One of them was Rembrandt van Rijn. Born in 1606, he came to Amsterdam as a young painter from a near-by Leiden. He became quite famous very soon and many of those wealthy merchants and businessmen would commission portraits from him. He lived in a few buildings in this neighbourhood, until he bought a luxurious canal house in a newly built eastern part of the canal belt. Many of his clients lived in this neighbourhood, as well. So he walked around these streets and have visited many of those buildings during his life.