THIS year Rembrandt van Rijn is being feted throughout the Netherlands and throughout Europe in exhibitions marking the 350th anniversary of his death in 1669.

They celebrate not only his painting but also the ascendency of Dutch naval and trading power in the 17th century, with Amsterdam becoming the world’s largest port and Holland the empire that succeeded the Spanish and Portuguese.

Born in Leiden in 1606, Rembrandt became the most prominent — and one of the best paid — portrait painters of the Dutch merchant class that powered this empire.

Yet he could be thought of as an outsider in this climate of imperial expansion. His drawings in particular show him in active sympathy with the downtrodden and poor in a society that considered poverty a disgrace.

His own fall into disgrace and ruin for the last 20 years of his life when, as a painter, he was ignored and cast into obscurity was not totally dissimilar to the way the contribution of the fertile lands and exploitation of the Indonesian peasants obscured the source of Dutch wealth.

And his painting The Night Watch, the most famous work of the Dutch “golden age,” is possibly an exposé of the violence of the Dutch militia — and that violence at home echoes that in the colonies.

That golden age, lasting much of the 17th century, was fuelled domestically by cheap energy derived from windmills and peat and abroad by powerful ships dominating world trade, such that the Dutch controlled a high percentage of all trade in Europe.

They pioneered the techniques of much of contemporary corporate and financial capital and their primary trading business, the Dutch East India Company, was the world’s first multinational and the first to be financed by the stock market and the national bank.

The Dutch operated monopolies in European trade on nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon and cornered the market in coffee, tea, cacao, tobacco, rubber, sugar and opium.

Independence from Spain in 1648, and the 12-year truce that preceded it, meant that they were at peace in Europe. It allowed them to train their weapons on Indonesia, the source of many of these goods, which the Dutch declared officially as their property in 1619. That subjugation is the underside of the Dutch golden age.

Rembrandt in his time, especially in the drawings and etchings of his early years on display at an exhibition Amsterdam’s Rijks Museum, demonstrated a great sympathy and reverence for the poor in Dutch society, often displaced peasants, as well as a Bosch-like attention to the raucousness and physicality of this class and a sharp, at times almost Hogarthian, ability to display the vulgarity of those in power.

Gorgeous cross-hatchings illuminate the drawing of a bearded old man with a high forehead, all his dignity intact. There are leprosy sufferers, a beggar woman with a gourd, a rat catcher plying his trade to a shirking homeowner and etchings of a peasant man and woman “making water,” seen simply as a natural act.

A painting from 1639 has a well decked-out boy looking at two pheasants, one hanging from a hook, the other sprawled on a ledge.

The viewer’s sympathy, though, is not with the plump boy but with the slaughtered pheasants. A rape scene of a monk with his female prey in a cornfield reveals the exploitation of the clergy.

And, at the point where Rembrandt is being forced out of his home by his creditors, there is a pen and brown ink drawing of the biblical Susana being accosted by two elegantly attired elders who, having surprised her at bathing, point to her nakedness and in a majestic economy of line implore her to surrender herself to them.

Rembrandt also has historical and aesthetic affinities with another outsider artist, Caravaggio, whose dark palette and mastery of light and shadow with the emphasis on shadow in his violent and bloody Biblical scenes, probably influenced the Dutch artist.

Caravaggio was exiled from his home in Rome as Rembrandt was forced to leave his. The Italian artist also had an affinity for street people, having been exiled for public brawling, and also died with little recognition.

He was not rediscovered until the 20th century, as Rembrandt was himself only reclaimed as a major artist in the 19th because of the attention of the Impressionists.

In his late forties, supposedly due to poor financial investments and lack of commissions, Rembrandt was forced to sell his house and the many art objects and antiques he had acquired.

It was the turning point in what was a descent into poverty. He died in 1669, was buried in an unmarked grave and, as was the custom for paupers, his ashes were dug up and discarded 20 years later.

One reason his sales no longer flourished was that in the 1650s and 1660s, in the high era of the Dutch empire, a new and more imperial style — “courtly, elegant, and smooth” — was coming into fashion and erasing the taste for his animated brushwork and unrestrained use of colour.

There was perhaps another reason, examined in Peter Greenaway’s film Rembrandt, J’Accuse. In what it terms is a forensic examination of The Night Watch, it makes the argument that the painting, anything but celebratory and solemn in its presentation of an Amsterdam town guard or its militia as a brawling band, was in effect an exposé of its central figure, militia captain Banning Cocq.

He’s seen as a violent ruffian who may have murdered his way to the top and taken part in an unsuccessful attempt at overthrowing the city government. A gun goes off behind him, indicating the violent and thuggish quality of his charges, while a rooster in the lower portion of the painting mocks his name.

Rembrandt himself appears near the centre, cupping his hand and seemingly whispering in someone’s ear — perhaps about the official and his dirty secret. Greenaway claims that Rembrandt’s ostracism was in part due to his exposé in the work and he argues his case from a spectral and minute analysis of the work itself, with little supporting evidence.

But the view that Rembrandt was ostracised for exposing the plot and the officer — a view the BBC took seriously enough to recently refute and which may be gathering steam — is simply one more indication that, far from being the primary representative of the Dutch golden age, Rembrandt was one more victim of it.

One of his most tender drawings in 1658, at the time he was forced to vacate his house, has a woman exhausted from the day’s activity sitting by the kitchen-stove fire, her shirt at her waist.

Unable to move, her half-nakedness is not voyeuristic but an expression of her exhaustion at a world that has made life hard and almost unbearable for her.

Her resignation seems an almost autobiographical representation of the artist’s own struggles under an empire that had rejected him and his sympathy for its outcasts.

This article first appeared in Culture Matters, culturematters.org.uk. Dennis Broe is a writer and critic whose latest book, Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure, is published by Wayne State University Press. Details of all the Rembrandt exhibitions running in Holland until the end of the year are available at holland.com.