Self-Portrait at the Easel
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669) · 1660
Rembrandt turns from his canvas to look out, palette and brushes gathered in his left hand, a maulstick steadying his right, a plain white working cap on his head. He is fifty-four, bankrupt four years earlier, his house and collection sold, and he presents himself not as a gentleman or a courtier, as he had in earlier decades, but simply as a man at work. The easel is a slab of dark wood at the edge of the picture; what we see of the painting he is making is nothing at all, only its back, which makes the true subject the labour rather than the result.
The technical interest is in the face, where paint is pushed, scraped and dragged into the flesh until the surface itself has the texture of ageing skin. Look for the loaded ridges along the nose and the highlight on the cheek, then move to the hands, deliberately summary and blurred, and finally to the palette, where Rembrandt has recorded the very pigments he is using. His late manner, rough where his early work was smooth, was criticised in his lifetime as unfinished, and this picture is a defence of it. X-radiography has shown that he first painted himself in a grander white turban and reduced it to a workman's cap.
Rembrandt left around eighty self-portraits in paint, etching and drawing, an unmatched sequence in European art, and the Louvre owns two painted examples hung together here. They are not confessions so much as a lifelong experiment in what a face can be made to carry. The canvas came to the Louvre from the French royal collections and has been on view since the museum's earliest years.
Did You Know? Beneath the modest painter's cap, X-rays revealed a large white turban that Rembrandt painted out, exchanging grandeur for the look of a working craftsman.
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