Some time then in 1631 the die was cast, and the removal accomplished. There is reason to believe that he went at first to stay or lodge with Hendrick van Uylenborch, a dealer in pictures and other objects of art. Among his first proceedings on his arrival, was one sufficiently characteristic of him and destined to be repeated only too often in the future. He lent Hendrick money, one thousand florins, to be repayable in a year with three months' notice. Soon after, if not before, this indiscreet financial operation, as it proved later, he found the suitable residence he had meanwhile been seeking, on the Bloemgracht, a canal on the west side of the town, running north-east and south-west between the Prinsen Gracht and the Lynbaan Gracht, in a district, at that time on the extreme outskirts of the town, known as the Garden, from the floral names bestowed upon its streets and canals.
Here he settled to his work, and here in a short time fortune came to him. The enthusiasm aroused by "The Anatomy Lesson," when it was finished and hung in its predestined place in the little dissecting-room or Snijkamer of the Guild of Surgeons in the Nes, near the Dam, was immediate and immense. The artist leapt at once into the front rank, and became the fashionable portrait painter of the day. From three portraits, other than those of his own circle, painted in 1631, and ten in 1632, the number rose to forty between that year and 1634; or, taking all the surviving portraits between 1627 and 1631, we have forty-one, while from the five following years, from 1632 to 1636, there are one hundred and two. Commissions, indeed, flowed in faster than he could execute them, so Houbraken assures us, and the not infrequent occurrence of a pair of portraits, husband and wife, one painted a year or more after the other, tends to confirm this; so that those who wished to be immortalised by him had often to wait their turn for months together, while all the wealth and fashion of the city flocked to the far-off studio in the outskirts, the more fortunate to give their sittings, the later comers to put down their names in anticipation of the future leisure. From the beginning, too, pupils came clamouring to his doors, Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol, Philips Koninck, Geerbrandt van den Eeckhout, Jan Victors, Leendeert Cornelisz, and others, eager to pay down their hundred florins a year, as Sandrart says they did, and work with and for the lion of the day.