Jean Genet became familiar with the paintings of Rembrandt on visits to London in 1952, Amsterdam in 1953, then Munich, Berlin and Vienna in 1957, and this is one of two essays that he wrote about the painter. First published in L'Express in 1958, its style, like the rest of his art criticism, flits between the notational and the poetic. A meditation on the effects of profound loss on artmaking, seeing and vocation, it gives an inisght, too, into Genet's writing, particular