BY the Rijn in Leiden, there is a old square, now decorated with statues and information boards, and, on one side of that square, a collection of drab council flats.

These unremarkable flats are the spot where, 412 years ago, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born. His actual birthplace was, perhaps foolishly, knocked down by the town's council in 1978, and all there is now in this grey corner of the otherwise pretty town centre - replete with a full-scale replica of the family-run windmill - to mark the great artist's birth is a plaque. It was here, one of nine children of a Protestant miller, Harmen, and the Catholic daughter of a baker, Neeltjen, that Rembrandt began his remarkable life, one that, nearly half a millennia later, is still being analysed, scrutinised and celebrated today.

Seeing it in the flesh last week, as a wet grey wind blustered over the river after which he is named, it seemed both forlorn and empty, and yet somehow right for the artist: a painter who, as Dr Jonathan Bikker, curator of research at the Rijksmuseum told me later, was concerned with realism: with the precise nature of things as he saw them.

The latest Rembrandt show for a Scottish audience opens on July 7 at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and concerns itself with the UK's enduring love of the master painter. In particular it looks at the period from around 1750, when the British collection of works by the master from Leiden reached a kind of fever: a kind of collector's delirium which the painter himself may have recognised: it was his constant buying of material for his 'Wunderkammer' or art and curiosities room, which led to his financial downfall.

Called Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master, it runs until October 14, and is only being staged in Edinburgh, and it will bring together works by Rembrandt as well as artists inspired by him, and some works that have not been on public display before.

Rembrandt, who may often be more associated with Amsterdam, was born and trained in Leiden, and he spent his early career, as well as his schooling and crucial training, only moving to the big city in 1631.

The narrow, modest building where he learned to draw, paint, and manufacture the tools of his art, is still in existence - he worked there for three years under the eyes of Jacob van Swanenburgh. You can walk from this building (89 Langebrug), now badged as the Young Rembrandt Studio, to his child hood home in 15 minutes. You pass the prison, which he walked past most days, and also the towering Latin school he attended.

After growing up here, and being educated, he moved to Amsterdam in 1631, when his star was in the ascendant. He married Saskia van Uylenburgh in 1634, and bought - with a momentous mortgage that he could not afford - the building now known as the Rembrandt's House. The painter's fortunes turned: Saskia died in 1642, and in 1656 - largely due to his mortgage and his excessive spending on art and curiosities - he was declared bankrupt. After his house and possessions had been sold, he continued to work in Amsterdam until his death. Rembrandt did not die in poverty, although he never again prospered as he had. He died in 1669.

The new exhibition looks at how, from this life, the work of the artist "cast a spell on the British imagination", leading to a fervent period of collection and accumulation of his art in the UK. Its literature says that no other nation demonstrated "such a passionate, and sometimes eccentric" enthusiasm for his art.

Its story begins with a self portrait, one of the forty of so that Rembrandt painted in his life. This one, painted in 1629, was presented King Charles I in 1633 - it was the first painting by the painter to leave the Netherlands. This work is one of 15 of Rembrandt's works in oil in the show, with two more attributed to him, two more from his workshop. It also will include 15 drawings, and 20 prints and etchings.

Paintings in the show include Belshazzar's Feast, from the National Gallery in London, Girl at a Window, from Dulwich Gallery and The Mill, from the National Gallery in Washington. The show also highlights the attraction of Rembrandt for other artists through the centuries, including works by Scots James McBey, Sir David Young Cameron, Sir Muirhead Bone and William Strang, the "School of London" in the 1950s, and works by the late John Bellany.

The show details how, after 1720, a steady flow of works by Rembrandt entered the UK, growing into a surge. By the 1770s this was a "mania", pushing demand and prices up.

The fad for collecting his work was one thing, his considerable impact on other artists, and art in general, another. The exhibition shows in particular the impact on Sir Joshua Reynolds, who lived from 1723 to 1792. His Rembrandt collection was one of the best in Britain, including prized paintings such as A Man in Armour (1655), which is on loan in the show from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. The exhibition also shows the impact on Reynolds as an artist, including his portrait of Giuseppe Marchi (from 1753) and his self-portrait from around the same time.

Christopher Baker, the director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “This exhibition provides an extraordinary opportunity to study the staggering range of Rembrandt’s achievement and its profound impact on British taste and art. Featuring both major international loans and many less well-known rarities, it tells a riveting story.

"From the collectors of the artist’s own life time in the seventeenth century to today’s painters, Rembrandt has cast a spell on the British imagination.

"It’s a tale of scholarship and money, of privilege and popularity."

The show also poses an intriguing question. Did Rembrandt ever leave the streets of Leiden and Amsterdam for foreign climes?

There is no evidence that he ever left the Netherlands. But, the shows leaves the question open.

Among the early arrivals in Britain were Rembrandt’s only portraits of British sitters, Reverend Johannes Elison and his wife Maria Bockenolle, which will be on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, US.

Although they were painted in Amsterdam, the portraits depict a Dutch couple who lived in Norwich in Norfolk. The paintings were in Britain by 1680. The gallery's literature on the show says: "such expensive and ostentatious portraits are uncommon for clerics, and rare in Rembrandt’s work; they presumably reflect the status of the couple’s son, a successful merchant, who probably commissioned them."

The paintings have not been shown in the UK since 1929.

But it was after painting these portraits that the questions arise. A few years after the visit from the Norwich minister and his wife, Rembrandt was again busy exploring English subjects.

A group of four drawings depicting English views are being exhibited in the show for the first time.

The drawings, in which the locations – St Albans Cathedral, Windsor Castle and London with Old St Paul’s – are clearly identifiable, are of similar size and made in pen, brown ink and wash. Experts believe they were all created in Rembrandt's studio in around 1640. The gallery admits there are questions now around whether they are all by Rembrandt himself, or by one of his many students, and whether they were drawn from prints or, more interestingly, from life. And if there were drawn from life: then did Rembrandt visited England, completing a life's journey from Leiden to London and back again?

REMBRANDT

BRITAIN’S DISCOVERY OF THE MASTER

7 July – 14 October 2018

Royal Scottish Academy

Princes St, Edinburgh EH2 2EL

0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org