but the main order had gone to Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680), so Rembrandt was the family's second choice. There are no known portraits of members of the ruling elite from his late period, and the chance that any will be found among the remaining anonymous portraits is slight.

Poverty had forced Rembrandt to sell Saskia's grave in the Oude Kerk, and he even dipped into his daughter Cornelia's savings. However, he was not so poor that Hendrickje Stoffels had to be buried in the paupers' cemetery after she died of the plague in the summer of 1663. She was interred in a rented grave in the Westerkerk, as was Rembrandt himself six years later. Their location in the church is completely unknown, and in any case they would have been cleared many years ago to make way for other impecunious citizens.

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