About this artwork
Rembrandt painted this self-portrait in 1660, when he was 54 years old. He had been painting his own face for over 30 years, since his early twenties in Leiden, and he would continue until his death in 1669. About 40 painted self-portraits survive, along with dozens of etchings and drawings. No other painter in history examined his own face with this kind of persistence.
In this portrait, Rembrandt looks at the viewer with a tired, searching expression. He wears a fur cap and a dark coat, with a chain of office barely visible at his neck. The light comes from the left, falling across his forehead, his nose, and the pouches under his eyes. The rest of the face is in shadow. The paint is built up in thick layers on the forehead and around the eyes, where Rembrandt used the butt end of his brush to incise the wrinkles into the wet paint. The skin is painted in warm ochres and browns, with touches of red in the cheeks and nose.
By 1660, Rembrandt's life was in decline. His wife Saskia had died in 1642. His finances had collapsed in 1656, when he was forced to declare bankruptcy and sell his house and his collection at auction. He was living in a rented house on the Rozengracht in Amsterdam, in a poorer neighborhood than the one he had left. His son Titus, then 19, and his common-law wife Hendrickje Stoffels were his main companions. His commissions had dropped off, partly because his style had become rougher and more personal, and partly because the Amsterdam elite had moved on to smoother, more polished painters like Bartholomeus van der Helst.
Rembrandt's late self-portraits are the most unsparing self-examinations in Western painting. He did not idealize his face, as Titian and Rubens did in their old age. He painted what he saw: the sagging flesh, the broken veins, the heavy bags under the eyes, the thinning hair. But he also painted himself with a directness and dignity that the earlier portraits do not have. The face in this painting is not asking for sympathy. It is looking at you, and it is asking what you see.
Oil on canvas, 80 by 67 centimeters. Rembrandt built the face in layers of glaze and impasto, using warm translucent browns for the shadows and thick, opaque paint for the highlights. The fur cap is painted in rapid, textured strokes of dark brown and black. The background is a warm, dark brown, applied in thin, even layers. The recent removal of an old varnish has revealed more of Rembrandt's working method, including the marks where he scratched the paint with the handle of his brush.
The vertical format and warm dark palette make this print work well in a study, library, or office. The browns and ochres pair with dark wood, leather, and traditional furniture. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the face enough room to read. The portrait has a grave, intimate quality that suits rooms where people work or think.
The painting entered the Met's collection in 1913, bequeathed by Benjamin Altman, the department store magnate whose collection of Dutch paintings was one of the finest in America.
This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.
