Rembrandt

No city holds Rembrandt's legacy more completely than Amsterdam. He lived and worked there for most of his adult life, died there in 1669, and the city has never stopped claiming him. The Rijksmuseum is the obvious starting point — The Night Watch occupies its own room and rewards at least twenty minutes of unhurried attention, its scale and complexity impossible to appreciate in reproduction. But the Rijksmuseum's holdings go far beyond the showpiece: dozens of paintings, many of them quiet domestic scenes or self-portraits, that repay slow, serious looking.

A short train south, the Mauritshuis in The Hague holds a smaller but equally exceptional collection, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp — a group portrait of rare psychological depth, and the painting that made his reputation when he was 26. The museum itself, housed in a seventeenth-century palace overlooking a canal, is one of the finest small museums in Europe.

Beyond the Netherlands, the great European collections compete fiercely. The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and London's National Gallery and Kenwood House all hold significant works. His self-portraits — over eighty of them, spanning five decades — are scattered everywhere, each one a chapter in the longest artistic autobiography ever painted.